War Of The Rohirrim Writer On The New Anime & The Hunt For Gollum [Interview]

I’m going to drill down on a couple of scenes with you, and I’m going to hold this until after the movie comes out so we can talk about it in detail.

Sure.

I wanted to ask about the scene where Héra lures the elephant into the forest to its death, that confrontation between those creatures feels different than the human-on-human violence that happens in the rest of the movie, and it feels so disturbing as a result. So tell me about that scene.

Yes, that was a nod to anime. So as much as we were trying to remain faithful to Professor Tolkien’s work, this is also an anime film. And [producer] Jason DeMarco, who, he was kind of the perfect partner in making this film because he’s such a huge anime nerd and he’s also a Tolkien nerd. And he said to me, he said, “Phil, we need a monster versus monster. We’ve just got to, it is a trope in anime.” And so then it became a question of, well, how can we do both? Can we give the anime audience this, but also make it work within this world? And that’s where the rabid mûmak came in.

The other scene that I wanted to ask you about was the decision specifically for Héra to choke Wulf with her shield in the final confrontation. He could have died in any number of ways. So why was that method important?

We set that up, that scene when Olwyn says to Héra, “I fought beside your father once, and I broke my shield in that battle. And he said to me, ‘It’s not broken. It’s just broken in.'” So we know that Olwyn’s shield has this notch in it. So yeah, there’s layers in there. There’s a kind of, dare I say, poetic justice in that she is a shieldmaiden and she is defending her people. And that you have some male characters at the beginning of this film saying, “I’ve long since thought it past time to retire that banner,” meaning, “We don’t need these shieldmaidens anymore. Their time’s gone. It’s well gone. Those were darker days. The men have got control of this now.” That also felt slightly poetic. [laughs]

But it was also something — the way in which Kamiyama choreographed that fight and the way in which it happens, she has nothing. She has no weapon. She is disarmed until her defender throws her that shield. That’s all she has. And this kind of, I don’t know whether it’s this kind of … it’s like that defiance that wells up inside of her and all that frustration wells up inside of her. And to do that and use the only thing she has to hand, felt right. A little bloodthirsty, but right.

I wanted to ask about the music, too. Did it require a lot of experimentation to find the right balance of using Howard Shore’s existing themes with new music made specifically for this movie?

The great thing about Stephen Gallagher, who has done just such a beautiful job on the score for this film, is that he worked with Howard for a long time. He’s worked with him. So he was incredibly familiar with that, not only the world of Middle-earth, but with the music of Middle-earth. But then what was great with Kamiyama working with him and also the great Mark Wiltshire, who is our music editor, is that they took that as the bones, like that’s the ancestor of the music of this film. And because you’ve got to make it your own. And I think Héra’s theme was one of the first themes that I heard Stephen come up with, and it just felt so right that I thought, “Yeah, this is going to work.”