Born of Hope: another Lord of the Rings fan film
Friday, November 27, 2009
posted by Al Harron
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Earlier this year, Leo Grin reported on the debut of The Hunt for Gollum, a fan film chronicling Aragorn’s search for the fallen hobbit during the Watchful Peace prior to the outbreak of war. It was well-received, and is probably one of the finer examples of fan cinema in terms of technical achievement. However, like Leo, I have to lament the fact that it wasn’t truly a Lord of the Rings adaptation, but a New Line Cinema Lord of the Rings fan film: the cinematography, costume, music and character design was exactly like in the films.
It’s really hard to criticize the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The sheer amount of love, effort and perseverance which went into production from every member of the crew is breathtaking and infectious, practically unprecedented, and the sort of thing we rarely see in such a project. It undoubtedly led people to seek out more Tolkien to read, and though Jackson, Boyens & Walsh took some unfortunate, unnecessary and downright infuriating liberties with the script, they were certainly more respectful and appreciative of Tolkien than, say, Paul Verhoeven was with Robert A. Heinlein, whose first few chapters of the novel Starship Troopers left him “bored and depressed”–not that it would stop him from adapting it. Or John Milius was of Howard. I tend to swing between two extremes: on the one hand, great appreciation of the score, cinematography, creature design and environments; on the other, dislike of the additions and alterations of the script, plot and characters. When it reached the highs, it was stratospheric: when it plumbed the depths, it was subterranean.
Which brings me to Born of Hope, another fan film of the trilogy. It’s been in production for quite a while, and a release appears to be imminent. Like The Hunt for Gollum, it focuses on a more obscure portion of the story, that of “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” found in the Appendices. The story of Born of Hope revolves around Aragorn’s father Arathorn, his relationship with Gilraen, and the Dúnedain themselves.
Right off the bat, I can see problems. The makers of the film are quite obviously inspired by the films, but they show an unfortunate lack of familiarity with Tolkien’s other writings outside The Lord of the Rings, which is discouraging, since I would’ve thought they would devour everything they could in order to fully render Tolkien’s work to screen, even if it was primarily a tribute to the films.
From the Q&A:
Q May 09 – Why does the Ring of Barahir look different than the one in the LOTR films? You’ve kept the tone of the film similar and use the same font for the website, yet something as important as that Ring looks way different.
A from Kate (Director/Producer/Co Writer) – We did actually start off with a replica of the Weta version for the test shoot in 2006 but just like the Aragorn sword used in 2006, wanted to avoid using copyrighted props etc and have unique swords etc for BoH. When our Art Department Coordinator, Edward M Eglinton, came on board he said he could see if a local jeweller in his native Canada might be interested in making a new Ring of Barahir. We liked the idea and worked on a lot of designs with Edward which we thought better fitted the description that Tolkien had written and two unique rings were made by Jason Bellchamber. This is unfortunately the only thing that breaks our link with the New Line Trilogy but I hope that people will really like the new ring and appreciate the work that went into it.
It’s at this point I wonder why they didn’t stop with the Ring of Barahir. If the specter of copyright was such a problem, surely it would add even more incentive to come up with their own interpretation of Tolkien’s vision, instead of simply replicating Jackson’s? Tolkien’s world is rich, vast and full of scope for reinterpretation. Why should they restrict themselves to the creations of WETA workshop when they could bring an entirely new vision to complement Tolkien’s words? Leo already pointed out that the amount of work involved seemed “wasted” on such a derivative project, and would be better served on a more original one.
Something that also bothered me was the large number of original characters. Apart from one or two minor characters like Lurtz the Uruk commander in The Fellowship of the Ring, the films only had half a dozen or so inventions, and none had a larger role than the important characters, acting mostly as bearers of one-liners. Born of Hope, however, has a cast list almost 50% original characters: Halbaron, a transplant of Halbarad to serve as Arathorn’s confidant; Evonyn, Halbaron’s wife and Halbarad’s mother; Maia, an improbably-named orphan who fell in with the Dúnedain; and other pointless additions like Mallor, Dorlad and Dirhaborn, as well as the orcs Gorganog (didn’t he have problems with little blue folk?) and Shaknar. The most egregious one is Elgarain, an ersatz Eowyn of the Dúnedain, whose short biography sounds like the typical affirmative action stereotype of a woman striving to prove herself as a warrior in a male-dominated environment.
Q Dec 07 – Why did you introduce new characters (not created by Tolkien but inspired by his work)?
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer/Co Writer) – I feel that to do this story well it is absolutely necessary to introduce new characters, even if some fan won’t like the idea. Tolkien did not write very much at all about Gilraen and Arathorn so we have very little to go on. We do not even know the name of Arathorn’s mother or if she was alive at the time of our story. Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this. Arathorn surely spent time with people other than his father and his wife and child. He must have had some friends and companions, so who were they? We also see a young teenage Halbarad in BoH but he can’t be alone. We want to know who his father and mother were. Tolkien never told us so we have no choice but to create them ourselves. The story would be very bland if we didn’t fill in these extra details. Understandably some changes may not sit well with all fans but a film is always just one interpretation of a story. I’m sure I remember reading some debate, when the New Line Trilogy came out, about the colour of Legolas’ hair, some people thought it should have been brown not blonde. Adapting books is hard because with a book you essentially make your own movie in your head and therefore everyone may have a different view of the story.
A reasonable explanation, but ultimately I don’t agree with their idea that a small cast of characters leads to a “shallow storyline,” as asserted elsewhere in the FAQ. What was “shallow” about A Streetcar Named Desire, Withnail & I, Glengarry, Glen Ross, and just about every film Ingmar Bergman ever made, all with a cast of characters smaller than Born of Hope? Another factor is the length: the site clocks the film in at 30 minutes. Does a 30 minute film really need 18 characters? More to the point, did they really need to add half a dozen characters to “fill out” the story?
It isn’t just characters, but Tolkien mythology the filmmakers don’t seem to know.
Q Oct 07 – I hope that you are aware that Tolkien wrote a note that describes the place where the Rangers of the North lived, and take the information into consideration when making your movie.
David Salo, the well known Tolkien linguist, posted the following message on Usenet: Subject: Re: Where did the Rangers live? There is a short but hardly legible note which Tolkien wrote for insertion into the story of Aragorn and Arwen (and which was not in the event used); it includes information about the location of the Dunedain. Because of the difficulty of the note, the information is not entirely clear, but it suggests that the Dunedain lived in woodlands between the Mitheithel and Bruinen. Source: microfilms at Marquette University, Series 3, Box 9, Folder 3.
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer) – Thank you, I was not aware of this. I always imagined them spreading further west but luckily I don’t think this will cause any problems with our story. Thank you for letting me know, there is so much information out there and I am not someone who has studied every book so it is easy to miss things.
It’s a strange admission to make. If I were making an adaptation of a Conan story with $5,000 cameras and dozens of crew members, I would contact just about every Howard scholar I knew of to rack their brains, and squeeze every drop of information possible from every available source. But, maybe that’s just me.
Q Oct 07 – I know that it is to early to be thinking about it, but did you ever consider doing a film about The Silmarillion? It was just an idea and I can’t wait until Born of Hope is released. Just remember that you guys have your own fans out here to.
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer) – For someone making a Lord of the Rings film I feel a bit guilty to say that I have never read the Silmarillion. I do own it but have yet to read it all. From what I know about the book it contains so much information that it could never be one film, even Peter Jackson has said that it could make quite a few films really to tell it all. Born of Hope is ambitious enough so I’ll stick with that for now. I’ll let someone else take on the Silmarillion.
I’m rather surprised at this, though given what I’ve seen so far, I shouldn’t be: apart from The Lord of the Rings itself and The Hobbit, The Silmarillion is one of the most essential sources of Middle-earth lore out there. Considering so much of the information regarding the Dúnedain is found in those books, it’s anathema to me that those in charge of this project don’t seem to have gone through every major reference, or at least connected with authoritative sources. I can forgive someone for not reading Tolkien’s collected letters, or Unfinished Tales, or even The History of Middle-earth. But The Silmarillion? Really? I guess I can agree on one thing, though: they really should let someone else take on The Silmarillion.
Q – I’m interested in filmmaking and have written and directed a few shorts. I’m hoping to make a Lord of the Rings/Tolkien film in the future. I was hoping that you’d give some advice on how to adapt from the books and how to write your own material while keeping it true to Tolkien’s great work. Do you have any little tips or secrets you’d be willing to share? (Good luck on your film!!!)
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer) -
For me I’d say it’s all about keeping the essence and the themes that Tolkien uses in his writing… I believe that films can only ever be ‘based’ on a book, a kind of trailer for a book so to speak, so things are bound to be left out or changed to make them visually more interesting. Although we are trying to stay true to the ‘facts’, there are some changes in the current version of our script which we hope people will forgive us for. Some of these changes are made to neaten up the story or make it more dramatic and sometimes it’s purely due to our limitations, ie we currently do not have horses for people to “ride out against the orcs” so to avoid this and increase the tension at the end of the film, the fight comes to them. These ideas may change again before the final shoot but much as I hate it you do often have to compromise.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that films can only be “trailers for a book”: I tend to think of them more in terms of illustrations. As Frank Frazetta showed his interpretation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan through the medium of paint, and Roy Thomas & John Buscema through sequential art, so Jackson showed his interpretation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the cinematic medium (with a little help from John Howe and Alan Lee). It isn’t the original article, and never can be: it’s another person’s interpretation of the original article. As such, the question becomes not “is this Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” but “is this a good illustration of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“?
Q – Why does the orc look very similar to PJ’s version? It’s not by Weta right? Anyway, its great cos it looks as if LOTR was a continuation of some sort.
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer)Flattery will get you everywhere. Wow thanks. No they are not by WETA. We are lucky to have the young and talented Luke McNally on the team. I’ll see if I can get him to write a reply. I’m glad you think they match the WETA designs. We didn’t want to do a film that just clones the current Trilogy but we do want people to feel the films are connected.
A from Luke McNally – Thanks very much for the compliment. As Kate said, we wanted Born of Hope to be connected to the trilogy, so it was important to give our orcs the same feel as those WETA had created. I studied a lot of their designs and tried to mix some of the different elements. It was great fun creating these masks, I just kept on imagining PJ telling me to make them look more gruesome! Lol. I hope you like the full trailer.
“We didn’t want to do a film that just clones the current Trilogy?” Could’ve fooled me. Indeed, a look at the site has a “quotes in praise” section from folk in the industry, celebrating the project. The people in question are Richard Taylor and Daniel Falconer of WETA, and sword maker Christian Fletcher. All in regards to how similar the film looks to the trilogy: no sound-bytes from Tolkien scholars about how it “brings Middle-earth to life” or anything of that sort.
Q – Will the twins (Elladan & Elrohir) be featured in the film?
A from Kate (Actor/Director/Producer) – Yes. That is the plan. I would have liked to have cast them for the trailer shoot but it was too complicated in the end. We need identical twins for the roles. The elves also require elaborate costumes and weapons plus long wigs and prosthetic ears. In the end it was easier to figure that one out later.
I don’t know why they “need” identical twins for the role. It’s often presumed that Elrond’s sons were identical twins, but frankly, I don’t think it’s the case. There are many references to the brothers being alike: “So much alike were they, the sons of Elrond, that few could tell them apart: dark-haired, grey-eyed, and their faces elven-fair, clad alike in bright mail beneath cloaks of silver-grey.” Wouldn’t this passage seem entirely redundant if they were, in fact, identical twins, seeing as being hard to tell apart is something that comes with the territory? Non-identical twins, perhaps, seeing as they were born in the same year and are practically inseparable, but I don’t feel they are necessarily identical.
Let’s have a look at Elladan & Elrohir as they appear in Born of Hope:
So yes, twin underwear models, marvellous. I’m just wondering where their bright mail and silver-grey cloaks are in this picture.
However, I’ve grown used to this interpretation of Tolkien’s elves: it’s just something that I roll my eyes over and ignore, like the fur nappy-clad Conan. If there’s anything in Born of Hope that does actively bother me, however, it’s the portrayal of the Dúnedain.
I went into detail as to how I interpreted the Dúnedain based on my readings of Tolkien’s work. All signs I read pointed to a secretive, scattered, but resilient & dangerous people, in many ways akin to the mighty Cimmerians of Robert E. Howard, or the Mohicans of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. True, they were diluted descendants of their mighty ancestors, but to the folk of Eriador, they were figures of mystery, power, and subtle menace: clearly not men to be trifled with. To my immense irritation, Born of Hope chooses to recast the stalwart, heroic Dúnedain into pitiable Medieval peasants being mercilessly hounded by the cruel forces of Sauron: the trailer is filled with contrasting images of rustic, cheerful country-folk sparring with sticks and bundling hay into wains, juxtaposed against the baleful cries of those same peasants wounded, terrified, and clearly in flight from a nameless terror. These are the people who defend Eriador from the predations of orcs, trolls, goblins, wargs and all manner of horrors? Bony-armed bumpkins who appear to be having enough trouble protecting themselves from the enemy, let alone the wild, lawless north of Middle-earth? With the quality of the “Dúnedain” presented here, I’m astonished the Shire’s still around for Bilbo and Thorin’s 12 to make their journey to the Lonely Mountain, much less for the Hobbiton Four to make their quest to Bree.
Why does this irk me? Because it’s cliche, plain and simple. So many fantasy stories have the rural idyll of happy farmers shattered by mean old invaders, with much screaming, torch-flinging and barn-burning, that it loses almost all impact. One of my bigger complaints with Jackson’s films is how he applied this to the Rohirrim: instead of being tough, determined barbarians willing and able to defend their homes from even the horrors of Saruman’s pits, they were turned into the sort of wailing, cowardly peasants running around like headless chickens one sees in the opening cut-scene of a bargain-bin RPG. The Rohirrim were better than that, and they deserved better: so do the Dúnedain. Tolkien wasn’t cliche, he was paradigm shifting: it’s only the works that came after which are generic and groan-inducing.
Perhaps encapsulating this preference for the cliche over the daring is their interpretation of Arador, Aragorn’s grandfather. To my knowledge, there is very little about Arador in Tolkien’s legendarium: all that is known is that his reign was uneventful (rather than full of the upheaval that appears to assail his people according to Born of Hope), and that he’s 110 years old when he was captured and slain by Hill-Trolls a year before Aragorn’s birth, roughly middle-aged as Dunedain chieftains go. Yet even that little information has enough to glean some information. Arador was the second shortest-lived of all the Dúnedain chieftains, only Aragorn I having a shorter life at 100 years: the vast majority of chieftains die relatively young, about 160, compared to Aragorn’s 210 years. Aragorn himself was in his late 80s when the Fellowship set out from Rivendell, and only had a few flecks of grey to show for it.
Yet here, Arador is quite clearly portrayed as a white-haired old man, despite only being about twenty years older than Aragorn at the time of The Lord of the Rings, the equivalent of less than a decade for normal men. I’d expect salt-and-pepper, premature grey at most, not this. In addition, I don’t think this gent could survive a few hours in the wild before succumbing to exposure. Quite how his heart could last the ordeal of being captured by the trolls, let alone the journey back to the Ettenmoors, is beyond me, since he looks more like a senile Shakespearean thespian who wandered out of a nursing home than the mighty chieftain of a warrior people.
Ultimately, the best I can say for Born of Hope is that it looks like it will achieve everything it sets out to do: a Lord of the Rings fan film, an homage to Peter Jackson and WETA, a tribute to the enormous achievement of those films. In that regard, it looks like a rousing success, and though I disagree fundamentally with many of their choices, I wish them the best of luck. Like the trilogy it was set out to accompany, this was a labour of love, and only the most stone-hearted and mean spirited of critics would wish for such a thing to fail. However, as a Tolkien fan, I just hope that some enterprising group of fans out there chooses to go back to the source.
Whatever your feelings on the film trilogy, their impact and influence cannot be denied, and they have set their place in cinematic history. However, that same success leads to the unfortunate fact that, for so many, Jackson’s interpretation is the definitive Lord of the Rings. Any attempts to bring a new adaptation would be decried since “Jackson nailed it,” and couldn’t hope to compete. While I truly doubt that anything with the funds, resources and effort involved in the films will come around any time soon, The Lord of the Rings isn’t–shouldn’t–be a literary property defined by a single cinematic interpretation. There are so many different ways of looking at it, and so many scenes and characters that would have to be omitted to fit in a reasonable film length, that there simply cannot be a definitive adaptation.
For example, I love Macbeth. Sure, I have the usual historical complaints of a pro-English bias brought on by Shakespeare’s attempts to ingratiate himself with royalty, but as a work of theater and study of motivations and damnation, it’s incredible. There are dozens of cinematic interpretations, and I admire a great many for very different reasons. For pure cinematic punch, you can’t top Orson Welles’ Macbeth. For the experience of watching a real-time performance of the play, I can’t recommend the RSC powerhouse A Performance of Macbeth more. Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jou manages to be one of the most powerful and spiritually faithful adaptations of the Macbeth story without any of the characters, settings, or even a word of the original dialogue–Shakespeare’s primary strength. Thus, why can’t there be more than one adaptation of one of the great fantasy novels of the 20th century?
Born of Hope may not be the sort of new Tolkien adaptation I’d like to see, but it shows the power of Tolkien: even derivatives of his incredible work have the power to inspire and delight. That speaks volumes of the man, and his words.
