Behind the Scenes: The Hunt for Gollum
Not long after The Hunt for Gollum’s premiere, Director and Executive Producer Chris Bouchard took a few minutes to talk to me about the making of his film. Bouchard himself wrote the script about Aragorn’s hunt for Gollum, expanding an incident mentioned in The Fellowship of the Ring and in the Appendices of The Return of the King.
By far the biggest challenge, Bouchard recalls, was a severe shortage of cash. “We really didn’t have any money, we just had whatever we have ourselves, which was nothing. So it was a case of trying to save up a hundred quid each month and put it into filming something one weekend. You have to be really ruthless and try to just spend on the essentials and cut every corner we could.”
The low budget was partly driven by copyright issues. No one was allowed to be paid for working on the film or to make money from it, so no financing could be sought for production. Bouchard explains, “Tolkien Enterprises did get in touch, and we reached an understanding with them, and that’s how we managed to put it on line for screening, as long as it’s non-profit. I think they’re probably watching what’s going on to make sure that its completely non-profit. They’re actually very nice people, and they’re supportive of fans expressing their love of the material.”
The second challenge for neophyte director Bouchard and his four co-producers, was simply managing the largely non-professional crew. A few crew members had some professional filmmaking experience. Bouchard himself is a video engineer whose day job is working with film editors and editing equipment, and many of his CGI team were also industry professionals who, as he says, “wanted to do something more fun than making a commercial for dog food.” He estimates, though, that more than 80% of the crew had only enthusiasm in their resumes.
“Organizing a large number of people to all turn up to the same forest at the same time turned out to be incredibly difficult!” he says. “All the different departments, actually getting them to do all the preparation with all the costumes and masks and orcs and all the fight scenes, and getting them to rehearse in advance and that was pretty hard… I managed to get 4 co-producers to work together and become one, so we really split the load so none of us are working full time, because producing this film would be a full time job. They all have different skills and they managed to collaborate and keep in touch and we had weekly meetings.”
Having CGI professionals on board made a huge difference to the look of the film. The computer wizards, who live in several different countries around the world, were able to supply shots and effects that otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive, such as a huge stone monument, and a series of aerial panoramas of high mountains. Not to mention a certain small CGI creature. CG Bouchard is especially pleased with one particular CGI shot. “We didn’t know if we could pull off a CGI Gollum at all, but we thought we’ll get some CGI guys and see if they’re up for it. In the end they did manage to pull off just one close-up shot of his face. It took months and months of work!”
Bouchard’s team also produced various DVD-type extras, including a 25-minute behind-the-scenes documentary available on YouTube, and the full, downloadable soundtrack for the 40-minute film.
• The Hunt For Gollum was filmed in England and Wales, and stars Adrian Webster as Aragorn, Patrick O’Connor as Gandalf, Arin Alldridge as Arithir, Rita Ramnani as Arwen, and Gareth Brough as Goblock and the voice of Gollum. It streams online at The Hunt For Gollum and on YouTube.
