Director Peter Jackson was so delighted with Weta on the first two movies that he was confident that the vfx house could meet even higher demands on the third movie. All images ©2003 New Line Prods. Photo credit: Pierre Vinet.

Peter Jackson acknowledges that The Return of the King, the last and most satisfying of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (opening Dec. 17), contains the best vfx because Weta Digital improved with time and experience. The hobbit-like director, who next tackles another icon, King Kong, recently spoke with VFXWorld about Weta’s incredible learning curve and groundbreaking accomplishments. He even addressed the multiple climaxes that have vexed certain critics, explaining: “Tolkien’s themes were very much about the fact that whilst there were things worth fighting for and going to war for your freedom, there were no winners in war. That even if you were the victor, you were never going to be the same person again. And I wanted that melancholy in and I also figured we had deserved to have a tranquil, slow finale — because we had been in this film for nine hours.”

Bill Desowitz: It seemed that the visual effects were much improved in Return of the King, particularly the character animation. What was the main reason?

Peter Jackson: Our crew. I mean, I agree with you. I think that the effects in this movie have improved and there is double the amount of effects shots than there were in the last film. I just think that it’s a combination of learning what worked on the previous two films and the collective experience of everybody who has gone through the three films. So by the time they got to the third one, everyone was working at the top of their game. You know, the harder shots on The Two Towers were obviously all the Gollum shots. And then the easiest shots on The Return of the King were the Gollum shots. You know, we had Gollum in a very tight type line. We made improvements to his facial expressions between The Two Towers and The Return of the King — and we kept improving him.

Gollum, which was the hardest CG character to achieve in Two Towers, turned out to be the easiest for Return of the King.

BD: I understand there were improvements in hair and skin shading as well.

PJ: What we’ve been doing all the way through is refining the techniques, improving the Massive [A.I.] software, improving the shaders for the characters, and so it’s never been stagnant. And also what I found on Return of the King was that I’ve been so impressed by what Weta had achieved on the first two movies that I was determined to push the envelope even further. So I made more and more demands on them. There are additional shots, there are more complicated shots and they rose to the challenge.

BD: Were there any improvements in software?

PJ: I’m probably the wrong person to ask, actually, about the software because I really didn’t get involved in all that technical side of it these days. I used to long ago, but not now.

BD: Shelob, the spider, and the Fell Beasts were impressive too. After a while, you forgot they were CG.

PJ: Yes, well, I wanted everything to be really photoreal. You know CG is wonderful, but at least if it’s very well lit it can look well textured. If done bad, it can [descend into] Playstation territory very quickly. So photorealism was something that I felt very strongly about. And that was achieved through a lot of revisions and a lot of time. One of the beauties of me working with Weta is the fact that I’m the owner of the company. I don’t allow myself to get locked into a rule where I’m allowed two revisions and then it becomes an overage. We just keep basically working the shots over and over again until we’re happy with them. My contribution, really, to the visual effects, once Weta was doing them, was to look at them as often as I could. And if they didn’t seem photoreal, then I would try to figure out what was wrong. I tried to suggest ideas, whether it was something to do with the direction of the light or the contrast values or the shadows of the characters were casting on each other… the specular highlights. I’d look at it and we would keep revising the shots until we’d achieved what I considered to be a very realistic image.