The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Orlando Bloom
Image credit: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Pierre Vinet
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Billy Boyd, ...

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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Despite a few CG costars, much of Middle-earth is quite genuine. ''There's this big misconception that 'Lord of the Rings' is one big CG movie,'' costar Orlando Bloom says. In fact, ''Towers'' will contain about 600 effects shots; by comparison, ''Spy Kids 2'' had more than 1,000. Even many of the sound effects are organic: When Jackson wanted orc yelps for his Helm's Deep sequence, he elicited help from a stadium full of 25,000 cricket fans, who screamed war chants, spelled out phonetically on the Diamond Vision screen. The filmmaker led the ruckus. ''When the players trotted off the field at halftime it was like ‘Yaaay,''' Ordesky says. ''When Peter trotted onto the field, it was absolute pandemonium. It was the ultimate version of local boy makes good.''

''Towers'' is currently clocking in just short of ''Fellowship'''s 160 minutes, and Jackson will again indulge his completist passion with a director's-cut DVD. He has a rough cut of ''The Return of the King'' -- due next December -- although some additional shooting is likely. After that, no immediate plans to go Hollywood. ''It's all about safety,'' he says of the town's current output. ''You're a corporation, and you have to make 15 of these things a year, and they're called movies, but they're just products at the end of the day.'' As for his first post-''Rings'' project, Jackson says it won't be ''As Nature Made Him,'' the biography of a boy raised as a girl after a botched circumcision, for which he owns the rights. Instead, he offers only this clue: ''It's a 'Heavenly Creatures'-type film, not based on a murder, but roughly in that genre -- a period piece set in New Zealand, and a true story. It's a small film. Not a big film.'' Oddly enough, those last four words seem to please Jackson immensely.

To read more about ''Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,'' check out the Nov. 15, 2002, issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine.

Originally posted Nov 07, 2002
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