'The Hobbit' seeks one filming location to rule them all
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News October 5, 2010 7:12 PM
We've got forbidding forests and majestic mountains. There are mighty rivers galore, as well as sweeping plains and quaint country villages where humble folk work the land.
We've got more bears and wolves than anywhere else in the world, plus foggy marshes, towering waterfalls and just about every other natural phenomenon with the exceptions, perhaps, of goblin-filled caves and cliff-dwelling dragons that novelist J.R.R. Tolkien or filmmaker Peter Jackson could have ever imagined.
So could Canada become the new Middle Earth?
This country has been identified as one of five nations angling to become the new setting for the blockbuster Lord of the Rings film franchise.
The once-unthinkable opportunity has emerged after a bitter labour dispute flared last week between actors' unions and the producers behind a planned two-part prequel based on Tolkien's The Hobbit, leading to threats this week of shooting the films outside of New Zealand.
The LOTR series has become so crucial to New Zealand's international image, economy and tourist trade that the country's prime minister, John Key, has personally offered to mediate negotiations between union leaders and Jackson's production team.
But with the controversy still at full boil and the future of the mega-budget project in doubt in New Zealand, vulturous rivals — including Australia, Scotland, Ireland and the U.S. — have joined Canada in a feeding frenzy to host the filming of the movies, Hobbit co-writer and co-producer Philippa Boyens told New Zealand Radio on Monday.
"The dispute over job security and working conditions, in which New Zealand film workers have been backed by actors' unions in Canada, Australia and elsewhere, has thrown doubt on how stable our industry is in terms of industrial relations," Boyens said. "That is what is being put in jeopardy, not whether the production goes forward, but whether it's made here."
She also noted that the film-promotion agencies from other countries that are now contending for to be Middle Earth are dangling lucrative incentive packages in front of Hobbit filmmakers that could save them tens of millions of dollars in production costs.
"Warner Brothers' studios are running the numbers on five to six different locations," Boyens warned the unions. "That's very real and that has put at risk the livelihoods of countless thousands of New Zealand industry workers."
An official with Telefilm Canada, the federal body that promotes moviemaking in this country, told Postmedia News on Tuesday that the agency has not been in discussion with The Hobbit's filmmakers.
But she confirmed that provincial film agencies can and will directly approach foreign producers to tout the merits of moviemaking in Manitoba, for example, or B.C.
Telefilm itself trumpets Canada's spectacular and remarkably nuanced geography and climate in its online bid to lure out-of-country filmmakers to shoot movies here.
And provincial agencies, as well as various city and regional film-development bureaus, are similarly marketing the physical attributes of their slice of Canada's geography.
"Nova Scotia is a place where stories come to life," president Ann MacKenzie boasts in an introductory video on Film Nova Scotia's website. "Located on the east coast of Canada, our province has a diverse landscape that can fill in for anywhere or look like no place else on Earth."
She also highlights the tax breaks offered to film producers who choose Halifax over Hollywood.
A quick reading of The Hobbit does yield plenty of descriptive passages showing Tolkien's imagination fired by Canada-like landscapes.
The book recounts the epic quest of hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he gives up the pastoral comforts of The Shire to endure the unknown dangers of Wilderland, including the perilous Misty Mountains and the spookily dark Mirkwood Forest.
In one scene, the adventurous hobbit is chilled by the shuddering howl of wolves gathering in a dense forest, a common occurrence for Canadians visiting Quebec's Laurentians or Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park, but an impossibility in the virtually mammal-less New Zealand.
"Gaze as much as he might," Tolkien writes of Bilbo, in another scene that could be straight out of New Brunswick, "he could see no end to the trees and the leaves in any direction."
And elsewhere in the novel, at a place where Mirkwood seems to give way to southern Manitoba or Saskatchewan, Bilbo and his companions "travelled for days and all the while they saw nothing save grass and flowers and birds and scattered trees."
If Canada is keen to snag The Hobbit from New Zealand, it appears likely to face a stiff challenge from Scotland, where wolves are absent but craggy landscapes abound and, just maybe, a mysterious loch is home to a Tolkienesque monster.
"Scotland is an attractive and highly competitive film location with stunning scenery and a skilled workforce," a Scottish government spokesman said this week, amid growing concerns in New Zealand over the fate of the film. "If there are any opportunities regarding The Hobbit, we would want to see Scotland benefit."
Scenes from The Hobbit with distinctly Canada-like settings:
Foothills of the Rockies?
"One morning they forded a river at a wide shallow place full of the noise of stones and foam. The far bank was steep and slippery. When they got to the top of it, leading their ponies, they saw that the great mountains had marched down very near to them."
Quebec's Laurentians?
"All of a sudden they heard a howl away down hill, a long shuddering howl. It was answered by another away to the right and a good deal nearer to them; then by another not far away to the left. It was wolves howling at the moon, wolves gathering together!"
Somewhere in Saskatchewan?
"They rode now for two more days, and all the while they saw nothing save grass and flowers and birds and scattered trees, and occasionally small herds of red deer browsing or sitting at noon in the shade. Sometimes Bilbo saw the horns of the harts sticking up out of the long grass."
High Park, Toronto?
"There were black squirrels in the wood. As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things, he could catch glimpses of them whisking off the path and scuttling behind tree-trunks."
New Brunswick?
"It was no good. Gaze as much as he might, he could see no end to the trees and the leaves in any direction."
Yukon?
"There, far away, was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale."
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