Interview: Creative Director Richard Taylor of Weta, ‘Lord of the Rings’

Richard Taylor: That cuts to the heart of the approach for something like this. You have to set ground rules otherwise the world starts to break and loses its plausibility. Specifically, Peter wanted what I call ‘the chessboard of Middle Earth’ to have a complete believability on a flora and fauna level, so that the audience would be more accepting of the fantasy elements that are going to be set up for this world. Even the fancy elements and characters had to have an anatomical reality, so the audience could relate back to our own known world. There are no dragons with small wings that come at you in reality, so there we had to establish a firm way to move forward. Once that was established the first three or four weeks of the entire process, we all understood it and never veered from it.