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- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- New Line Cinema
Wardrobe Secrets From Behind The Scenes Of The 'Lord of the Rings' Trilogy
Since the 1960s, wannabe wizards and hobbits have been whipping up their own robes and frock coats to play in the world of The Lord of the Rings. But in the early 2000s, one very special group of talented seamstresses, embroiderers, dyers, cutters, and designers made that world real, and not just on screen.
Costume designer Ngila Dickson has offered extensive behind-the-scenes stories on the Lord of the Rings wardrobe secrets that brought thousands of costumes - and an entire fantasy world - to life.
Some Costumes Required As Many As 40 Copies To Fit Different-Sized Performers
When The Lord of the Rings went into production, it was clear that bringing the various races and cultures to life on screen - and in the same frame - would require plenty of camera trickery. That meant body doubles, size doubles, and stunt doubles, all of whom needed costumes.
In the making-of appendices of The Fellowship of the Ring, Dickson describes the process of developing the same costume for all the different performers of each character:
The very first thing that you have to do is you've got to break out that script and work out how many costumes are going to be required. So that meant that we had to make the lead actor's costume ten times, and then we had to make the body double's costume ten times, and then we had to make the mini-me costume ten times, and then we had to make the stunt double's costumes. So there are about 40 costumes of that one design.
Viggo Mortensen Repaired His Own Costumes And Props To Stay In Character
Viggo Mortensen was asked by Wired about his role as Aragorn in The Lord of The Rings, and whether it was true that he "lived in his costume" during filming.
Mortensen clarified the situation for the magazine: "I did go fishing in costume during lunch breaks when we were in more remote areas during the shoot, and did tramp around in the forest a little, but I did not live in the woods in costume as some have reported."
However, Mortensen did have a much larger part to play in the creation of his costume beyond just wearing it for fittings. As he explained:
I was permitted by costume designer Ngila Dickson to keep the costume during the start of filming just to break it in, and later helped break in bits of subsequent costumes. Not that unusual a thing, really, providing the actor is responsible and the designer feels comfortable with that. The costume department also allowed me to do some mending of the costume from time to time, as Strider himself would have done.
Mortensen added that the property department and Weta Workshop also allowed the actor to modify his hunting bow, quiver, and other tools.
Ngila Dickson Made Over 150 Costumes For Each Of The Nine Different Cultures
Lots of big numbers get thrown around when it comes to the massive production of The Lord of the Rings, and that includes the incredible output of the costume department. Some sources say the crew made 18,000 costumes; there are claims of 15 copies of Gandalf's cloak alone; and of the nine different cultures seen throughout the trilogy, the average number of unique outfits per culture is 150.
But Ngila Dickson says she's less concerned with the numbers and more focused on how the costumes contribute to the production. "On a project of this size and scope you have to design what you believe in, and on this film there wasn't a day in the 274 days of shooting that the costumes didn't look and feel real," she explains. "The less people notice the details of the costume, the better job we did, in a sense because that means the costumes have helped to completely absorb you in the story."
'It Was Like Organizing WWIII'
Peter Owen has designed hair and makeup for countless Hollywood productions, but even after winning an Oscar for his work on the trilogy, he still considers LOTR an insurmountable challenge.
As he explained to The Telegraph in 2002:
If they rang me up now to say, "Will you do Lord of the Rings?" I would say "No, we are not capable of doing it." But we did it. It was like organizing World War III. They were shooting in never less than three places simultaneously. We had six weeks to prepare everything, which was ridiculous. We had to design the make-up and create more than 100 new wigs and teach everyone how to put them on. [But] there was no time for panic. We had to make quick decisions and give the director what he wanted.
Peter Jackson initially asked his "Lord of the Rugs" to give Gandalf a 3-foot-long beard. "I told him that it would be unworkable, that Ian would not be able to act freely or move about without getting tangled up," Owen said. "Eventually he saw that and I just cut a foot or more of it off. The beard had to be part of Ian's character, not a caricature."
Andy Serkis Helped Put Together Smeagol's Costume In 'The Return of the King'
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Just as Viggo Mortensen contributed to the look and feel of his costume, Andy Serkis helped design Smeagol's hobbit-like outfit for the scene in which he finds the ring in The Return of the King. In the DVD appendices, Dickson discusses their process:
When we developed the Smeagol outfit, both Andy and I kept working on ideas, which was fabulous because you actually get to understand who he is, and it gave Andy the chance to think it through. There is something about him that is slightly vain, that little neckerchief that he wears... it comes back to starting to let the audience know beforehand that there is something about Smeagol that isn't as endearing as a hobbit.
In the feature, Serkis adds,
Given that his family were a fishing culture, we worked out that he'd have little bits of shells and fish hooks and things that meant something to him, and bits of things he'd found and dug up. But again, trying to retain the status of the character, I was trying to find ways of making him slightly more wealthy looking. [The neckerchief] it was kind of slightly spotted and it sort of dandified him in some way.
They Had To Wear And Tear And Throw Mud On All The Costumes
Regarding the wizard robes of Saruman and Gandalf, Ngila Dickson explains how her team made them feel truly lived-in:
We've really aged this costume down. It's quite extreme at times that we've actually sort of put quite a bit of life into that breakdown. You can see it's starting to get ever so slightly threadbare in places and, again, looking for elements that we're going to create that sense of age. He's been a wizard for a long time... The idea was that [Gandalf] needed to look like he never took this costume off. He liked that idea of bits of twig and leaf caught up in it.
Ian McKellen was very much on top of the idea of showing the life in his costume. "I was always concerned that there should be mud on the fringes of the long robe, and if he'd been riding that there should be splattered mud further up the costume," the actor explains.
His wizard co-star Christoper Lee agrees. "[Saruman's robe] wouldn't be brilliant glowing white; it couldn't be after thousands of years, or hundreds of years," he says. "So they were very clever there. They said it must look not exactly shabby but worn."
'It Was A Relief For The Wardrobe Department To Get To Make Some Very Beautiful Dresses'
After sewing dozens and dozens of hobbit pants, wizard robes, and threadbare ranger clothes, it's not hard to see why cast members like Miranda Otto wished there were more female characters for Dickson to design for. "I think she liked having a chance to dress the girls," Otto said.
In the series' appendices on costuming The Lord of the Rings, it's clear just how much passion and dedication Dickson's wardrobe team put into every dress they were able to make. As the head designer herself explains:
Yes, it was very much the relief for the wardrobe department to make some very beautiful dresses... The girls in the wardrobe department have actually hand stitched all of [the] embroidery, hours and hours and hours of work and these huge sleeves they just drop right back so [Arwen's] arm will suddenly appear quite naked on screen and it's incredibly sensual.
Dickson consistently sings the praises of the film's behind-the-scenes costumers: "The amount of people that have worked on every dress from cutter to dyer to embroiderers [to nights] at four o'clock in the morning when there would be five people stitching each corner of a dress in order to get it finished in time... I just can't imagine just how much everyone has given in to it..."
Denethor Wears Several Layers To Accent His 'Grandiose' Vanity
In creating the costume for Denethor, the steward of Gondor, Dickson's main question was how to make him "menacing" and "heading to the edge of sanity." She explains that process like so:
We wanted to make him vain and expensive. To make him look like he is wearing the most luscious of fur pelts and velvets and embroidery and just making it as grandiose as I possibly could, without resorting to color. And then of course adding in the chainmail... The vanity of the man that he imagined himself as a soldier of any kind that was what fascinated me the most about that character.
John Noble, who portrayed Denethor in the trilogy, wore the largest suit of chain mail that any actor could possibly support for a 10-hour filming day. "Putting it on was a weight but then after a while you'd forget about it," he says. "But then when I took it off in the evening it would be floaty, that was how heavy it was."
The Elves' Costumes Used Colors And Fabrics That Made Them Appear To Float
In bringing the elves to life, the goal was to make these immortal caretakers of Middle-earth appear real and tangible, but also otherworldly. Ngila Dickson discusses the creation of the fine elvish fashions in The Lord of the Rings appendices:
With the elves, I wanted the Rivendell elves to feel different to the Lothlorien elves. How we went about that was a slight color shift; there's a bit more color around the Rivendell elves than the Lothlorien elves... What I was looking for was the sense that these people were not of this Earth, this Middle-earth. We wanted the sense that these people sort of floated through the landscape. So I hung all the elf costumes off the tops of their bodies, giving them as much length as I possibly could to accentuate this idea that these elves were much taller than man...
Dickson has more to say about the Lady of Lothlorien, Galadriel, whom she describes as "the ultimate elf." In describing the costume choices for Cate Blanchett, the actress who plays Galadriel, Dickson explains:
She is our most white, our most beautiful, our most elegant, and most of Cate's dresses have this very, very slight drape around the neckline and again these really huge sleeves. [A] lack of jewelry other than what are considered important pieces to the story. [We] use the most glorious beaded fabrics that we could get our hands on.
A Lot Of Things Don't Even Show Up On Camera
Saruman the White is described in the books as having brilliant white robes that, when viewed up close, actually feature a prism of all the colors giving off a white light. Of course, on camera that would make the costume look like something out of a '70s Superman movie. The wardrobe department handled this problem by texturing Saruman's costume with many different white fabrics.
"The concept behind this costume was to give it as many textures as we possibly could because when you've got a character who's called Saruman the White and he's going to be in white robes [you need] to get some sense of definition happening to that costume," Dickson explains. "So the way we went about it was to use different textures in the fabrics themselves. So whether it's the linens and this underneath piece, the incredible brocades... We went to a silk which has got quite a lot of pattern in it..."
Many of these details aren't really visible to the audience, Dickson acknowledges, but the overall effect is to give the costume "much more life."
Hobbit Clothes Were Made Improperly On Purpose
Hobbits are people of the land - farmers, gardeners, brewers, and bakers - and their clothes were made to reflect this, using earth tones like green and yellow and brown, as well as hearty fabrics with heavy weaves. But Dickson had to take great care in dressing her lead actors, and making their frock coats and short trousers "as real as possible."
However, her hobbit wardrobe was not without a sense of humor. "I added a lot of quirks, things to jar the eye," she explains. "Their trouser legs and sleeves are too short, their buttons are too big, and their collars are out of proportion. I even made their pockets higher than usual for example, so when they put their hands in their pockets it has a very distinctive, funny look to us."
The Robes Of Gandalf The White Reflect His More 'Virile' Nature
Some costumes had details so fine they seemingly existed just to help the actors get into character. This was certainly the case for transitioning Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White, as Dickson explains:
What we wanted was a much more virile Gandalf, and it was certainly how Ian McKellen viewed the character in this guise. [He] wanted to be able to fight, he wanted to be able to move. What we didn't want was the volume in the costume that we had had in Gandalf the Grey. The other thing that I wanted to do was to impart a little more elven quality, so that we had a sense of him being part one foot in another world. We used some very beautiful fabrics in this... again, they're quite subtle, and the immediate version to the eye of this is just a cream costume, but it has a lot more happening than that.
The designs on Gandalf's sleeves, for instance, were elven designs - similar to designs seen on Elrond and others. Gandalf's undergarment, too, was also created as an elven fabric.
In an interview, Ian McKellen marvels at the detail that went into the clothes he wore on screen. "This remarkably embroidered gown can never be seen!" he says. "There's no point in doing it other than making me believe as I put them on that they're real clothes, which I do."
Costumers Went All Out, Even When The Characters Wearing Them Were Featured In 'Just A Headshot'
One of the hardest things for the wardrobe department was keeping up with the busy schedule across multiple locations while constant rewrites were happening, creating new characters and outfits to be designed and sewn. Miranda Otto, who played Eowyn, marvels at how efficiently the wardrobe team worked. "Ngila [Dickson] would be whipping things up in about three days and [they] actually turned into gorgeous frocks!" she says in the behind-the-scenes features. "I don't know how she does it."
But despite the furious schedule and constant changes, Dickson has a great sense of humor about it all:
We had already filmed a scene of Eowyn in the eggshell blue coat with the big fur collar, and then Peter wanted to shoot a scene earlier, so we needed to show the dress that was underneath this cloak... It was a chance to try a very different medieval design style that has a sort of separate embroidered front piece. That turned out to be a really beautiful and very delicate dress, and I remember the premiere and I remember thinking as that scene came up, "Oh my god, this is classic Peter; it's just a head shot." No point in having any ego when it comes to these things.
'I Wanted To Frame Her Ears'
The coronation scene at the end of the trilogy presented the wardrobe department with the opportunity to finally make the most beautiful dresses and jewelry they could design. Dickson had envisioned a very special crown for Arwen:
I had done this portrait of Liv wearing the coronation crown, which was based on the idea of a butterfly, and [I] had to have the hanging jewels. And my reason for that was that I wanted to frame her ears. [It] was all about highlighting those fabulous little elfen ears.
To go with a crown like that, a queen would need a very special dress, and Dickson's team didn't disappoint:
[Writer and producer Fran Walsh] said that her and Peter would really like Arwen to be in green at the coronation, and so the mission of my dye house was to keep dying me up pieces of fabric in every possible shade of green until I fell in love with one of them. [Finally] we found that green [and] it did all the things that I needed it to. It had enough blue in it to bring out the blue in Liv's eyes; it had enough yellow in it to ensure that it was still going to be green; [and] it was soft enough to allow me to believe in it as a coronation gown.
