This time, in addition, they have left New Zealand, the islands where Peter Jackson He shot his two trilogies, putting them on the tourist and cinema map. They went that far in the first season (it was there JA Bayona directing the first two episodes), but have now returned to the landscapes that would surely inspire Tolkien himself. Most of the locations this season are in England, both natural and the sets built on the set there.
They filmed between October 2022 and June 2023. Only the final battle scene that occupies the last two chapters took them almost those nine months of preparation and filming in Windsor Great Park, more than 2,000 hectares of land within the Crown Estate full of ancient trees, the kind that Tolkien loved.
The (almost) final battle.
Courtesy of Prime Video
Finlay Bradbury was the localizer for this season focused on English spaces. A self-confessed fan of the novels, he took it “as a great challenge to be at the level of the first season, but looking for spaces in the United Kingdom, where no production of The Lord of the Rings had been filmed,” he explains to us via Zoom.
But he had a certain advantage: originally from Wales, he has always developed his career as a location scout in Great Britain, so he is a great connoisseur of the natural and architectural landscapes of the entire island. Bridget Jones, Wonder Woman, Match Point o Jane Eyre These are some of the titles in his filmography. Here, as always, he started working weeks before filming began. “Luckily, this time I was able to count on some scripts, which I relied on to start looking,” he explains.
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Although they covered part of the entire island, they ended up finding all the landscapes they needed in England, which made production logistics much easier. “It was a stroke of luck,” he says. And that, in addition, taking into account that “the number of productions that are currently being shot there makes it difficult to find places that are not too often seen or that are not being used at that time.” “Again, luckily, we still have many hidden gems, “although I would say that most of them are private farms and fields. We knew some of them and you get to others through documentation, you knock on their doors and if they open them for you, when you go in it’s incredible what you find.”
