‘We Can’t Ruin’ Tolkien’s books: Lord of the Rings author Philippa Boyens on The War of the Rohirrim

On December 14, 2024By Littum

“Professor Tolkien said in his letters that sometimes the most compelling story is the untold story.”

That’s what Philippa Boyens told me when I recently interviewed her about the new animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which she produced and co-wrote the story for. She also has the street cred of having co-written Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

It started, of course, with JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy book series. Adaptations followed over the years, first on radio, then in animation, before Jackson finally brought the Middle-earth realm to a worldwide audience with his acclaimed films. Since then, adaptations have continued, with the latest version being the anime-style The War of the Rohirrim, which looks into a previously untold chapter of Tolkien’s world.

Delving into Tokyo’s Annex to fill in some of the gaps in Middle-earth’s history, the film is also very clearly set in the Peter Jackson version of Tolkien’s fantasy world. In my chat with Boyens and executive producer Jason DeMarco, we discussed how they cracked the code to tell an entirely new Lord of the Rings story while managing to stay true to not only Tolkien, but Peter Jackson as well.

Tells an untold Tolkien story

The War of the Rohirrim is the latest project based on Tolkien’s beloved fantasy series, which attempts to fill in an aspect of Middle-earth’s history that the author barely touched upon in his original works. In this case, the story of the rulers of Rohan from the Lord of the Rings appendices was the starting point, specifically Helm Hammerhand, as voiced by Brian Cox in the film. Of course, Helm will become the inspiration for what we know as Helm’s Deep.

Philippa Boyens not only wrote Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, but also his Hobbit trilogy with the director and Fran Walsh. She also helped write the story for War of the Rohirrim. As she explains, it all came down to figuring out what story to tell with an animated film for her and the team.

“There are a lot of stories out there in the appendices, in the world, the stories still untold in the books, all of that,” Boyens says. “It was just somehow… it didn’t gel.”

The biggest challenge was how to bring Tolkien forward in a way that no one has seen before.

It was executive producer Jason DeMarco who suggested switching to an anime-style approach.

“For me, the biggest challenge was how do we bring Tolkien to life in a way that no one has seen before, which is equally anime,” he recalls. “Make it feel true to Tolkien and the movies that Philippa and Peter and Fran made, and then also make it feel like a real anime?”

After pitching their idea to Warner Bros., the next task was to get director Kenji Kamiyama to sign off. Boyens and DeMarco wanted to make sure they could plug the Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex director, and they felt they had an idea he didn’t want to pass up.

“It’s an interesting piece of storytelling, even if you just follow the bare threads that are in the book,” says Boyens. “And that’s because it starts huge and quite epic. In fact, the biggest battle we have is the attack on Edoras, at the end of the first act. And for a lot of directors I think that would scare them because you land in this huge epic moment and it’s really shocking to see Edoras go up in flames. But then the movie changes, and it’s really interesting how it changes into this intense kind of siege.”

Channeling Peter Jackson’s Midgard

Despite The War of the Rohirrim being an animated film, or taking place some 180 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there’s no doubt that it still feels like the world we all know and love from the Peter Jackson movies . Of course, it’s a story set in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but the depiction of any book series is always open to interpretation from a visual perspective. That said, War of the Rohirrim shares a design aesthetic with Jackson’s films, and that was very deliberate – starting with director Kenji Kamiyama.

“Our director was pretty clear from the beginning that he wanted this movie to stick to the universe established by (Jackson),” says DeMarco. “So one of the first things we did was contact Weta and say, do you have CG models of the Hornburg? Which they did when they were 20 years old. So it took some getting. They also had tons of of lovely physical maquettes and things.”

Weta, of course, is the effects company that worked on Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, and they were a major force in creating the Middle Earth that most people think of these days. In addition to the CG models and maquettes, they were also able to provide the War of the Rohirrim team with a wealth of photographs and drawings for the film’s background artists and designers to use as reference.

But funnily enough, the vast resource in the Weta archives also led to the occasional problem.

“(It was) the kind of thing you only run into when you get into the nitty-gritty, where Kamiyama was trying to block scenes and say, ‘Well, where does this room sit inside the Hornburg?’ And then we heard back, ‘Oh, geographically, the inside is bigger than the outside. It doesn’t really make sense. Train it however you want,'” laughs DeMarco. “So there were things like that that happened that you would never have guessed because you’re making a movie 20 years earlier and you don’t think that anyone will ever visit this place again.”

Another challenge for the War of the Rohirrim artists was to take the 3D designs from the Jackson films and transform them into the 2D painterly style of the anime. In fact, Weta was brought in to help design new elements that might not have been in the Jackson films, just to make sure they felt like they fit into the overall world.

“We knew we were coming at people with a completely different style than they’ve seen with The Lord of the Rings, but we still wanted them to feel like they were at home,” says DeMarco. “And for us, it was a way we could help achieve that without having to pile people over our heads.”

In the end, the artists also had to take into account not only the where of this story, but also when.

We thought about things like what did the Hornburg look like 200 years before you saw it in The Two Towers?

“Obviously the Hornburg is an old fortress, but we thought about things like, what did it look like 200 years before you saw it in The Two Towers?” adds the EP. “Was there anything different? What would we change? How do we make it a little less old, but still old?”

Meanwhile, Boyens noticed some familiar traits—and talents—when working with Kamiyama.

“He brought a much larger scale to it. So everything I thought about, he wanted to take it and expand it even more, like the long winter and what that means visually,” she says of the anime director. “And then he would immediately contrast it in a way that I never would have thought of it. My brain was still, “OK, we’re in this cold, cold channel.” And then suddenly the sun comes through on this frozen scene. you work with a visual master. … But he also reminded me of Peter because he’s a storyteller first and foremost, and he’s always looking for what’s cinematic. What’s going to stick in your mind visually? I love working with people like that because he would throw ideas out there and then we would try and think, how are we going to earn this?”

Héra, the unsung hero

The narration in the film is by Miranda Otto, who of course played Éowyn, a shieldmaiden of Rohan, in the Jackson films. She tells the viewer from the start that even the inhabitants of Middle-earth don’t know this particular story, which is an interesting way for the writers of War of the Rohirrim to deflect any criticism of the pass that might come from fans complaining that this is a new story .

“We could tell a story inside that didn’t change anything that Tolkien laid down, but still fleshed it out to be what it needed to be,” says DeMarco. “So I think it was that and a callback in a cool way of saying that there are legends of a lot of strong people, strong women who have done these things that may not be written in the stories, but that doesn’t mean , that they were not exciting stories.”

The unsung hero of this story is actually Helm’s daughter, voiced by Gaia Wise. Unnamed in Tolkien’s work, Boyens and the other writers decided to call her Héra. So when Otto’s narrative says not to look for stories about Héra in the old songs, it’s because there literally aren’t any.

“It was intentional to say to the audience, we know what we’re doing here. We know, we get it. Stay with us,” says Boyens. “Because … this is where we work from … is that it doesn’t change it’s unnecessary. You don’t just change something arbitrarily, do it for good storytelling reasons. And then whatever you bring to it, make it feel authentic.”

Don’t just change anything arbitrarily. If we’re going to change something, do it for good narrative reasons.

Boyens says the story could also have been about Héra’s father Helm, or perhaps even Wulf, the story’s antagonist. But she and the writers wanted to be able to end the film on a more hopeful note than the other characters would have taken things.

“I think Tolkien always brings that element of hope to his storytelling,” she says.

The filmmakers also felt it was important to include a character from the original Jackson films, and Éowyn was the perfect choice to tell the story of Héra.

“What (Otto) especially loved was the line, ‘Don’t look for her in the old songs, stories about her in the old songs. There’s none,'” says Boyens. “She loved it. I think she liked that challenge. … We always said to her, ‘Imagine telling this story to your young son in Gondor or your ancestor.’

Tells an untold Tolkien story

Channeling Peter Jackson’s Midgard

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Gallery

Héra, the unsung hero