I’ve done a couple of days on the set of the Númenor docks, but now we’ve been asked to come in for a half day for some off-camera training. There is a big scene coming up later in the week featuring about three hundred extras, and it will apparently involve some marching. The idea is that the soldiers will all walk in time together, thus the powers-that-be have wisely decided that it could be an idea to practice this.
The soldiers have yet to feature on the Númenor set, so the City Guard are veterans by comparison. We are here for the training too, although it transpires that all we will be doing on the day is standing on the side of the city square as the soldiers march past. So our training consists of standing – which we feel we have already mastered at this point – and watching people walk. Again, already got a handle on the watching. But hey, more than happy to take Bezos’ cash.
It’s raining, so we’re practicing our marching/standing in one of the enormo-tents. As a result, they can’t line up the soldiers quite as planned for the shoot, but for the City Guard the standing practice is almost exactly like it will be on the day, with just one major difference – we’re not in costume. In fact, standing in normal clothes and wearing shoes with actual support and not carrying our shields and spears is, if anything, giving us a false sense of security about what a stroll, well, stand, in the park it’s going to be.
As I watch the Assistant Directors trying to organise the soldiers into some form of order, which is definitely including an element of cat-herdery, I’m interested to see that the extras are pretty much 50/50 male/female. As a group I mean, not as individuals. My first thought is “yeah, nice, I like it”. My second thought is “but I bet some people are going to see this as a grievous insult both to Tolkien and to their own fragile masculinity” and <sigh> I was of course quite right.
I’m next to my fellow Guard Mick, watching it all unfold and laughing heartily at the poor fools trying to walk in time with each other. At this point Mick and I know nothing of our own future, but rest assured this will come back to bite us on the arse next week. But for now we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves. My memory is a little hazy on the numbers now, but I’m thinking there were perhaps fifty to sixty extras on marching practice. They include a handful of “musicians”, featuring a “drummer” who is definitely not making a positive contribution to the timing of the whole thing. After an hour or so they’re finally beginning to look vaguely soldier-esque, but there’s one poor sod that absolutely cannot get it. No matter how many times they try, he can only start walking on his right foot, not his left. Despite an AD calling out the left/right chant in time for everyone, he just can’t get it. Another AD is assigned specifically to stand next to him so that he has his own personal left/right caller, but to no avail. In the end the decision is taken to reassign him from soldier to civilian, and the relief all around is palpable.
We’re off home after a few hours, but a couple of days later we’re back at the studio in the middle of the night preparing for a very long day to film this scene. It’s ridiculously busy everywhere, there are hundreds of extras being pushed through costume, make-up, and catering, and the earliest arrivals will have been hanging around for a good five or six hours before we even start to move to set.
We have a full complement of a dozen City Guards today, with several new faces. We are led out to a section of the enormous city set that we have somehow not seen yet. I have no idea how I have not seen it earlier, it is HUGE. At the far end is an imposing stone building, and set at the top of some steps are a pair of golden doors about ten metres high between two blue and gold pillars. Banners in the same colour are hanging on the walls, and the lower half of the walls feature a carved mural of assorted stonemasons. The opposite end of the city square – I say city square, but it’s really more of a city trapezoid – is open for crew access etc, but either side are more big stone buildings several stories high with a large array of nooks, crannies, windows and balconies, all dressed beautifully. The Guards are amongst the first on set so I have a chance to wander around and drink in all the astonishing set design. I’m particularly taken by a notice board full of various lovely examples of handwriting in some very Tolkien-esque scripts, although my levels of nerdery are not so high that I can decipher any of them. Presumably at least one of them is offering guitar lessons. There are what appear to be shops and cafes set back in the buildings and once again I’m struck by how incredibly real it all feels.
You can tell by the shape of the city square that it’s, well, not very square.
The city trapezoid is filling up now, and down both sides the buildings are filled with civilian extras, in some places up to ten deep. The real heroes i.e the City Guard, are standing in line and fully armed to keep the plebs away from the soldiers. Fires are burning either side of the great golden doors in two huge golden bowls and to be honest it’s hard for me to overstate the sheer amount of gold everywhere in Númenor – all of it glittering in the sunlight. Even the Smaug of Jackson’s Hobbit movies would be looking around going hey yeah, this is actually quite a lot of gold. More importantly, as far as I’m concerned, is that there seems to be no sign of anybody about to melt a gigantic golden dwarf.
They have brought in about fifty soldiers who are positioned in the middle of the remaining space, where they are flanked by our archrivals the Sea Guards. I mean what even is a Sea Guard anyway? Anyone can guard the sea right? It basically looks after itself and ignores any human activity aside from causing the occasional death, but the City needs looking after. It takes a real guard to do that.
Finally the cast arrive, and we have six rather large and handsome horses, elegantly decked out in – you guessed it – gold. Atop four of these horses are some soldiers who to my utmost delight are wearing the entirely ridiculous but absolutely lore-correct helmets with the large feathered wings on the side. Somewhere I’m sure there are some drawings of helmets like these in Tolkien’s own hand and I’ll try and dig them out. I think we see something similar in Peter Jackson’s Gondor too. I’m sure the impression they are supposed to give is very grand, but I always look at these and think of the boot cleaners you get outside the changing rooms of a sports club.
There are two cast members I recognise – Pharazôn is standing atop the stairs in front of the golden doors, and Miriel is on one of the two lead horses. Pharazôn isn’t wearing much gold, but then his name literally means golden, so he’s doing his bit. The other lead horse is ridden by a character I don’t recognise at this point but with whom I will have a close encounter on another day. Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Míriel) is looking a little ill-at-ease on her horse which is doing what I find horses usually excel at – not doing as its told. On the plus side, the horse clearly has no problems with its digestive system.
I want to go back to the soldiers here though, as I’ve mentioned them several times without actually giving them any description. I feel obliged to point out that while the fandom gave them quite a lot of stick for their costumes, up close they look really good. Not City Guard good, but definitely better than the Sea Guards. They all have helmets with large horse-hair plumes, lances festooned with banners, ivory-coloured fish-scale armour, swords with ornate horse-head grips and much to my chagrin they have comfortable looking boots. Bastards.
If you look closely you can see that the soldiers are absolutely not marching in time despite all that training.
Despite the admirable idea to give some of us some training prior to the day, it seems that perhaps that level of forward thinking had not been applied further up the chain of command. A few attempts are made to line all the soldiers and horses up in a manner both practical and aesthetically pleasing but it’s just not happening. By this point some of us have been standing here in the sun for quite a while and the day is heating up. A break is taken while the director can formulate a new plan.
There’s a soldier in front of me who is looking pretty unhappy with all the standing around. We’ll call him Dick. While the ADs experiment with a few different soldier formations, Dick is getting visibly pissed off, as if he is better than all this nonsense, and during a break in proceedings I watch him walk off. The ADs continue to experiment, and eventually someone has decided that the way to do this is with ropes. They spend the best part of an hour marking out lines of soldiers with the ropes, and giving each soldier a marked place on the rope which is their spot for the start of the scene. Finally they are ready, and everybody is in their place. Everybody except Dick that is. Just as the set is cleared ready for a take, Dick reappears in front of me and tries to squeeze himself back into line. But he can’t – he’s missed the whole measuring phase and is getting miffed at the other soldiers refusing to move to make way for him. A visibly annoyed AD appears and asks what’s going on, so Dick whines about people not moving for him. As soon as it becomes clear that Dick had done a bunk for the entire setup, the AD tells Dick in no uncertain terms to get the fuck off the set and not come back. But this will not be the last story about this disobedient young soldier!
While this has been going on I’ve noticed that another City Guard, Terry, who was supposed to be standing to my left is also nowhere to be seen. I don’t want to raise the issue with an AD and get Terry in trouble, but now that I think about it he’s been gone for well over an hour and they’re about to shoot. But nobody else has noticed. The call for “rolling” is announced, which normally allows for perhaps five to ten seconds before the call of “action” and suddenly Terry is in his place, cool as you like. I asked him afterwards where he’d gone, and he’d been sitting in the little café set up behind us having a nap before the call of “rolling” woke him up!
The soldiers march off, but Míriel’s horse is having none of it, and refuses to move, and instead takes a seemingly never-ending piss. Unlike Dick however, the horse is rightly indulged (and I have to say that every single time I have been on a set with animals they been treated like absolute royalty and rightly so). Several attempts later and the horse plays ball, but another problem arises as it finally becomes apparent to everyone what happens when they all march together from the wide end of the trapezoid to the thin end. Another break ensues while a system is implemented by which the soldier can merge like a zip at the end and prevent those at the rear from bunching up. Good job we had that training day huh?
I have no idea what is happening in terms of the story on the day, I can’t connect it to the scenes we’ve shot at the docks, but it’s early days so far in that sense – this is only the fourth scene I’ve shot. Those of you who have seen the show will know this is in fact the moment where Míriel leads the Númenorean cavalry soldiers, including Halbrand, off to war in Middle-earth. But my focus right now of course is on guarding the city. Guard of the citadel indeed. What? I’ve already used that one? Bollocks!
Always happy to read another installment of the DIARY OF A CITY GUARD!