Sam Amico
It may not be the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but it should be close.
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We will find out soon enough, as the Amazon streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set to make its debut on Sept. 2.
But in the event you can’t wait until then, The Rings of Power director J.A. Bayona dropped some hints in an interview with io9.
“I think to portray the level of beauty that you find in the (J.R.R. Tolkien) books is such a massive endeavor. I’m glad that Amazon had the ambition to go there,” Bayona said. “Also, if you think about the movies, the bar was set so high that we can not offer less to the audience, you know? So to me, it was to be at the level of the expectations, not only for the people who saw the movies but the people who had read the books.”
In other words, the series should stay true to the books — and therefore, the movies too. Only this will be on television (or wherever you stream the Amazon app). This gives Bayona and other directors some wiggle room.
“I remember that I read about the show and I was curious like, ‘Oh, that seems like a very good idea,’ because television allows you to give the space and the time that Tolkien spent in telling the story and the story of these characters,” Bayona said. “… I think it was very smart and clever to do a Second Age [story], which is something that Tolkien planned, but was never that specific. So it gave us a lot of freedom to create new storylines and characters, but at the same time be faithful to the plan that Tolkien already had.”
He added that he borrowed a little bit of everything in the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, which he directed.
“I mean, it’s such a rich and complex universe and so different,” Bayona said. “So if you want to go for [nature], you would find the Harfoots. If you want to get more political, you will go to the Elves. There’s melodrama when you go to humans. It feels very rich and complex, and I really enjoy it a lot working with each of the worlds. I love movies in general and I love all genres. And somehow the world of Tolkien allows you to pick up a little bit of all of them in the story.”
