Dressed for the Middle Earth

Mumbai:Bob Buck was in charge of costume design for Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, contributing to the Middle Earth adventure’s authenticity. Incidentally, Bob worked with director Peter Jackson on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, before stepping into the Hobbit films (the third and final series in the installment will be released this December).

“I feel very, very blessed… It’s honestly a dream come true. I’ve worked on other movies with Peter and there is definitely a family atmosphere. We often have to dress people who are family and children of the cast who get to be hobbits and things like that. We’ve been together so long, you experience quite a lot of withdrawal after you’ve finished,” Bob says, about the journey so far.

Working on Peter’s films can make for a larger-than-life experience, Bob admits. During the filming for The Desolation of Smaug, for instance, there were about 90 people in the costumes department.

“We had a full operational work crew, including four cutters and eight machinists; we had a team of two dyers and laundry people downstairs, and five-to-eight breakdown people managing all the costumes. At one stage, we had three jewellers working. We had a milliner; sometimes we had as many as five to ten costume props people. We even had a team of cobblers, sculptors and leather workers making boots and belts and moulds for all sorts of things. Pretty much everything you see in the movie is made from scratch. It’s a fantastic thing to do, but it’s a lot to keep a handle on. It does give you ultimate control, which is wonderful,” Bob explains.

Then there is the team that works on the sets ,a special team for the dwarf characters in the film and a team for specific lead actors. “There’s a lot to deal with on set,” Bob says, wryly. “The dwarves have an early call to come in, put their underwear on, go to the truck, get their prosthetics applied and then come back down in their costumes and put on their basic suits and their pants. Then they go get a little bit of breakfast and come back, and before they go to the set, you’ve got to dress them in their full kit. These are their fat suits body suits with cooling vests underneath, with a hose that you can plug into a little machine that sends cool air through tubes to keep them cooled down!”

Bob says what’s been most exciting about working on The Desolation of Smaug costumes, is venturing into a whole new aspect of Middle Earth. “We definitely wanted to create a different aesthetic for different parts of the journey,” he says.

“As we go through the journey and get closer to the Mountain, the geography and time of year changes, and it affects what people wear, so it’s very important that we think about that as well. You’re also trying to make a different world from the LOTR trilogy, yet with a believable connection to it. But you want to take it to places where it’s never been before.”