This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
For a country whose national identity is an inferiority complex, we are surprisingly overt in the pride we have for our prominent association with adaptations of the works of JRR Tolkien. That first Lord of the Rings trilogy gave us all a little boost on the world stage, then the Hobbit films kept the feeling alive.
When Amazon Prime Video announced that they were mounting an ambitious live-action Lord of the Rings prequel series based on supplementary Tolkien material, it made sense to us that it would be made in New Zealand, even if Peter Jackson wasn’t involved and the production was more of an Auckland-based affair than the movies.
