Alan Lee

What led you to draw Tolkien's world?

I've always loved his books from when I first read them, when I was seventeen, but I never really thought there would be an opportunity to illustrate them. Then in 1984 I did a book called Castles and that was published in England by the same publisher that did Tolkien and one of the editors, Jane Johnson, had the idea of trying to see if we could get an illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings.

It took a long time and a lot of discussion with the Tolkien Estate, I had to do a few pencil drawings for them, then they agreed and at the end they were very happy with the result. That was published in 1991, just in time for the Tolkien Centenary, and three or four years later I did The Hobbit.

How did you approach depicting the various characters and places in the Lord of the Rings given that there is not a lot of information in the text?

Well, there is actually a lot of information if you pick it from little bits of description at various point of the book. At Minas Tirith, for example, by reading carefully you get a picture of what Tolkien had in mind. The only thing you can do is draw as much information as you can, and then imagine the rest, all the details are up to your imagination and for me that is the most enjoiable part. Is good to have a book where there is plenty of room for imagination.

With characters is the same: there aren't very detailed description of them but there is enough to give you a feeling. My approach, when illustrating a book, is to try to avoid getting too close to the characters, because I want to concentrate on the landscapes and the cities. Very often the characters are very small and in the distance and that's a deliberate thing.

Do you like to listen to music when you draw?

I do listen to a lot of music, classical, jazz and the new american country music but while I'm drawing it's actually less distracting for me to listen to talk and stories because very often I'm moved by music: I just stop working and sit back and let the music wash over me. So I prefer radio or comedy programs, something that allows you to keep your mind half on the work and half on what you are listening to.

What techniques do you prefer?

I really like to work with a variety of materials but watercolor and pencils are among my favorites.

I don't have a preference between the two as much as I like to have a switch back and forth between watercolor and pencil. You usually work with pencils as a preparation for a finished watercolor, but what I do like about pencils is that you can leave things kind of suggested and unfinished so that you finish the draw with your own imagination.

As an illustrator, you are used to work on your own but during the Lord of the Rings you had to collaborate with a huge number of people: what was it like?

It's very different and there's benefits to both. It's a sort of trade-off, really. When you are working on yourself in a studio, you have complete autonomy and total control on what you do. In a film you don't have quite so much control but you do have a huge amount of resources in creating a very impressive end result: basically you can either have a small amount of power on a huge project or you can have a lot of power on a small project.

I like to do both. I like to be in control of my books but I really like the social aspect of working on a film, the comradeship and the sense of a shared adventure.

Did you develop the style for the elfic and the gondorian architecture form Bytanzine architecture?

That seemed appropriate for Minas Tirith because Gondor is a great civilization which has gone into some decline and that choice seemed a way to tie in the later period in gondorian history with the history of the roman empire when it had split into two and it only really survived in Byzantium.

If we had gone for a more gothic look, that would have made us think of european cathedrals and we wanted a more eternal feel.

I don't know whether Tolkien had that style in mind but it seemed a good starting point. Anyway, it does relate also to romanesque architecture, but there was no attempt to actually copy anything directly, it was more of a starting point for the imagination. Everything we designed was created without a specific model in mind.

Are you planning to do some more work for the cinema industry?

I have been asked a couple of times to get involved with other projects but I'm reluctanct to get deeply involved with anything unless I'm very confident it will be as satisfying as The Lord of the Rings. I did a little bit of work on Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a three months work on King Kong. Besides, I'm really interested in books at the moment because I was unable to do any book of my own for the six years that I was working on the films, so that's my priority now. Perhaps once I've got a couple of more books out I'll think about doing another film.

The most satisfying part about working on a film is being able to follow in through, not just doing one drawing then walking away leaving other people create from that. But follow the whole process through and add more and more details means that you have to be there from the very beginning to the end: I'm prepared to do that for a project like The Lord of the Rings but not for something that is going to be here today and gone tomorrow.

Would you like to work on a version of The Hobbit for the cinema?

If the Hobbit does get off the ground I would like to be involved, yes, especially if Peter Jackson was going to be making it.

Do you think it will happen?

I think there's a good chance it will happen at some point, maybe in three, four years time.