Mike Heffernan, the construction manager for Edoras, discusses the challenges and rewards of building one of the most remote—and memorable—sets in Middle-earth. The set for Edoras was located at Mt. Sunday, in the Rangatata Valley on the South Island of New Zealand, and it was about a 30 minute drive to the nearest town. We started building in March 2000 and finished seven months later. The main buildings of Edoras were built on a rock sticking out of a valley floor carved by glaciers thousands of years ago. Some mornings there would be ice on the ground and it would be freezing cold, but it was absolutely stunning. The scenery was just breathtaking. Edoras was built on such hard rock, and in such a high wind area, that we had to get a drilling team to put rock anchors into the ground. On top of the rock anchors we erected a steel frame, bolted it to the anchors and covered that with four by two or two by four lumber and plywood. The wind was the biggest challenge. You could get 120 knot winds whistling down the valley, but there were only two days when we couldn’t work because of the wind. We had a full time safety officer there, as we were actually working on the side of a cliff face. Before we started construction, we put all these safety points and clip on points around the site. If there was an accident, we had our safety man ready to go. Peter Jackson came down two or three times during the construction, just to have a look around and work out what he was going to shoot. If he had any problems he’d go through production designer Grant Major or conceptual designer Alan Lee and they’d come back and redesign. We had about 50 people in the construction department at Edoras. Two foremen, 20 odd chippies (carpenters), 10 to 15 hammer hands and 10 to 15 laborers. We had an engineer as well doing all the welding. And there were probably 10 people in the greens department for the duration. On an average day, we’d get up at about five in the morning, have breakfast and jump on the bus at about quarter to six. The bus would arrive on the site at about seven o’clock and we would start work. We had a cook on the set and at 10 o’clock we’d have breakfast. Then we’d work until about one o’clock, have lunch and work right through to six. After that, everybody would jump back on the bus and we would head into town, getting back about 7 at night. The main roof of the Golden Hall took about three weeks to make. We had to buy 25 acres of wheat and get it cut in the old style so that we got the long stalks to make the thatching on the roofs. A lot of the detail work on the outside of the building was created in Wellington and shipped down to us. To get other architectural features, like the horses, we would cut out a piece of plywood in the shape and then put polystyrene on both sides of it. Then the carvers would carve the horse’s face into it. When we arrived on the location we had to remove a lot of the natural vegetation, so we set up a big nursery area and it was all kept alive and fed. When we finished, we had to re-establish everything that was there before we came. So we had to put everything back, plus of course we had to bring truckloads of other stuff in that didn’t survive and replant the whole area. That was one of the biggest jobs, getting the site back to its original condition. It took us another year after we finished filming there to return the site to what it was before we arrived. We worked closely with the New Zealand Department of Conservation. They would come out every couple of weeks just to make sure what we were doing was within our agreement. They were totally happy with what we were doing there.