The company has produced costumes, weapon, armor, make up effects, sets and creatures for blockbuster movies like The Lord of the Rings and has expanded into other areas.
Bridges spoke with Richard Taylor about the growth of the company, New Zealand’s location as a film destination and his strong affinity towards the Japanese.
“My wife and I own and co-ran the Wētā Workshop, which is design and manufacturing for film, TV and location-based experiences. We do consumer products, we do tourism, we have our own digital gaming division, and we also run a location-based experience department doing immersive experiences of which we have three in Wellington and one in Auckland, which is a very significant experience called ‘Wētā Workshop unleashed’”
Tell us about Wētā Workshop’s beginnings and how you’ve evolved three decades later?
My wife, Tania and I started off in a very small way in the back room of our apartment. And no, we could never have imagined what would unfold. I don’t think anyone could. It’s not to in any way suggest that we weren’t incredibly ambitious and very eager to make our mark but we predominantly thought that it would be within the New Zealand film industry and not really understanding that we might get to be working on the world stage to the degree that we are. Even the name of our company Wētā which is named after an indigenous New Zealand bug probably speaks to that naivety because we knew that Wētā would work as a name for a New Zealand Company, because people love and know the Wētā but whether it would actually work internationally was yet to be seen.
But ultimately, you take the opportunities offered to you and those opportunities exponentially grow starting probably with ‘Hercules’ and ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ – the early television series’, because that reached an international audience and that was seven years of our lives.
Although We’d done ‘Meet the Feebles’, ‘Braindead’ and ‘Heavenly Creatures’ with Peter Jackson, which were cult movies in their own right and had a pretty amazing cult following around the world, ‘Meet the Feebles’ had a very intense cult following in Japan, as you could imagine. Peter had actually went on a junket to Japan for ‘Meet the feebles’.
Tania and I had the good fortune of going to Cannes for the prescreening of 20 minutes of the film, and it was during that trip that we fundamentally understood how the world was going to react because the press that were gathered, hundreds of press people had been invited to be part of this incredible junket to celebrate Lord of the Rings.
Richard Taylor, Founder and Owner of Wētā Workshop
But it wasn’t until we really got on to ‘Lord of the Rings’ after ‘The Frighteners’. ‘The Frighteners’ was a $14 million feature film made to reach a global audience in which it did and it was very highly praised at a critical level but it wasn’t until we actually got on to ‘Lord of the Rings’ where things took off.
Tania and I had the good fortune of going to Cannes for the prescreening of 20 minutes of the film, and it was during that trip that we fundamentally understood how the world was going to react because the press that were gathered, hundreds of press people had been invited to be part of this incredible junket to celebrate Lord of the Rings.
And they went as skeptics, and they came out as positive skeptics, converts and champions of the movie and that was extraordinary and we realized that point, that through the power of the press, and the phenomenon that were the films that Peter Jackson was creating with a small team of people in Wellington, New Zealand, this was going to be a monumental moment.
So that that was really the catalytic moment that created a further 20 plus years that has allowed us to work on a very diverse and very significant number of films, television shows, digital games, we also do location-based experiences in China, in Dubai, in our own country and other parts of the world. So definitely a reality today that we’re working in that sort of space.
What would you attribute to the success of your company and New Zealand as a destination for filmmaking?
Oh, well, it’s easier probably to talk about New Zealand, New Zealand is a population of can-do people all united with the belief that we want to indelibly put our mark on the world stage from our small place in New Zealand that we have a capacity and capability to service international films and TV shows in our country at a level comparative with the best in the world.
We have a country that can offer a diversity of locations that are equivalent to being able to fly almost anywhere in the world within a two-hour flight of where I sit today. So, all those components add up to offer a filmmaker a very dynamic and exciting experience should they come down here.
With respect to our own company, we’re just very, very passionate about what we do. We’ve been doing this for over three decades now. And I think most of us still get up every morning, keen to get into work and keep doing what we’re very fortunate to do for a living and we take every job as if it is the most important job that we could be doing. And whether it’s a tiny low budget short film effects job or it’s a major production, we try and tackle every project with the same level of gusto, enthusiasm, passion, and outcome possible and I think our clients and ourselves enjoy that.
Behind this success is a love story too. Tell us about your partnership with your wife, Tania?
Well, we started in 1987. We met when we were 13 and sort of committed to each other by the age of 15 and moved to Wellington when we were 17. And so in our late teens, early 20s, we were really starting to get things going in a very modest way but and I would argue that that ability to do the job with someone that you’re very close to and trust in and enjoy working with has been one of the main ingredients for our ability to grow our company because we’ve been able to share the challenges.
Of course, as the company is growing, you share it with more and more wonderful people that gather around you and take the burden off a lot of the business side of things off your shoulders so that you can focus on the creative and the clients and trying to do work at the level that’s going to inspire your audience.
And that probably has been the most joyful thing is the collaboration with amazing like-minded group of people that just want to be on the same journey, trying to keep creativity and art at the forefront of what we do.
Tania and I worked very closely together every day and of course continue into the evenings at night because it doesn’t really ever stop. But thankfully for the two of us we see significantly eye to eye on all matters, which certainly helps when you’re doing something as complex and as abstract as what we do for a living.
How would you characterize the Japanese market as a consumer of the movies you’ve been a part of and as a potential partner?
Obviously, the Japanese culture is a significant consumer of popular culture and a considerable generator of its own popular culture. You would argue it’s the most successful and most significant in the world if you think about a country that is generating a cultural entertainment specific to its own people. But when you look at sort of the bifurcated nature of the diverse offering that comes out of the Japanese pop culture machine, it almost without fail, everything hits an international audience appeal, never mind how populous and impactful it is on an entertainment level within Japan and we’ve all benefited massively from that we of course, are directly inspired by it.
You might see behind me a large number of collectibles of which a number of those are Japanese collectibles. I’ve gotten almost everything that Takayuki Takeya ever made or has made and he is my favorite sculptor in the world and someone that I have visited in his home in Tokyo.
But of course because we predominantly work in science fiction, fantasy, it is just a natural progression that the type of movies that we’re working on things like Lord the Rings, The Hobbit, Narnia, King Kong, Thor, Avatar, District Nine, Elysium, etc. are going to be popular in Japan because the Japanese people are huge consumers of that type of entertainment and it’s a very lovely thing to think that movies that we have worked on have done so well in Japan.
It’s always our aspiration that should an audience member get out of their chair, walk up to the screen and look around the edges of the proscenium arch, they would perceive that the world continues beyond the rectangle of the film frame because you’ve given such a depth of plausibility to the visual images on the screen that the audience doesn’t think that they’re only watching what the camera is looking at and what the set builders have built.
Obviously, it’s a long-standing hope of mine that we might collaborate on a Japanese content, whether that be film, television, or location-based experiences.
We did make a television remake of the Thunderbirds and obviously the Thunderbirds was massively popular and still is and Japan and we did a 72 half-hours which played and was popular in Japan over the last 10 years. So we have made some impact on the Japanese market.
We haven’t really found distribution of our collectibles business into Japan. But that’s something that we believe that the Japanese audience would also enjoy the sculptures of figures and pop culture collectibles that we make so we always hold out that that may become an opportunity.
We distribute collectibles all over the world, almost every corner of the world but the Japanese market is surprisingly difficult to break into so we’re always holding out that we might find that distribution partner and we do have some level of distribution but we’d love to have a greater level of connection.
What was it like working on ‘The Last Samurai’ starring Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe?
The Last Samurai was a lovely film to work on of course it was an American production that was working to celebrate the Japanese story and a specific part of the Japanese culture and we got to build all of the weaponry for it, which we enjoyed greatly because we love the opportunity to do very deep research and that gave us a chance to get very deeply into the research behind the history of sword making in China which your courses is one of the richest and the utilitarian objects but treated like Faberge eggs, you know they treat with such a high level of respectful craftsmanship while still needing to be extraordinary pieces of equipment.
The last time I went to Japan which was a number of years ago, sadly, we were actually booked to go to Japan for three weeks and two days before our trip was supposed to commence, COVID Hit the world so we actually cancelled. It is our hope to get back to Japan to explore more fundamentally potential co-production opportunities and potential filmmaking relationships that could be ignited.
I’ve actually in all honesty I have given so much of my focus in the last few years to China, Korea and other parts of the world that I’ve sort of lost touch with what’s happening in Japan from a filmmaker perspective and would love to reignite that so, but of course, we’re always hoping to invite more Japanese tourists back to New Zealand as well because that’s been an incredible relationship between Japan and New Zealand is our ability to host Japanese people here in our country and, and here amongst our own tourism offerings. So that would be a lovely thing to find again as the world comes out of COVID.
Are there any other noteworthy projects you’ve worked on outside New Zealand lately?
We did the mobility pavilion for the Dubai Expo and for the Dubai government and that required us going into a depth of research around the Middle Eastern culture that required a large number of people working for many, months. One project within that one project took six months to research for a team of people. So it’s all relative to how big the project is and how deeply we need to go.
It’s always our aspiration that should an audience member get out of their chair, walk up to the screen and look around the edges of the proscenium arch, they would perceive that the world continues beyond the rectangle of the film frame because you’ve given such a depth of plausibility to the visual images on the screen that the audience doesn’t think that they’re only watching what the camera is looking at and what the set builders have built.
You’re trying to give plausibility to cultural references and I find that to probably be one of the most inspiring parts about Korea for instance. I’m very thankful that I have a team of people with me that try and fulfill that at every turn.
With Japan, my wife and I will be traveling to Japan to try and do exactly that. So we’re just really biding our time waiting until its time that we could find the most productive interactions but of course we are always open and eager for any contact or collaboration or discussion coming the other way and always look forward to sharing our little slice of creativity with the extraordinary audience that is the Japanese youth culture.
