RANDALL WILLIAM COOK: AN OSCAR WINNER’S JOURNEY FROM HARRYHAUSEN TO HOBBITS By ADAM EISENBERG
Photos courtesy of Randall William Cook, except where noted. TOP: Cook and Harryhausen, 2012. Harryhausen passed away in 2013 at the age of 92. In 2019, Cook was made an advisor to the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation. OPPOSITE TOP TO BOTTOM: Cook and Ray Harryhausen, 1987. Cook manipulating the Wolf Lizard puppet from The Day Time Ended (1979). Cook “standing” in a scene from Caveman (1981) beside the T-Rex puppet he animated.
When Randall William Cook arrived for his first day on the set of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, director Peter Jackson immediately put him to work. Jackson introduced Cook to miniature supervisor Richard Taylor and to the enormous model Taylor and his team had constructed for the towering stone steps of Khazad-Dûm. “Peter rushed me through the set and told me I was going to direct the previz animation,” Cook says. “We talked through the sequence with everybody offering opinions, including me. There were lots of ideas thrown out and I couldn’t see how they gelled, so I asked: ‘Do you want me to do what everybody’s been saying?’ ‘No,’ Peter replied. ‘You just do it. This is you.’” From those initial words of encouragement, Cook went on to design one of the most breathtaking action sequences in The Fellowship of the Ring. In the scene, Frodo and company are deep in the dark mines of Moria, fleeing for their lives over stone stairs that are hundreds of feet high. As Orcs launch a barrage of arrows, the ancient steps crack and crumble beneath the Fellowship’s feet, revealing a bottomless chasm below. “They gave me a scan of the miniature and little scale puppets of all the Fellowship guys,” Cook explains. “I choreographed the whole sequence from a God’s eye point-of-view and created a very simple presentation that Pete signed off on. Then I blocked out the
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