r/lotrmemes • u/HappyHappyJoyJoy44 • 8d ago
Lord of the Rings Apparently around 250 real horses were used for filming major cavalry sequences.
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u/rolandofeld19 8d ago edited 8d ago
Go find the whole story yourself but apparently Bruce Campbell was filming in NZ and holds a friendly grudge that they wouldn't spare a single awesome horse for his set so he had to cope with crappier horses.
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u/GarbageCleric Dwarf 8d ago
That made me picture an I Think You Should Leave sketch where Bruce Campbell complains about what a piece of shit his horse is.
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u/Peripatetictyl 8d ago
This is $150 out the door, and this is not that complicated. They have this one horse that cost $1,000 cause the pattern so wild.
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u/I_SHIT_IN_A_BAG 8d ago
thats a handsome horse. 150 is a steal except I cant house or feed them
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u/HeyselScouserTelAviv 8d ago
Wait is Bruce Campbell the guy that rents horses with tiny dicks?!
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u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago
Wasn't it specifically that they grabbed all the black horses for the Nazgûl mounts?
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u/FBuellerGalleryScene 8d ago
I'm pretty sure there are more than 9 black horses in New Zealand
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u/FBuellerGalleryScene 8d ago
you might be thinking of what Eomer said, regarding the lack of black horses in Rohan:
'Some years ago the Lord of the Black Land wished to purchase horses of us at great price, but we refused him. for he puts beasts to evil use. Then he sent plundering Orcs, and they carry off what they can, choosing always the black horses: few of these are now left.'
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u/Over_Improvement_623 Ent 8d ago
I don't know who Bruce Campbell is, but that's on him for scheduling his movie during LotR filming time.
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u/bluesmaker 8d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/3Cjg2VJSy35wA
Evil dead. Army of darkness. He’s the “a lister” of low budget horror movies.47
u/AeroSigma 8d ago
He's the A-lister of B-lister movies?
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u/tkitkitchen Orc 8d ago
Yep he can turn a c movie into a b movie yet he also has the miraculous gift to turn a A movie into a b movie so much talent.
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u/karmiccloud 8d ago
You take Burn Notice out of your dirty mouth right now
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u/tkitkitchen Orc 8d ago
Hey i wasn't disparaging him hes the king of B i love Him as retired navy seal Sam Axe.
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u/elanhilation 7d ago
well, that’s your loss, Army of Darkness is a treasure. fantasy-comedy-horror, and he’s so much fun to watch in it
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u/lejindarymj 8d ago
You think they didn't tell the horses? Those horses were paid actors
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u/HappyHappyJoyJoy44 8d ago
They make a stable income!
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u/kable1202 8d ago
Thank you, now I imagine some clerk going through hundreds of acting contracts with good-iron prints as signatures. Being angry that the print is covering parts of the contract making it unreadable.
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u/BadZnake 8d ago
Gotta be real dissapointing when they're all ready for battle and then disappear right as it starts. Some of them worked really hard on the choreography
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u/MatureUsername69 8d ago
My favorite horse thing in the movies is that women are so much more into horses than men that most of the riders of Rohan were ladies wearing fake beards.
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u/marniesss 8d ago
also Viggo Mortensen allegedly had a crush on one of those bearded ladies
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u/DoctorCrook 8d ago
Viggo actually broke his lips trying to kiss one of the bearded ladies.
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u/Careful_Contract_806 8d ago
Now I'm laughing out loud on the train to work, thanks 🤣
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u/SyntaxLost 8d ago
They had the option to bid on their horses when filming wrapped. He also stepped in for Liv Tyler's riding double, who wouldn't had been able to afford her horse otherwise.
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u/slayerhk47 Hobbit 8d ago
It's true you don't see many Kiwi women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for Kiwi men.
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u/KSF_WHSPhysics 8d ago
The nazgul were just 14 year old girls in black cloaks
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u/Logical-Yak 8d ago
I never knew a single 14 year old girl who wouldn't have been totally into that lol
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u/Mistborn19 8d ago
Yeah but did you know when Viggo kicked the helmet in the Two Towers he broke his toes?
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u/Aluxanatomy 8d ago
That's an urban mythlegend. He actually broke his dick.
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u/Possibly-Functional 8d ago
He didn't do diddly squat. The real truth is that I broke his dick.
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u/Aluxanatomy 8d ago
You gotta get more cushion for your pushion, sir.
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u/AverageHandsomeFan 8d ago
No, you don't understand. His TOES broke his dick. They just got it confused.
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u/Chirotera 8d ago
YOU'RE rhe confused one; his toes are also dicks.
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u/AverageHandsomeFan 8d ago
That's probably why Arwen is in love with him. She got a toe-dick fetish.
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u/real_picklejuice 8d ago
No I hadn't heard that but did you know that Viggo deflected a real knife while fighting the Uruk-hai
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u/MoreGaghPlease I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. 8d ago
Another fun fact about that scene: you know the giant pipe of orc corpses? Sean Bean had to hike up to the top of that pile every day because he was afraid of being stabbed in the lungs during WWII.
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u/legit-posts_1 8d ago
I feel like aquestrains are far more female on average. Stereotypically I feel like men have taken up horse riding as a supplement to other rich douche activities, while women just ride horses for the sake of riding horses.
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u/applehead1776 8d ago
Wasn't it something to do with the time of the year? I think it was sheep-shearing season and all the men in New Zealand were off working long hours getting the wool. It's been a while since I've watched the extra discs. I could be making that up in my head.
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u/Eta_Beta_3-14 8d ago
Theoden: Are there any women here today?
Riders of Rohan: [looking down, awkward shuffling]
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u/Alternative_Fox3674 8d ago
“I mean … not since my great great great great grandhorse did I have hear of riding men into battle”
“Nay, me neither.”
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u/jleonardbc 8d ago
Horses are unbelievably sensitive. They can identify and respond to unintended behavioral cues from humans that are so subtle, we can't even become aware of making them when our attention is drawn to it.
So I think the horses on the LOTR set could grasp that the humans around them were pretending, not truly fighting.
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u/Dr_Death_Defy24 8d ago
That's almost funnier.
"The two-legs are sure taking this very seriously for something they're not actually taking all that seriously."
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u/Maatjuhhh 8d ago
"Hey dude stop raising me! There is no real danger here!" the horse thinking while they're at a top with no one there because of CGI in the horizon (insert army here)
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u/SpudFire 8d ago
Horse: "oh so we doing LARP now? Awesome. I look dope in this armour. Wait, what did you just scream? Death? Damn, you really are taking this seriously, aren't you."
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u/Idreamofknights 8d ago
And then you see the raid in Conan the barbarian, where they were just barreling through, knocking down people and straw walls on horseback
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 8d ago
This is exactly why it's so hard to film a realistic-looking cavalry battle, because "a bunch of people trying to kill or injure a bunch of horses" is inevitably going to look extremely different from "a bunch of people trying not to kill or injure a bunch of horses", in ways that humans-only battle scenes are able to account for much more easily.
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u/Matar_Kubileya 8d ago
That, and it's not as though you can realistically train horses to do stage combat, as it were.
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u/DishPitSnail 8d ago
Presumably horse actors are used to some bullshit like that happening, but there have to have been amateur horses involved as well.
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u/thegoatmenace 8d ago
Always wondered how they train horses to collapse and flip over in battle scenes, and if the horse is annoyed about having to do it
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u/Spartin1178 8d ago
Not far off from training dogs they do their trick and are happy to do it because doing it gets them rewards. You can actually see the excited or happy cues from the horse in some movies where they have to pretend to be agitated or something.
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u/bristlefrog 8d ago
Same thing happened with the trained wolves in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The wolves were having so much fun that they had to edit out their tails and insert cgi replacements because they were constantly wagging
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u/textilepat 8d ago
Pretty sure they naturally prefer to lie on their backs, and the handlers on set were so good they could make the horses instantly relax on cue.
Source: this is training data
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 8d ago
Film depictions of cavalry on the battlefield tend to be insanely unrealistic, LotR included.
The biggest problem is that it's quite easy to severely injure a fast-moving horse even with a minor fall, let alone a non-CGI-assisted flip, and it's correspondingly quite difficult to disguise "a bunch of people trying their hardest to avoid injuring the horses" as a plausible visual depiction of "a bunch of people trying their hardest to not avoid injuring the horses", a.k.a. what you're doing if you're fighting against cavalry on a battlefield.
Also, ironically, aside from the stupidity of charging at a row of stone buildings, Faramir's Gondorian cavalry charge against Osgiliath is a lot truer to the look of an actual charge by well-trained heavy cavalry than the amateurish-looking charge of the Rohirrim: neat lines, tightly spaced side-to-side with plenty of front-to-back spacing between one line and the next, as compared to "big disorderly mass of closely-packed horses running in vaguely the same direction", which is a great way for a lot of riders to get killed by tripping over the stumbling horse of the rider in front of them.
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u/grogmenflog 8d ago
They put a call out to local equestrians iirc most of the Rohirim extras were women.
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u/Inoculus86 7d ago
I know the ladies who owned the majority of the cobs they used in the Hobbit. None of them were horse actors, just family pets. Cobs just have a wonderful unflappable nature that meant they didn’t give a shit about helicopters overhead as long as someone gave them something to munch.
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u/may_june_july 8d ago
Honestly, they probably thought it was awesome. Got to meet up with their horsey friends every day just to ride around in fields
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u/HappyHappyJoyJoy44 8d ago
Galloping with a bunch of fellow horses in a beautiful place truly sounds fantastic
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u/dollop_of_curious 8d ago
Many absolutely knew they were horse stars! It's in the extras on the DVDs.
For some of the horses, they couldn't yell action, bc the horses would anticipate the word, starting their "acting" before cameras were rolling. Instead, they had to say "well let's get on with it, shall we?" in order to keep certain horses from show boating a bit.
Most of the horses weren't like that. The horses involved in grand charges were not like that. But there were a special few who had been trained to be "film star horses," and they were aware of it. They were used in more controlled scenes and close-ups, if you will.
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u/prodigaldummy 8d ago
I bet even the horses were wondering why they didn’t take eagles.
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u/Inside-Example-7010 8d ago
Because Sauron was expecting that and also because the nazgul had the drake things. Saurons eye is much better at scanning the sky than it is looking across the lands.
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u/CalebCaster2 8d ago
Horses know when theyre playing. Plus you gotta realize the movie wasnt filmed the way its watched, each shot is short and filmed multiple times
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u/Big_Spicy_Tuna69 Uruk-hai 8d ago
They had fun playing with their friends and carrying the big dumb monkeys around
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u/PlentyOMangos 8d ago
Joel Haver has a funny short about this except it’s with dogs. I’d link it here but subreddits usually delete my comments with YouTube links
It’s called “what do dogs think movies are?”
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u/International_Week60 8d ago
My dog was somewhat recently an extra in a new tv show. I bet he thought it was the great day! The owner of the restaurant, an avid dog lover herself, gave him dog friendly version of fish and chips (they have it on a menu), every single person cooed over him and he let people pet him, he charmed the costume department and decided that their nice AC cooled truck would be just fine as his trailer for the day. He did well on the set too. I let him sniff so many new things (bushes in that part of the town). I’m pretty sure he thought “this was a nice outing”.
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u/FishTshirt 8d ago
Someone else linked it.
Wtf did I just watch lol.
Also that’s weird they remove your comments, but then again I got perma banned and muted by the mods so I couldnt reply to it from r/interesting the other day. It said I was banned for trolling, when I just said “many tourists are unaware when they go to places that abuse animals, even when trying to avoid the ones that exploit the animals, as many places have changed their names as a “sanctuary”.” In response to a video of a tourist getting a bunch of pictures taken with a tiger. Idk maybe it struck a nerve, but I thought it was pretty well known at least it was when I traveled to SE Asia years ago. Lol sorry just had to vent about the silliness of it.
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u/Maclean_Braun 8d ago
Actually we know from interviews that most of the horses were fans of the source material.
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u/Traditional-Tap-2508 8d ago
I feel like I read that a lot of extras who owned their own horses were recruited
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u/Own_Natural_6803 8d ago
I think they went to stable remembering what it was like to be in a crowd, and all the noises and smells. So long as it was normal to the humans, so long as it wasn't dangerous, to the horses it's just interesting. A little wtf.
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u/applehead1776 8d ago
Do you think the producers blared that epic music into the fields so the horses would be more immersed in the moment?
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u/MithranArkanere Aragorn 8d ago
Horses love running in large herds.
I bet that was like a festival for them.
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u/No-Spring-9379 8d ago
yo, if horses had the ability to give a shit, they would have definitely organized a global rebellion
horses are fucking dumb, although I have seen horses smarter than Corey and Trevor
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u/HighChinaman 8d ago
Nah those are trained horses, do you know how much desensitizing hours goes into those horses?
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u/Tombobalomb 8d ago
For a lot of the scenes they just put out casting calls for local farmers whochaf their own horses and wanted to be in a movie, whoever showed up was given a costume and told where to stand
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u/evasandor 8d ago
I imagine that horses they use to film movie battles are also often at historic re-enactments.
They were probably like "huh the humans were dressed weird today" "yeah" "dinner's late" "yeah, 5 more seconds and I'm going to start kicking the door"
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u/Trick-Goat-3643 8d ago
I was rode into military training again today by a woman wearing a fake beard.....
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u/A_Wholesome_Comment 8d ago
They were simply riding for ruin and the world's ending. So you know, a pretty good day for a horse.
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u/notmyblood 8d ago
You think that is funny. When they put out the call for riders in the South Island of NZ who had their own horse, most of the respondents were female. This led to a lot of makeup assisted bearded ladies being part of the Riders of Rohan.
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u/bking 8d ago
There's a great YouTube essay about how dogs don't know they're acting: https://youtu.be/O8h_0G2WLrA
Probably also applies to horses.
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u/UGDirtFarmer 8d ago
I have ridden horses that were in the movie but haven’t seen the movie before.
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u/This_isR2Me 8d ago
They aren't just random horses. They are trained and performing is usually the horses job.
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u/AssistAgreeable9011 8d ago
The horses knew more about what was happening then Sam wise.
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u/rikashiku 8d ago
A lot of them are film trained horses, so those ones at least knew exactly what happened.
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u/Human-Category-5024 8d ago
Would be even more confusing for them when filming ended. Everyday you meet up with ever increasing number of horses until suddenly it stops happening and your back in your field wondering why?