![]() When the dragon moves, it just takes days to see how the coins are going to react. The biggest new technologies were the simulations that we used for the water and for the coins. There were over a billion coins in there that we were simulating. Smaug is sitting on what must be the largest pile of treasure ever. So it’s all heads and hands that telegraph his body language for most of the dialogue scenes. He’s about twice as long and twice as wide as a 747. And what we had to do then is figure out how do you actually make that dialogue feel intimate when it needs to be? Because the dragon’s got a head that’s the size of a bus. So he’s hungry, he’s angry, but he’s also lonely. He knows there’s someone trying to steal his gold. So when you have a dragon who’s been asleep for like 200 years, he wakes up. So Peter took that idea and said, “OK, maybe rather than just pounding around like you would expect a big dragon to do, he’s actually going to be slithering through the gold, almost like he’s luxuriating in the gold.” But the talking with Bilbo for me was the key to it, because it really comes down to performance and personality. Tolkien always used the word “worm” to describe him. Tolkien, for which Letteri was again nominated, he and a visual effects team of about 1,000 people at Weta Digital produced everything from giant spiders to the shape-shifting bear Beorn to the avaricious dragon Smaug. Early in his career, senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri blew up a planet for 1991’s “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.” The four-time Oscar winner has since made up for that wanton destruction by creating worlds as well, most recently for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” For the second installation of the trilogy based on the book by J.R.R.
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