Wētā Workshop — Stories from The Lord of the Rings, Four Tenets to Live By, and Untapping Creativity

Tim Ferriss talks with Wētā Workshop co-founder Richard Taylor and artist Greg Broadmore about the origins and philosophy of their creative careers. Taylor recounts teaching himself to sculpt in rural New Zealand, building Wētā from his bedroom into a ~400-person, 11-division company, and the leap of faith that was taking on five divisions of work for Lord of the Rings. Broadmore discusses learning by doing, chasing the creative 'flow state' and 'the Muse,' and the psychological resilience artists need to stay attached to their work yet able to let it go. Both explore how a great idea ('the grand idea') seeds large projects, the importance of passing craft on to children, and the value of working under a deadline. The conversation closes with Broadmore's influences and his new graphic novel One Path.

• Richard Taylor landed his breakthrough job sculpting satirical puppets by sneaking into the office at midnight, leaving a margarine-sculpted puppet of the boss in a rubbish bag on his desk with his card on top.
  00:13:38
• Taylor and his wife Tanya started Wētā Workshop in the back bedroom of their flat on a sheet of MDF flipped onto their bed, moving workshops nine times to reach today's roughly 400 people across seven business centers.
  00:21:29
• Taylor explains 'the grand idea': a project won't start until the team finds the central conceit, illustrated by Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which presents hyper-realistic soldiers at 2.5 times life size so visitors connect to eight individuals rather than statistics.
  00:47:35
• Taylor frames taking on Lord of the Rings as 'teetering towards the edge of a precipice' and lays out his four tenets: love of oneself, love of what you do, love of who you do it with, and love of who you do it for.
  00:57:30
• Broadmore reveals his game studio (built with Magic Leap backing) collapsed almost overnight when COVID-era funding dried up, leaving games half-finished and his whole team gone, which pushed him back to making a comic book he could create largely alone.
  01:30:25
• Broadmore tells how the Halo film he poured months of concept work into 'fell over' one day, then was reborn as Neill Blomkamp's District 9 starting from the short film Alive in Joburg.
  01:39:37
• Broadmore describes the core artist's paradox at Wētā: you must love your work deeply like a baby yet be completely unattached, because in competition with other artists most of your designs will be thrown away.
  01:48:30
• Broadmore says the thing that changed him most was not a project but having a child, an instantaneous shift that reshuffled all his priorities and extended his time horizon multiple generations.
  02:04:46

• Taylor's first ~300 film-industry sculptures were done in margarine; legendary makeup artist Dick Smith nicknamed him 'the margarine guy,' and all of Heavenly Creatures' sculptures were made in margarine.
  00:11:00
• Over two years at Gibson Group, Taylor's team built 72 satirical puppets, using roll-on deodorant balls and curtain spring wire for the eye mechanisms.
  00:14:40
• After Wētā's Unleashed experience opened in Auckland, a central Auckland supermarket reportedly sold out of tinfoil because kids wanted to go home and sculpt with it and a teaspoon.
  00:19:55
• The largest hyper-realistic figure Wētā has built is 8 times life size (a 16-meter-tall figure) with 1.5 kilometers of fabric in its garments, requiring sheep bred for hair of the correct scaled-up density.
  00:51:46
• Over 4 million people have visited the Gallipoli exhibition, in a country with a population of only about 5 million.
  00:53:49
• Lord of the Rings required 158 crew working 7.5 years on 48,000 separate items, including 122 million handmade chain mail links over three and a half years.
  01:01:42
• As a thank-you to crew after winning their first Oscars, Taylor flew stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen and his wife Diana to New Zealand for two weeks; Harryhausen gave a five-hour talk on the last night.
  00:08:53
• Broadmore made pioneering games at a studio backed by Rooney Tisch's Magic Leap (3D 'spatial computing' AR goggles) before the company's funding crisis ended the venture.
  01:30:55
• Broadmore cites Simon Bisley's 2000 AD work (Slaine the Horned God, ABC Warriors, Lobo) as having 'blown the lid off' his mind as a 15-year-old aspiring comic artist.
  01:52:39
• Tim Ferriss saw his first original Frank Frazetta painting at the Austin home of film director Robert Rodriguez, who displays it under dramatic dungeon-style lighting.
  01:57:53

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