Christopher Nolan avoided CGI and used 7ft stuntmen to portray Laestrygonians in The Odyssey. The giant leader, King Antiphates, is portrayed by actor Josh Stewart, while Matt Damon’s stunt double is Devyn Dalton, who is just under 5ft.

[u/padfoony]

[u/siraolo]

Forced perspective really does a lot here. 

[u/tayl0559 → u/siraolo]

that's not how forced perspective works. you can't use forced perspective to make something close to the camera look smaller than something far from the camera. it only works the other way around. if anything, the perspective is acting against the intended illusion here

[u/Paddy_Tanninger → u/tayl0559]

Not only that but forced perspective usually involves props and differently scaled parts of a set to make it so that the person in the background looks much smaller than they are.

ie: Bilbo sitting at the table with Gandalf where it looks like they're talking to each other, but really Ian Holm is 5ft down the table and working with a set of props that are 3x bigger than the ones Ian McKellen has.

As you said, you cannot do it the reverse where you somehow make the foreground person look smaller than the background person.

In fact to prove this point...in the scenes in Bree where the Hobbits go to the inn, to make them look tiny when they're in the foreground, they needed to use massive human-looking puppets walking by in the background.