l o o k i n g   c l o s e r

  <  back

respond to the review

A ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW WITH THE CAST AND CREW OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

On Wednesday, Dec. 5th, Jeffrey Overstreet joined several other privileged film critics, including Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films), Andrew Coffin (World), Steve Beard (Thunderstruck), and Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) to talk with members of the cast and crew for the year's most ambitious, exhausting, and gloriously realized film. Over the course of this week, Looking Closer will be adding excerpts of those interviews here. Keep checking back!

Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens

screenwriters

Jeffrey Overstreet:
As you adapted this story, I suspect it crossed your mind that such a powerful myth of clashing cultures might be easily misinterpreted as a political allegory. Did you have t to craft your script to avoid having the story be interpreted as a blatant allegory of the literal West versus the literal East? Were you at all concerned that your treatment of various cultures and peoples and events onscreen might echo current events too loudly?

Boyens:
You’re absolutely right: it is something we do fear and worry about. We hear the line “war is kindled”--which is in the book, and which we changed to “hope is kindled”--not just because of the world today, but as a sentiment... which actually is also in the book as a line--“Hope is kindled." But as a sentiment, it played better in terms of storytelling, and resonated better in terms of today's audience.

Jeremy Landes:
You’ve really inspired young men...

Boyens:
Oh good! Who? Where are they?

Walsh: (laughing)

Jeremy Landes:
... through the writing.

Boyens:

Ohhh... through the writing.

(Everyone gets a good laugh.)

Jeremy Landes:
Were there certain qualities that you wanted to inspire through your writing. You wrote a lot of male characters.

Boyens:
We’ve both got sons. One of the things that I love about this new generation of boys—certainly in our boys’ cases—is that they’re gentler and that there’s a sensitivity there, and they can embrace their inner movie, such as The Lord of the Rings, just as much as they embrace the charge into battle and Aragorn fighting and those sort of things. And a character like Viggo Mortenson’s portrayal of Aragorn ... certainly plays to that. And he has a son as well. To that extent, we know our boys and we love our boys, so that’s easier to write to.  My son’s called Calum. 

Walsh:
[Mine's] Billy.

Press:
I'd like to hear more about that scene when Arwen makes that decision that she will never know that child if she does not stay [in Middle-Earth]. Can you give us a woman’s perspective on that scene?

Walsh:
It appealed to us that she isn’t just driven by needing to be back with the guy… 

Boyens:
That’s the mother in us again…

Walsh:
 …and it is a part of her extended story, that Eldarion in fact inherits the kingship. But yes, there were things driving her that were other than the pure romantic notion of her need to be with him. It has to do with carrying on.

Boyens:
She may not endure. [Aragorn] may not endure. Their love even may not endure because they’ll both be dead. But it will carry on through this child--and also that she never know that, and she would rather know that and experience that.

Bob Smithouser:
Richard [Taylor] said it was ultimately their responsibility to bring Peter's vision to life and not necessarily Tolkien's vision to life. Hopefully in many places there would be synchronitiy. Did you all feel that tension of needing to bring Peter's vision but working with the text?

Walsh:
I've never felt huge discrepancies between the way Peter viewed the story and the way I've read it. Maybe there are massive differences. In terms of the scriptwriting, we’ve made big changes. Sometimes they were embraced and sometimes they weren’t so much, but I never really felt that Peter’s brought something to life in a way which was very different to how I perceived it in the book; I’ve not felt that.

Boyens:
No.

Walsh:
Not with the Ents, or with Gollum or with anything the way the characters were realized.

Boyens:
This had to work as a film and that’s what we were most conscious of, wasn’t it? 

Walsh:
I think the single biggest challenge of the book was undoubtedly the Eye--which plays easily in the book--it’s the Evil Eye, it’s the psychic eye, and its powerful. But in terms of its visual dramatization, what a nightmare! I mean, it’s a flaming eyeball, the lidless eye.

We used to have jokes about what was under, you know... in the prologue Sauron is marching around in this suit of armor, this large armored figure, and we had this idea that under the visor was a large eyeball. [laughter] It was hard to really invest that eye with the dread and horror it needed to have, and the profound sense of omnipotence that it needed. I don’t know if there was a way to do that, but it was our single biggest difficulty.

Press:
Talk about your perspective on the writing process in regards to those who have read the book and those who are encountering it for the first time through the film. There seems to be a large dissonance between those who have read it and those who have not. Some of those who hadn't read it thought the film was too long, and those who have read it thought things were left out.

Walsh:
We’ve always put as our primary goal to make these books---to realize them for the screen as engaging entertainment. That’s our job, to make them translate. I guess we’ve failed if it’s playing long at the end. But we’ve always put the cinema audience ahead of the book audience in that regard, because the readers of the book have the book and that's never not going to be. And yet we’ve obviously tried to honor it as much as we can within that parameter. It’s been always, for us, a challenge to try to fulfill at least some of the expectations that come from fans of the book but not overload the film to the point where people who are not familiar with it cannot enter into the experience of the story.

The end for us was difficult. It was very difficult because we were wrapping up not one film, but three. We felt also that these characters were due their moments, that Aragorn and Arwen, when they come back together… you need to see that and be with them. You need to attend to the Shire. And you actually need to send Frodo away too, as the end for him.

So it became ‘What can we leave out?’ Well, we can’t leave any of that out! And we needed also to see Sam and Rosie, together. We needed to give that character [closure.]

Boyens:
The ring is destroyed ... and you could say “End of story!”

But Frodo is also destroyed. And that’s the end of the story.

Walsh:
I think it also possibly challenges your sense of how movies should end. You’re used to the big explosive climax and then there’s a little coda wrap-up, it might be two or three minutes, and it’s over. You’re already getting up out of your seat after the world’s blown up and you’re out, you know. And yet we had twelve minutes [or more] of stuff, and that’s not normally done and I know…I was very aware, all the time when we were doing it…

Boyens:
She was very worried about it.

Walsh:
We had this big argument. It was terrible.

Boyens:
I don’t give a stuff!  I do not care. If people are with those characters, they’ll love it, or they’ll go there, Even people who think, well that was one [ending] too many, I understand that, I can appreciate that. But that’s the film.

Walsh:
I think it’s frustrating if you’re in the audience and you’re thinking, well do I…is it over now? Do I…oh no…and there’s another….It’s difficult.

Boyens:
She was so worried. That’s what it is though, that’s the film. That’s the way the film plays. That’s what these films taught me… they will find their own level and they’ll find a place at which they play. Ultimately the person it had to play for was Peter. And it played for him. It played for a lot of us. And he made the movie that he wanted to see. That's what the movie is.

Walsh:
Coming to it with fresh eyes, you have an expectation about how films resolve themselves. This isn't traditional in that way.

Boyens:
It could have gone even longer, because Peter’s going to edit the movie even more.

Walsh:
In the end, it is what it is, and that’s what happens in the movie.

Andrew Coffin:
Can you talk about your feelings about good and evil and how it plays out in what you brought to the film and what Tolkien brought to the stories?

Walsh:
I think that stories do offer us comfort that we live in a moral universe, whether or not that is… you know… who can say? The world seems to be quite an amoral place, governed by something arbitrary and not-founded on a great sort of underlying sense of decency. Sometimes you have to question that.

If anything, Tolkien’s faith informs the third book… it’s certainly faith that the enduring goodness of men and in men will prevail. Faith that even those who leave us too soon or who are lost in war or who die young—and Frodo certainly represents all of those—they go to another place, they don’t just fall into nothingness. They transition to somewhere else. Faith that we can all be better than we are.

He took that from his own war experience and from his own profound Christian beliefs. Those ideas in the book, we attempted as much as we could to invest them in the film. The values in them, they give you a sense of hope, that it isn’t chaos, that it isn’t arbitrary, that it isn’t without a point. I love storytelling for those reasons, because so many things fall away as we charge forward into this new century. There’s so much cynicism and such a lack of ritual and a belief system to govern anything. I like stories for that because they still offer it.

Press:
Do you think there’s anything in human beings that says things aren’t arbitrary? Anything that is a a reason why we connect with a story, that says on a deeper level that there is a point?

Walsh:
I think it’s about the enduring power of goodness, that we feel it in ourselves when we perceive it in others in small acts every day in other people. And that gives you reason to hope that it has significance for all of us as a race, as mankind, that we’re evolving and getting better rather than becoming less, diminishing ourselves through hatred and cruelty. We need to believe that. We need to have a sense of preparation.

Steven D. Greydanus:
In spite of the element of the goodness in humanity, one of the significant things about the story is that Frodo ultimately fails. And yet Frodo is saved from the fate of Isildur and Gollum, by providence, chance, fate, whatever you want to attribute it to. What does this say to us as we wrestle with our inner demons, and how does that relate to to the principle that comes up for those wrestling with addiction—the idea of a higher power?

Boyens:
That’s funny, because addiction was something that we drew on a lot in terms of Gollum, the idea of the junkie. And for Frodo, in that moment, absolutely. It also had to do with … and one of the things Tolkien understood because he was a humanist… is that we are all frail, and we have the ability within us to fail at any stage. Faith requires us to believe in a higher power.

Gandalf very early on in the book says “The Ring came to Bilbo and in that moment something else was at work.“ Not the design of its maker, this evil power, but some other power was at work.

So it’s whether you believe in that or not, whether you choose to believe in that or not. Actually that was the combination. Frodo dragged himself to that point, and failed. And another power intervened. And he ultimately surrenders to that power at the end of this movie, which is one of the most beautiful moments in this movie… when Frodo turns and he smiles. That is his redemption.

Press:
Fran, Andy [Serkis] referred to you, Fran, as the “guardian of Gollum” and he says that "She has an extraordinary mind and I think she has drawn from her own life…"

[laughter]

Do you address yourself as "we"?

[more laughter]

Walsh:
I enjoyed Gollum. He’s my family dynamic. I haven’t had drug addiction problems. But I have I had a dysfunctional family background. I completely understand how he works because ... he’s my father. There are elements of my own parenting in there and my sibling and myself. I understand the persecutor-parent and I understand the child who wants to please their parent but who also wants to be free of that conflict. And also the pathos of Smeagol versus the rage of Gollum. And Gollum is curiously protective—in the end, when Smeagol is hurt. He is angry. He is angry because his child has been damaged. So he’s a very damaged character, but yet I drew on my own family background to inform him, and I think it’s probably quite common for a lot of people. So I think that's why he strikes a familiar chord. People do empathize with him.