[арве]

Chapter 31 ~ "The Ring goes South"
PJ: These are combinations of miniatures and matte paintings, and various waterfalls photographed from different places in New Zealand.
That ruin is a computer generated ruin, I flew round in a helicopter with our areal-crew, shooting these scenes. We had doubles that we took down to South Island.
And this is the, this is what we call our "hero-fellowship-shot". Was done against bluesceens, ahm, with a scenic plate of the South Island of New Zealand. This is a great location, I really love this, it´s just out of Tiaro, near Lake Manapouri. And it´s just a great part of the country, really loved filming this stuff.
PB: Bill the Pony. We actually didn´t have Bill for a while in the script.
PJ: No. Bill the Pony was added -
PB: And then Pete -
PJ: - much much later.
PB: Pete war pretty determined to stick Bill in, but Mark Ordesky didn´t realize this, and when he came down one day he saw this pony and said: "What the hell is this pony doing?!" (lacht) We said: "It´s Bill. Bill´s back in."
PJ: Well, the reason why we didn´t think we could have Bill was -
PB: No, I think it was right to do.
PJ: - because of the problems of shooting on the mountains, that we thought: "How on earth are we ever gonna get a pony up these mountains?" But we -
PB: (lacht)
PJ: - we sort of solved that by resorting to what´s called "The Pantomime Pony", which is simply to have a pony played by 2 people, somebody is the front end and somebody is the back end.
And in quite a few scenes also is, especially the scene in the snow where the fellowship are walking, that´s actually the, that´s actually Bill the Pantomime Pony, the fake pony. Which solved the problem of having to transport a real animal to, in all, to all these far-off locations.
PB: We wanted this connection of course between Boromir and Merry and Pippin, it´s very very important for the end of the movie.
PJ: This was shot in a national park, the top of the South Island. And again it was, it was a location actually that we were, that was offered up to us by a helicopter pilot, that we were flying around, going somerwhere else, and Bill the helicopter pilot said to me: "Ah, I saw a really interesting place that I´ve never seen before. It´s on the side of a mountain, about 15 miles away, and there´s all these weird rock formations."
And I said, I immediately got interested, and I said: "Oh, could you just fly us there now and give us a look?" And he flew us over this location that you´re seeing now, and this was, this was amazing! With all these incredible weird rocks, it was something like out of Easter Island.
And so I just thought we gotta shoot something there, so I thought this scene ultimately would be a really good one to go back to that location. So we went back there and dumped the crew on top of this mountain and shot this scene.