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Chapter 33 ~ "Moria"
PJ: Another scene trimmed of the theatrical version for pacing reasons is this nice little moment between Gandalf and Frodo that we - we wanted to really emphasise the fact that Gandalf is sensing his impending doom, that he doesn´t wanna go into Moria.
However, because Frodo has now made a decision he´s gonna go along with it. But he wants to, just take an opportunity to warn Frodo, that from here on in the journey it´s gonna get more dangerous.
And it´s a scene we did with Ian McKellen, it was actually the last scene we shot with Ian for "The Fellowship of the Ring", it was a pick-up that we did after the completion of photography. And Ian flew out to New Zealand and it was done literally on Ian´s last day of being involved in the movie, and he flew home that afternoon.
The little moment here between Legolas and Gimli is a little beat of the rivalry between dwarfs and elves, which we did shoot for the movie, and we had to trim most of that out of the theatrical version. It´s obviously a very notable part of the book, the sort of antagonism between those 2 characters, that is slowly turning to friendship.
The Gates of Moria used to be a very well-used road, that the elves and dwarfes would take in ancient times before they fell out. I always loved the idea that the door has this inscription that reflects moonlight. It´s - so that if the moon´s out then the letters, the markings on the door glow, which I always thought was really magical.
PB: And that wide-shot was your deliberate recreation of the Alan Lee painting of the Moria door and the -
PJ: Yeah, the Alan Lee painting is almost identical to this, and I just thought: "That´s gotta be what the Gate of Moria is like in the movie." So we deliberately tried to replicate this as closely as possible.
bviously Tolkien himself designed the pattern of the gate, the symbols on the gate.
There was a lot of concern about whether Gandalf should appear too much of a failure here, and I guess this slightly longer cut shows more of his frustration. But I actually always loved it. I thought that to make Gandalf fallible just shows that even though he´s a (spirit?) he is inhabited in the body of an old man. He does forget things, he´s not always perfect, and I think that´s really nice for his character. It sort of, it´s anti-wizzard in a funny kind of way.
This was filmed on what´s called "the wet set", which is basically like a big swimming pool that was outside in Wingate, which was right an extra railway line. If you hear the real sound of the recording of the day it´s just full of trains rumbling past the set. In fact, I think people could look out of the window of the train and actually see what we were shooting.
FW: This little moment here was due to a request of Mark Ordesky.
PB: (lacht)
FW: He was worried about what the audience might think would become out of Bill the Pony.
PB: No, what happened was: When he´d finally discovered that somehow Bill the Pony had materialised he said: "What happens to the pony?!" And I said: "Well, in the book he´s released outside the Mines of Moria, where all the wolves are howling, and they´re really hungry". And, oh, Mark had then this great horror that we would gonna Bill off to, (Pete and howled wolves?)
PJ: I always wanted the Watcher to go to grab it -
PB: (lachend) Grab it!
PJ: I thought that would be great, if the little donkey was kind of like Iiih-Ah, Iiih-Ah (imitiert Esel) and was kind of pulled below the surface by a big slippery, slimy tentacle.
PB: (lacht) Mark would have had a heart-attack.
FW: No, it was kind of, that very lame line: "Don´t worry, Sam, he´ll find his way home" -
PB: Yeah?
FW: - Was our concession to the studio.
PB: Yeah.
PJ: (lacht)
PB: That was done under durance.
FW: It was, under protest!
PB: The idea of giving the solving of the puzzle to Frodo, which some people sort of objected to - because of course Gandalf himself solves it in the book - was basically because by this stage Frodo´s starting to drop out of the story.
And always one of the things we had to work very hard to do was to keep him in focus and keep him very pro-active. So that he´s not just somebody who´s been dragged along by other people.
PJ: That is a couple of shots there that are not John Rhys-Davies´, they´re another person in his make-up.
PB: John had had a very bad reaction to the prosthetic by this stage, cause he faced - I think it was, began as a 4 hour, 5 hour prosthetic and ended up being 3 hours. Unlike, I think it was even less than 3 hours, wasn´t it?
FW: Yes. The glue was giving him tremendous (irritation?) around his eyes.
PB: He was such a - he was so great at dealing with it.
FW: And it got to the point where we couldn´t shoot with him on consecutive days, we would have to shoot with John every 2 or 3 days.
PJ: Yeah.
FW: To give him a break.
PJ: The Watcher is one of those scenes that was a little bit of a fight with the studio. That there was always a feeling that it was unnecessary, that we could just have the door open and they´d just go straight into the mine and carry on going to the mine.
But I always - I loved the notion of the scene. I thought the film needed to, you know, a good monster sequence at this point in time.
PB: Yeah.
PJ: And so I kind of fought for it. And obviously it´s a little bit more than it was in the book even, because in the book you don´t see the creature as clearly as you do here. You just see the tentacles coming out of the water. But I - so this was a fight, I have to say, to retain this sequence in the script.
But fortunately, as they did in most situations, the studio finally relented and let me do, let me do what I wanted to do. Which I´ll be always very grateful for.
PB: One of the most important things it does, of course, is: Give them no choice. It locks them in there. And we would have had to have -
PJ: Yeah. I mean, I love the idea that they decide that they don´t wanna go through the mine -
PB: Yeah.
PJ: - when they see how nightmarish it is - and then they have no choice, they get entombed in there.
PB: Yeah.
PJ: They have no choice at all but to walk through the mine.