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Четвертая.

Chapter 4 ~ "Very Old Friends"
PJ: It couldn’t look artificial or fake in any way possible.
This shot here of Ian banging on the door was Ian’s very first shot in the film. This is his day 1. He just came off X-Men flowing to New Zealand January 2000 and this was the very first scene that we shot. He really hadn’t quite figure out Gandalf, but he was doing a pretty good job for his first day.
The Ian-Holm-shots were actually done inside a studio, from the location at Matamata. That’s Ian McKellen and then when you cut to Ian Holm we’re inside the studio. Andrew Lesnie our cinematographer did a brilliant job of matching the indoors and outdoors.
Now, some of the scale tricks in the film were done with very complicated matters and I wanted to really spend a lot of time on the shot here, where Ian McKellen and Ian Holm are together in the hallway and we shot them separately. Ian McKellen was against blue screen and the hat handover with the stick was the most tricky part of the shot, which was basically involving different sized hats, different sized sticks and blending the two together with a computer. It were (it’s) just a situation, where, if we did a few of these complicated shots, time consuming, difficult shots, I thought it would sell the concept of scale for the rest of the film.
Now, when Gandalf bangs his head here, that was actually a mistake, that Ian didn’t intend to do that. It wasn’t in our script. It was something that he did accidentally we decided to keep it in the film. Fortunately he kept acting, he didn’t stop. He thought it really well.
PB: He never stops. He always keeps going.
And here of course is Thorin Oakenshield’s map from “The Hobbit”. The map used by Bilbo and the company of dwarfs and Gandalf to find the secret door into the lonely mountain. There was a little bit of confusion as to what happened to Thorin’s map. We had it written in there, we had a note to check factually what happened to the map and the person we sat onto that was Henry Mortensen, Viggo Mortensen’s son was our research man, he went in there and double checked what happened to Thorin’s map and said: “Yes, no it survived.”
PJ: Thank heavens for Henry.
PB: Thank heavens for Henry.
One of the things I remember was before this project even got green lit, you had a wish list and the wish list for Bilbo Baggins was Sir Ian Holm.
PJ: Hm, hm.
PB: And I don’t think we saw anybody else as Bilbo. So it was just a dream come true watching him bring Bilbo to life.
PJ: This shot is actually not a computer shot. It looks like one, because we got the two actors in the same shot, but it’s done with forced perspective and the table, that Ian Holm is pouring on is a different sized table to what Ian McKellen is sitting on. It’s actually 5 or 6 feet. The table is split in half, chopped down in the middle the joint is hidden by all of the different objects that are on the table, but there is actually a 5 or 6 foot gap between the 2 halves of the table in that wide shot and the two actors are in the same room together, but they’re a lot more separated by distance then what appears on film and what you’re actually see is the appearance that one character is very small and one’s very big, and that’s simply because the small person is further away – it’s called forced perspective.
PB: I think I’m right in saying this was the first time, that Ian Holm and Ian McKellen had acted together in a film.
PJ: Yeah, they never worked together. They knew each other slightly, but they’ve never been in anything together and I think they had a lot of fun.
PB: They did.
PJ: They were great days, these days, cause they were both, in a way they were both, you know, really determined to make their scenes as special as they possibly could. They only had two or three scenes together and they wanted to make the most of them.
PB: I think one of the, if I remember rightly, Ian Holm did make the inquiry, don’t think Gandalf had been cast, when you approached him, and he did ask – one of the first questions was: ‘Who is playing Gandalf?’
PJ: The smoking scene is one that I thought I would have to fight for. I was sure at some stage, because it’s Hollywood, somebody would come to me and say: “You can’t show smoking in a film, it’s not politically correct.” And yet it’s my favorite scene, the smoke ship – I always wanted to have the smoke ship and I was gearing myself up for a hell of a fight, when the day came, when I was told to get rid of the smoking scene, but it never did.
PB: No.
PJ: Nobody ever breathed a word about it.
PB: In earlier drafts we actually had a running gag, that Gandalf had giving up smoking.