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Chapter 5 ~ "A Long Expected Party
PJ: A big scene like the Hobbit party is one of the scenes, where you gather your friends and family to come along to be extras. It’s a lot of fun, they get to wear funny clothes and wigs and it’s quite a few of our family involved in the scene. I know, that there’s a shot of Fran’s uncle Tom Leary – it’s there, it’s Fran’s uncle. And my cousin Joe pops up at some stage around here.
That’s Fran’s uncle Tom again shaking Ian Holm’s hand and I remember, this was a lot of fun to shoot this on this day, we shot this about 2 or 3 days and we needed 3 cameras so I got to operate one of the cameras. So a few of the shots of the dancing and the partying is actually me filming it, which is a lot of fun. I always loved operating cameras and I don’t do it quite as often as what I like.
PB: If you look very closely at the band, there’s (a several) shot, that you see Billy Boyd is actually playing bass guitar.
PJ: There is another little family cameo. The 2 Hobbit children, that you see there, are actually Fran and mine two children – the cutest Hobbits in Hobbiton.
PB: Originally it was 5 minutes longer than that of course.
PJ: Oh yes.
PB: Actually there is an interesting bit of trivia in here of in all 3 films every single actor was wigged except for one character and that was Billy Jackson, who had the perfect Hobbit hair and never had to be wigged, but everyone else you see is wearing a wig.
PJ: There is supposed to be 144 Hobbits at Bilbo’s party and I think due to budgetary constrains, so we had about a hundred.
PB: One gross.
PJ: Don’t count them too closely, cause you might find, that there’s a few missing.
PB: It was one gross of Hobbits.
PJ: All right.
PB: As Tolkien put it.
PJ: This is a little piece that got trimmed out of the theatrical version. It’s the return of the Sackville-Bagginses back into our story. After Bilbo says “Hi” to Mrs. Bracegirdle he just gets wind that his feared relatives are on the prowl trying to look for him. Yeah this sense of Bilbo’s paranoia at the fact this his relations are trying to get the house from under him is something that’s very humorous in the book, so we wanted to have a sense of it in the movie.
But what this also gives us, which we didn’t have in the theatrical version, is this little scene between Elijah and Ian Holm that in actual effect in the movie that go screened in the theatres the only time that Frodo and Bilbo actually connect is in the Rivendell scene much later. We managed to really, you know, to cut the movie for the theatres in a way that Bilbo and Frodo never actually shared a scene together at the beginning of the film, but one was shot and here it is.
It plays into the concept, that Bilbo knows, that he’s gonna be leaving. He wants to go away to finish his book and he just hasn’t had the courage to, to break the news to Frodo. It’s one of this typically English things, where you’re so skirt around the issue and never really confront it and he doesn’t know how to tell Frodo he’s gonna be leaving.
The gag with the firework dragon is one of those situations, where there was a mention of it in the book. I can’t remember quite, what the book says, but it wasn’t used in the same way, that we do it in the film. I don’t (think) Merry and Pippin were involved.
PB: No they don’t.
PJ: It, it did say something about a dragon, a firework dragon (that’s) going out of control or something in…
PB: It’s the first scene I’d write for you.
PJ: Yeah, and so it was fun to take this moments from the book and kind of develop them into something that has little bit more significance. PB: … and was doing more then 1 thing.
PJ: Yeah, we’re introducing Merry and Pippin. That’s what it was, which was doing great. And it’s also magic. You know, I didn’t want too much magic in the movie, because I don’t like magic in films, in fantasy films. I think it’s – but, you know, having a dragon like this, a firework dragon is a pretty cool thing.
My first introduction to “The Lord of the Rings” was when I saw the Ralph Bakshi cartoon film in 1978 and even though our movie is obviously is stylistically very different and the design is different, there is one shot, which I regard as my homage to the cartoon, cause it did inspire me to want to read the book, and that’s the shot of Proudfoot shouting “Proudfeet”, where I, I deliberately copied the angle, that Ralph Bakshi used, which I thought was brilliant.
If you look very closely in the wide-shots you’ll actually see that the cake is on fire. The candles sort of set fire to the polystyrene and even though the cameras kept rolling, the cake was slowly starting to burn like an inferno. But Ian Holm was doing such a great job, we just wanted to keep the shots going and it actually started to burn the entire cake down.
PB: So 111 candles were (due for?)
It was interesting, when we came to do some ADR on this, that Sir Ian Holm was absolutely brilliant at ADR and usually only requires one or two takes – ADR is additional dialogue recording. In this particular scene, where he played it slightly tipsy on the day, he could not ADR these lines and he just turned and said to us in the ADR-session: “Can you clean this up, I can’t redo it.”
PJ: We added a little bit of psychological intensity on this, that’s not really in the book. In the book the disappearance of Bilbo was like a total lark a really tricky (place) and we just wanted to show that the ring is actually having a little bit more of a potent effect on Bilbo and it’s starting to make him look a little odd.