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Chapter 10 ~ "A Shadow of the Past"
PJ: Bag End was obviously an exterior set on the location on the farm. And then this was the studio, when Frodo comes in the door.
This is actually a case where we changed the time-line in the book. I think, from memory, 17 years goes past in the book from the time that Gandalf leaves to find out about the Ring to the time that he arrives back in Hobbiton, to warn Frodo that this is Sauron's Ring. And in our movie we felt that 17 years was just too long a time. So we reduced it to it seeming like a few months had gone by.
FW: Well, for those who know the book: You know that there are fairly leisurely time-frames in the Fellowship of the Ring and this was not a luxury that we could indulge in the making of the film. We had to compress the time-frames in order to get the story on the way.
PJ: I like the idea that Gandalf had been sleeping in the... under ditches and in hedge-rows and had this sort of- like this tramp-like existence, trying to get himself right across Middle-earth in a six or seven week journey to get... to rush back to Bag End. So this is why we had Gandalf looking so dishevelled.
The letters on the Ring are a CG-effect. There was a lot of debate about whether they're on the outside of the Ring or the inside of the Ring and we carefully read the book and we found out that it's actually both. We actually really struggled with figuring out a way that we could get the entire poem into the movie. And in this we failed. We don't have the whole poem in there, we just have this version which is the last verse of the poem. But we did actually film the entire thing at the council of Elrond where we had Hugo Weaving saying the entire poem, but we ultimately cut that out of the movie.
FW: You know, in the book you can enter into the sort of psychological horror of the Ring and it doesn't need any, you know, augmentation. But in a film it's less easy to sell that and so we knew that it needed some kind of literal voice in the movie. It needed to interact to some degree with the characters. So we thought long and hard about what kind of voice it would have and ultimately it's obviously Sauron's voice. And we worked with an actor, an English actor, Alan Howard to develop a rather chilling edition of Sauron's voice.
PJ: This is one of those nightmare-scenes that has to do such a lot in a little space of time, basically set up the entire back-story. And we kept struggling with exactly what to say and how to say it and we ended up filming this scene three times. And the final scene that you're watching now is like an amalgam of all three versions. So there's some shots that were done while we were shooting the movie and then there's some shots that were done after the completion of the shoot.
Ian and Elijah came back to New Zealand and then they came back later to do the scene yet one last time. And we put some ? too, so the whole scene has been a bit of a Frankenstein-number of each of those three filming occasions.
FW: Do you remember, Pete, when we didn't have a prologue and all of the prologue-information was in this scene. That was-
PJ: Yeah. It really was longer, it was about three times as long.
FW: It was untenable. It was-
PJ: We had all the flashbacks to the last alliance, didn't we.
FW: Yeah.
PJ: All the flashbacks to Elrond and Isildur.
PB: The making of the Ring.
FW: And Ian did about... He did about seven pages.
PJ: That's right, without the prologue, this was the scene that was gonna give all that information. Yeah.
FW: Yes.
PB: But I have to say, a few shots, that's three times, Pete. We wrote it about 50 different times. Fifty different versions.
FW: We suffered.
PB: We did suffer.
FW: When we actually put the prologue back into the film, it lightened the scene and it enabled us to strip it down and keep it relatively manageable in terms of its information and content. It became for us a scene that wasn't so much overburdened with information as one where we could play more of the power of the Ring and the presence of Sauron.
PJ: There's great stuff in the book that we just couldn't put into the movie. And I've always loved the concept that when Gandalf leaves Bag End he goes and joins up with Aragorn and the two of them hunt Gollum down. And so we've got this little remnant which is Gollum being tortured but we never could obviously do the bit where Aragorn and Gandalf actually track Gollum down. But it's a neat idea. That would have been great, to have been able to squeeze it into the film somehow.
This is one of those situations where you're trying to explain the most obvious thing to people. You know, why doesn't Frodo just give the Ring to Gandalf? Why can't Gandalf just take it? You know, it's those little bits of common sense that audiences always come up with, that you've got to cover yourself when you're doing the movie. And it's in the book, of course, too, the fact that Gandalf would be kind of... You know, he would be a horrific version of Sauron if he ever got hold of the Ring himself.
It's fun just to feel Gandalf's temptation, though. The energy of this scene is like in deliberate contrast to the book as well, because the departure from Hobbiton is a very leisurely affair in the book. And we wanted to give the film a bit of heat. So that's why we deliberately kind of cranked it up through here to really try to light a fire under the story at this stage. Because one of the problems with adapting the book was always the fact of how you get a bit of momentum and heat under this opening section.
PB: This next piece here where Ian is speaking is actually something that Ian wanted, a piece that he found in the book that we decided we couldn't- We couldn't afford to go there. And this is something he really, really wanted to do. And it worked beautifully.
PJ: You remember a really early version of the script? We also introduced Merry and Pippin in this scene, do you remember that?
PB: Yes.
FW: Yeah.
PJ: We- I think we had all three Hobbits... Sam wasn't outside the window in that version. He was listening- He was eavesdropping behind a door. And then when Gandalf like pulls the door open, all three of them, Sam and Merry and Pippin, all kind of fall onto the floor, tumble on the floor. And that was how we were gonna get Merry and Pippin into it at some point. And then we decided to so separate them and have them, but later.
FW: Well, they were well known? in these big gaps of time, you know. That was seventeen years between Gandalf's ? and things like this to Bag End. We knew this and yet we felt that that was far too leisurely. You know, that we did feel- And that Frodo takes his time. He's given his mission by Gandalf and he takes another six months (..) thinking about it. And it just, again... That tense did completely undermine any sense of dramatic urgency in the storytelling. So we couldn't honour that part of the book at all. We had to really compress and accelerate the time-frames for the movie.
PB: So the main push here really was to get Frodo on the road as quickly as possible and get them doing exactly what they're doing, setting out right now.
PJ: Always the most difficult part of the movie is- Because the travel and the journey and all this detail is such an important part in the book. It's so evocative. And in the movie, there is only a certain amount of it you can have before audiences start to just, you know, feel less... You know, all that. So we really limited ourselves to three shots of them walking. We obviously shot a whole lot more than three and we chose our favourite three.
Now people apparently claim to have seen a car driving along the hill in these wide-shots. I have looked very, very hard and I just can't see it. I don't know what people are talking about.
There's a line in the book where Sam says: 'If I go one more step, that would be further than I've ever done before.' I just thought it would be nice to build a scene around. So I asked Philippa and Fran to write something.
PB: I think those pages actually literally went out about eleven o'clock the night before the day we shot them.
PJ: We squeezed it in. We weren't supposed to film it, because nobody even knew about it. But we managed to find an hour at the end of the day and we only shot a couple of takes.
FW: Scenes like that don't hit the schedule, do they?
PJ: They don't. The schedule- No, the studio didn't even know that...
FW: Nobody knows they're there...