[арве]

Двенадцатая (на сегодня - последняя).

Chapter 12 ~ "Saruman the White"
FW: Where was that shot, Pete?
PJ: That was down in the South Island about past Glenorchy. This is almost completely CG, this shot, everything is digital in this one – the horse, the rider, the trees – everything. And here we have Christopher Lee in his first entrance in the movie, it’s, that was always a great thrill walking with Christopher, because I’d always been a fan of the old Hammer Horror movies and, you know, working with something like that you’d admired for 30 years is really fun, a lot of fun.
We ended up shooting a lot of this dialogue twice, this is a bit like the situation in Bagend, where it’s all plot explanatory stuff, it’s exposition with dialogue and we shot the scenes with Gandalf and Saruman talking - both, the exterior scene in the garden and when they go into the chamber, we shot it early in our shoot and by the time we put the film together we wanted to have different information and so we basically had to get them back to New Zealand and re-shoot virtually the entire conversation, because what they were saying now was different, we just simply wanted them to convey different information to the audience.
FW: Well, part of that was identifying Sauron as, as a - giving him an identity separate to the character, who appears in the prologue and so we specifically had Chris Lee talk about him as “The Eye” and what and how it’s operated dramatically.
PJ: Yeah, the Eye it’s the bane of my life.
FW: The Eye was such a horror to dramaturge.
PJ: To have your central villain being nothing more than a flaming eyeball is a little bit of a problem. Of course, what we did is we elevated Saruman in a sense to the villainlary role and get the eye relatively a minor player.
FW: It’s just a hard thing to bring to cinema, it’s a wonderful notion, but it works very much, you know, it’s rather a novel form than as a storytelling device for cinema.
PB: We had a lot of problem deciding what Saruman, what is Saruman’s agenda and we played it in several different ways. We started off with the concept, that Saruman was looking to Gandalf as an ally to go for the ring and use it against Sauron, we also tried a more subtle version of that, where you’re not quite sure, but eventually we decided to stay close to the books I think and to reveal Saruman attempting to take the ring for himself as he does in the books a little later on.
PJ: The sequence, where the wizards fight was always a, it was a problem for me, because I really don’t like wizards in movies, I don’t like the idea of old guys firing blue lightning out of their fingertips and doing all the usual wizardry type stuff. So I thought that the, the most interesting fight would be one, where we strip away the magic to some, to a large degree and we simply see two old guys beating the hell out each other. I thought, that would at least be kind of humorous.
Uhm, so that’s basically what we did, we kept the fight as physical as possible and the idea was, old bones and bodies cracking onto the marble, that sort of you can almost feel the bruises starting to form. Of course, one doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess, that not a lot of this is actually Ian Mc Kellen and Christopher Lee.
The great thing with doing stunt fights with guys with long hair and beards is that you can disguise a stunt man relatively well.
FW: I think even the stuntmen sustained some injuries from that scene…
PJ: Yeah, one of them cracked the hip badly on the side of a trampoline, when they, they were gonna (ran) on a trampoline and they fell short and actually hit the middle part of the trampoline in a badly hit.