TolkienNut16 has posted an auditorium version of the video introduction given by Peter ahead of last night’s screenings of the extended version of The Two Towers. Most of the production background he described will be familiar to fans who have seen the supplements and listened to the commentary tracks of the extended-version DVDs.

Peter did say one thing that seemed new to me, though perhaps he has said it somewhere before and I just missed it. He says that Fran Walsh suggested and wrote the famous “Go away and never come back!” argument between Smeagol and Gollum. She also directed it, since it was a very late addition to the film. Fran has always been quite modest about this and said she simply directed the scene the way Peter wanted her to. But it does sound as though that scene was pretty much hers from inspiration to execution, and here Peter graciously gives her credit. Of course, it has become one of the most famous scenes in the film.

I have an analysis of it in an essay, “Gollum Talks to Himself,” in a forthcoming anthology of essays about the film, Picturing Tolkien, to be released by McFarland on July 31 and edited by Jan Bogstad and Phil Kaveny. (It’s available for pre-order on Amazon, and given how these things go, it may well come out before July 31.) I hope to post an interview with Jan and Phil about the book in July.

Today TheOneRing.net posted an interview with Daniel Falconer, one of the main designers and sculptors at Weta Workshop, where he was hired fifteen years ago. (Though, as the interview points out, Daniel does a whole range of creative things at Weta that aren’t conveyed by that description.)

Daniel was one of my interviewees for The Frodo Franchise. I told some anecdotes about the tour of the Weta facilities he gave me in an earlier entry. He’s a terrific guy and, needless to say, an incredibly talented one.

Yesterday the official LOTR Facebook page posted a set of fans’ questions and Alan Lee’s responses to them. As one might expect, there’s virtually no reference to The Hobbit. It’s about Lee’s work as a Tolkien illustrator and his contributions of the designs for the film trilogy. Well worth checking out!

Website Den of Geek! has just posted a lengthy interview with John Gilbert, who edited The Fellowship of the Ring. (Jamie Selkirk was the supervising editor for the entire trilogy, but each film had its own editor.) Gilbert has edited many other films, most recently Blitz, a British action film, the upcoming release of which was the occasion for the interview.

But Gilbert talks a lot about FOTR and working with Peter Jackson. He got the FOTR job because he had previously edited The Frighteners. Up to that point PJ had edited on film, and Gilbert was brought in to use the digital editing system Avid on the film. Needless to say, by LOTR, Peter’s team was doing most technical jobs, including editing, using digital technology. Gilbert was slotted to edit King Kong back in the mid-1990s, but when that project fell through (temporarily), he was put on FOTR.

One highlight of the interview:

There was a lot of pressure. There was pressure on him from New Line and the people with the money, just because it was so much bigger than what he’d done before. But he’s very adept at keeping everyone in check and keeping in control of things. And I think we cut a sequence together in the Moria Mines early on and finished it as a piece of film, and it went off to Cannes about halfway through the process. The press and everyone fell in love with it, and everyone backed off after that and let him go for it, because it spoke for itself.

I discuss the preview footage shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 in Chapter 1 of my book. I hadn’t been aware, however, of how very important that moment was in convincing New Line to give Peter more creative leeway after that point.

Gilbert stayed on in New Zealand to edit Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Indian (a charming film that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved), and he has some interesting things to say about the impact of LOTR on the Kiwi film industry.

All in all, a very interesting interview, well worth reading.

The STV website has an interview with John Rhys-Davies. He’s promoting a new TV documentary on the King James Bible, so be forewarned that mentions of Peter Jackson-related films don’t start until about 4:30 in a 7:30 clip. For those who don’t want to sit through the rest, all the relevant comments have been transcribed and printed in the article.

[Thanks again, Paulo!]

The Belfast Telegraph today posted an interview with John Rhys-Davies in which he describes having visited the set of The Hobbit about four weeks ago:

“It was a very strange feeling going back and seeing so many old faces. Seeing Ian McKellen and young Gollum [Andy Serkis].

“It was like going back to your old school where you were being a person of real importance and they treated you courteously, but you’re no longer part of it. It really plucks the heart strings.

“So I grovelled as obsequiously as I could, to no avail, but Peter’s a very merciful chap… Let’s put it this way. I have been sending pushy, grovelling signals.”

It sounds as though Rhys-Davies was shown some footage, since he also says that he thinks the decision to shoot at 48 frames per second rather than the standard 24 will revolutionize filmmaking.

[Thanks to Paulo Pereira for pointing out this interview to me. As he remarked, how many film productions inspire that much nostalgia and loyalty?]

Ian McKellen added a post, “Halflings and Hot Dogs,” to his Hobbit Blog. It’s a charming anecdote about a scene that was shot for the long-expected party scene of LOTR but not used. He also talks about Billy and Katie Jackson, who were among the children in that scene, and how they’ve grown up since.

The link to the new entry isn’t live on the blog’s index page. I assume that’ll soon get fixed, but in the meantime you can find it here. [Later the same day: the link on the index page is now working.]

Jack Machiela, of the Noldor Blog, has alerted me to an interview with Costa Botes he recently conducted with Costa Botes. It’s mainly a discussion of the three feature-length candid documentaries Costa made to document the behind-the-scenes work of the people who made LOTR. He talks about their making and why he won’t be involved in doing similar films for The Hobbit.

Costa is best known as the co-director of the wonderful 1995 mockumentary, Forgotten Silver, but he also has made a series of independent documentaries since then. (See links in the interview.) He was also one of the first people I interviewed for my book when I first arrived in Wellington in October, 2003 to do my research, and our conversation was a treat.

Later I was able to interview Dan Arden, the maker of most of the promotional making-of films shown on cable and included on the theatrical DVDs, and Michael Pellerin, producer-director of the extended edition supplements. It was very gratifying to be have input from the makers for my overview of the three sets of quite different documentaries. (See Chapters 4 and 7.)

Ian McKellen has started a blog in which he will report on his activities while playing Gandalf in The Hobbit. The blog home page is here, its first entry (one we’re already familiar with, confirming he would indeed be Gandalf again) here, and a new one about arriving in New Zealand here.

Fans who kept close track of doings during the making of The Lord of the Rings will also be familiar with the online journals Ian posted then: The Grey Book and The White Book. (Blogs didn’t exist in those days, but now the home pages of these “books” lists each as a “journal/blog.”) If you somehow missed those or just want a little bit of great nostalgic reading, you should check them out. Plenty of illustrations, and there are more LOTR-related photos here, here, here, and here. If you still want more, checkout the lengthy question and answer section on LOTR, where Ian replied to queries sent in by fans. (And yes, he did answer them himself!) Note that the index is in reverse chronological order.

For more on the background of Ian’s website, see Chapter 5 of The Frodo Franchise book. In researching that section, I was lucky enough to interview both Ian and his webmaster, Keith Stern.

Ian McKellen will be taking a break from principal photography on The Hobbit. He’ll be playing the part of a Mafia don at Chichester’s Festival Theatre. No information yet about the dates on that. According to the story at Mail Online, “McKellen, who appeared as ­Gandalf in Jackson’s triumphant Lord Of The Rings trilogy, instructed his representatives to carve out some time over the shooting schedule so he could take on other acting assignments.”

On his Facebook page, Ian has corrected a couple of mistakes in the story, in the process telling us the new date scheduled for his first filming: “With corrections to the last para, story in the Mail is accurate (I was on stage with Roger Rees not Patrick Stewart) and filming begins 3/21, with my call now 3/28.”