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Chapter 1 ~ "Prologue: One ring to rule them all..."
PJ: Hi, I'm Peter Jackson, the director, co-writer and -producer of the "Lord Of The Rings".
FW: Hi, I'm Fran. I have a writing credit on the film and a producing credit.
PB: Hi, I'm Philippa Boyens. I only have a writing credit on the film.
PJ: And we're up here in our office in Miramar, New Zealand, having a look at this movie, a little bit of a different version of the film than what you used to see in the theatres. This is the extended cut version, got a few new scenes, that none of you have seen before. So it'll be fun to talk about those.
I think, the beginning of the movie was probably the hardest thing both in terms of conceiving it and writing it and then, when we edited the film, it was really difficult. Everything else seemed simple in comparison.
PB: Very early on though you knew, you wanted something quite lyrical as the very, very opening thing and you knew very early on, that you wanted to open in black.
FW: When we did early drafts of the script, we attempted to write a prologue and it became so overstuffed with information and so over- burdened with its own enormity, that we eventually decided, we didn't need one.
PJ: And we shot obviously everything for the prologue, when we were doing the original photography, but then I remember that as we got into postproduction and cutting, we felt, that the prologue was possibly redundant and we developed an entirely different opening, which was more evolving around Hobbits and what Hobbits are.
FW: And so we left the prologue behind and we thought what ever information we haven't got, it can come out in Bagend with Gandalf and Frodo and he can speak to that and we wrote several different kitchen-scenes in Bagend with Gandalf throwing light on the events of the past.
PJ: And I remember, the decision to go back to revisit the idea of the prologue and to put the prologue back in happened, when we were about to leave New Zealand to fly to London to do the scoring.
FW: What happened was, we screened the movie for New Line and one of their key and mandatory notes was: 'You must have a prologue', which was for us (sort of) oh God we're back there again. It'd become a sort of hell for us and so we found ourselves in England recording the score with an Avid machine jammed into one of the rooms in the house. Our editor John Gilbert came over with a bunch of footage and it was up to us at that point to construct the prologue and this had to happen during the time, we were also doing the score. It was a big, a big strain. It was quite a hard thing.
PJ: And basically the exact cut, that's in the movie now, is what got down in London during that period of time.
I always had the idea of doing a big battle in the prologue. That was really one of the attractions and I looked at it in the sense of like the opening of a James-Bond-film, where, you know, they always have their prologue with some real "boost of the wall"-kind of action scene and I always loved that as a concept in film as a device it plugs you out of the world that you have been in that day.
You're now in a cinema in the hands of the filmmakers and suddenly you're being put into this incredible action sequence. You're giving no time to think, you've only just sat down to watch the film and there's all the stuff going on and then by the time, a prologue like that finishes, you're sort of totally in the hands of the filmmaker and I wanted to do something similar.
Obviously we're telling the story of the ring, but I thought a battle would be a great way to start and the story obviously gives us the battle with the last alliance, where Sauron is destroyed.
FW: Here was the place, the one place that we were going to demonstrate the depth of his power and if we fail to do that, then he really wasn't going to be very credible for three full movies. So we knew, it was very important, that we sell him as this terrible and omnipotent all powerful force.
PB: A lot of these images, you had in your mind right from your treatment, I remember the 90 page treatment. Nothing changed, not over 5 years.
PJ: Isildur is played by Harry Sinclair, who is a long term friend of ours. We've knowing Harry for 10 or 12 years. Harry himself is a director. He has directed 3 feature films.
PB: I think, if I remember rightly, you and Fran were trying to find the most corrupt and venal person you knew, wasn't it…
PJ: (lacht)
PB: … Pete and you thought about Harry.
PJ: Oh, yes - (caught it) in a second.
FW: The other thing, that was really hard about the prologue, was, from what point of view do you tell the story and I think in past attempts we told it through the point of view of Isildur solely or we tried to tell it from a kind of God's eye point of view. We tried all these different points of view, but in the end it wasn't until we came to understand, that the ring is in fact a protagonist in the story - in many ways it's an antagonist and that, what we should do is tell the prologue from the rings point of view.
It's who makes it, for what purpose, how they loose it, who it comes to and who it then passes to. That' the story of the prologue and when that became clear to us, it was a much easier thing to do.
PJ: The footage we added here does show the process of how the ring ultimately causes Isildur's death much clearer, then what was in the theatrical version.
The length of the prologue was always a little bit of a debate. Once we got to the point, that we knew a prologue would gonna be in the film, it was the very last stages of post production, then New Line started to impose rules on us, which they'd never done before. They started to say: "Well, you can have a prologue, but it's gonna be no longer than 2 minutes". And our prologue is actually 7,5 minutes. And it was really in a way, it was one of the biggest fights we ever had with the studio and it was strange, because it was the very last thing that happened before the film was finished. We've been making this movie for 3 or 4 years with a very good relationship and - needless to say - we won the battle, because we just felt, you know, you can't make a prologue like this with all this information in a 2-minute-length of time.
PB: And had, we did find in the process of writing the prologue, which was really valuable, is you can overload of course and one of those things that went in an overload in earlier drafts of the prologue was the excessive use of proper names straight from Tolkien, such as naming Narsil and such as naming the lance of Gil-Galad, in fact even naming Gil-Galad himself. It just was too much information and it wasn't really until Pete got in here in post, that you can feel the weight of just excessive information.
Ngila Dickon, our costume designer worked very hard, where ever there were descriptions of clothing made by Prof. Tolkien in any of his works, they were followed almost (?). If you look closely, you'll see that Bilbos vest does indeed have brass buttons, these brass buttons that famously pop off, when he tries to escape as told in 'The Hobbit'.
PJ: Oh, yes the red waistcoat with brass buttons. To make Ian Holm look younger, we attached, we glued some taps to the side of his necks and pulled his skin back underneath his wig to pull the wrinkles out, because obviously Bilbo Baggins as seen in the prologue is 60 years younger then we see him later on in Bagend.