A new hope

Surely, many of you have already read the new update of McKellen´s webpage. i want to focus only in one question now:

Q: I hope that Peter Jackson will have a convincing explanation for how he can, as you say, "protect the source material from commercial encroachments" and have Liv Tyler do battle with 20 Uruk-Hai (cf. her interview). We non-filmmaking Tolkienists may be entirely ignorant of scriptwriting and cinematic narrative, but we do know the original, which never at any point featured the martial prowess of Arwen Undomiel. Your assurances are less than assuring in this instance.

A: Sorry you aren't happy but I didn't write the screenplay and suggest you address your concerns to those who did! You might be encouraged by the fact that scripts often change during filming.

You have to be a jerk to ask that question to one of the major people of the film (though i cannot say i don´t share the feelings of the questioner), but his "braveness" has won the prize of a little jewel: that last sentence of Mckellen "You might be encouraged by the fact that scripts often change during filming".

I think he would never pick that question to be answered if he had nothing important to say. Speaking without words?

Perhaps we "purist" might also find hope in the fact that more footage is filmed than is actually used. I'm crossing my fingers that the warrior princess bit might actually get left on the cutting-room floor.

I think tha it's better to be pesimistic and happily surprised then optimistic and dissapointed. I get this view after seeing what optimism did to so many in regards to TPM

I recall reading a few days ago on theonering.net that many of Liv's scenes were cut because of her bad accent. Of course, you don't need to speak much in a battle scene.

Oh, I should point out at this point that I am not a strict purist. We should just be gald that this movie is not "based on" the Lord of the Rings, like so many other book conversions in the past.

Good point.....the title of the movie could be George Lucas' Lord of The Rings.

If it were that it would be called Willow.

(For those who don't know: Lucas wanted to make LOTR, but couldn't get the rights, so he designed, maybe wrote, the Willow project instead. It was followed up by a book sequel called Shadow Moon)

Wow!

I didn't know that. I loved Willow when it came out, but am not so sure how I feel about it now. I guess it was pretty good, if not too original. All I can say is that I'm glad Lucas didn't get the rights to LotR. That would have been a terrible mess, with Gollum walking around saying, "Meesa smokada ganja my precious"

But, I'm curious about why he couldn't get the rights if an all but unknown director within 12 years or so manages to do it. Has Thorn Emi gone out of business or something, or did they have exclusive rights from Saul Zaents (sp?) to the trilogy for X amount of time which has now expired?