Gimli

[The Nameless One]

Originally Posted by Durin1

Question: WHY should a portrayal in the book be totally seperate to the movies?

Im glad you asked. Books and movies are not the the same form of entertainment. It's that simple. Film is less discriptive than a novel and relays information in a limited amount of time. Books and novels do not have limits; unless publishers give the writer limits, but that doesn't mean the writer can't write on his own time and expand on his work. A director can expand as well but needs a heck of a lot more money to bring it to the public audience. Peter Jackson has talked about another DVD he wants to do after King Kong and its rumored that he would like to get some of the cast back together and do scenes that do not appear in the Film Trilogy.The new scenes are the rumor but he deffinantly wants to add something more to the triology with this DVD. PJ had a limited amount of money to use for the movies and since he filmed them all at the same time over 18 months he did the best he could with the money he was given. He didn't think it would be as big a hit as it turned out to be. After he saw the response FOTR got, he used the years between movies to add a bit more footage for the EE of the movies. He calls them "pick ups". Like the Boromir and Faramir scene in the TTEE. That was filmed about 4 months before the TTEE came out in nov. He had plenty of money to work with to add to the films because of his sudden success, but was only aloted a year or less to work on the extended versions of the first 2 EE. The bottom line is that he had less time to work with. Im sure(seeing as he is as big a fan as we are)that he wanted to add more when he was working on it those 18 monthes. It seems like Bakshi was faced with the same situation with his version. He loved the books as well but with the restrictions of film, big buisness plays a large part in both cases.

Now with Tolkien, he is one person. He doesn't need tons of other people to carry out his vision . PJ needed various people to do tasks in order to show his vision; he couldn't do it on his own. Basicaly, writing is free in a sense. Sure it takes money to get it published and edited but the writer has the ultimate freedom. Tolkien wrote his novels for most of his life. He could write as much as he wants at what ever time he wants. No limits(except for death of course). I'm currently working on a fantasy novel that I started thinking about 4 years ago and Im still drawing maps and writing histories. I haven't even started the acctul novels yet. I don't have proper gramer and might not even publish my ideas but I don't feel any constraints on my work....the same as tolkien. Im not comparing my self to tolkien at all(Im not even a writer or even planing that as a career) so please don't comment on it Anyway, my point is that as a writer you have total creative freedom. Film has to many limits to ever be able to correctly portray the books. Thats why I keep them separate.

I noticed PJ made many changes in the story line and left many caracters out. But like I said, money was a limiting factor for him. If he had all the money in the world, was able to do every task on his own, and didn't have any higher postions telling him what to do, than I think he would have made a correct portrayel of the books(but this isn't a perfect world). A lot of people think he achieved perfection and thats totally false. I belive he achevied the closest thing to perfection so far but later on some other director could do much better. So at this point he is on top as far as interpretaions of the books goes. Someone could very well take away his crown.

On a side note: I would love to see the movies done as a 6 movie instead of a trilogy next time(if there is a next time). I feel thats the closest way to achevie perfection in portrying Tolkien's work. Especially since each novel consists of 2 books and each movie could be each book. This is just a dream of mine and is very likely not gonna happen.

Thanx for listening to my rambling and I appriciate your coments.

[Durin1]

Nameless One,

I can't accept the fact that poorly quality character or story depiction can be mainly attributed to financial constraints. It's not as if PJ had a small budget!

More importantly, it is the job of film makers to research and plan their movie according to their own "vision". PJ's vision is ultimately flawed.

I think most of us are intelligent enough to recognise that books and movies are two different mediums of entertainment. Yet, IMO, this should not necessarily mean that you have to alter the movies too drastically. Nor is there any excuse to portray characters as baffoons and nincompoops!! That for me is unforgivable, regardless of how much money PJ and co had to spend.