Cool article on final screentime for the actors...

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Farewell to the King

Friday, January 2, 2004

Farewell to the King

The principals of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King recall the bittersweet experience of filming their respective final Tolkien scenes.

By Todd Gilchrist

Final shots are often a relief for actors enduring the gauntlet of a film production. It’s the end of their stint on set, and most likely the last time they’ll see many of their colla-borators and co-workers in person. Of course, when you’ve been filming off and on for four years, that feeling is one that seems like it will never arrive.

The Lord Of the Rings’ production originally ran for fourteen months, during which time all three films were shot consecutively. After that, numerous pick-up shots and expansions of scenes were added to flesh out story elements in response to the enormous financial and critical success the first film met. During their recent press day for the film, the actors discussed their final days on the LOTR set, and how they responded to the completion of this life-changing experience.

For once and future king Aragorn, his final shot sadly didn’t even make it into the theatrical cut of the film. Nonetheless, Viggo Mortensen gives us only a taste of his last work, since the extended DVD versions might soon show what director Peter Jackson chose to leave out. “I was running,” explains Mortensen. “It was an extension of the Paths of the Dead [sequence] where I’m speaking to the ghosts and then all hell breaks loose. In the movie as you see it, there’s a cut and then you don’t know what happens. But there’s a bunch of other things that happen.”

Mortensen’s gentle articulation belied the intense (and seemingly difficult) nature of the sequence. “I don’t want to give it away for when you see it, but there’s a big commotion and Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn are running for their lives basically.” Revealing a few secrets of the trade, he adds, “In reality we were on this raised platform that was about this wide [indicates only a few feet] and we were sprinting and pretending to jump over all these obstacles and then there was just the green screen everywhere.”

Giving his final moments a less than memorable sheen, Mortensen tantalizes his audience without giving up too much information. “When you see that scene, there are hordes of armies of the dead and other things that we’re evading and dealing with. So it was just simply us running along a bar-top or something.”

For Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf, the steadfast wizard who helps humans and hobbits alike in their time of greatest need, his final scene was little more than a bit of extra coverage for one of his most memorable sequences. “There were a number of last shots,” confesses McKellen. “There was the last shot of the principal photography, and then the shot of the various pick-ups, but the last shot this time around was quite recently in July. I had done some generic fighting as Gandalf, which you see in the film- swinging the white staff, pulling [Merry back to] knock Orcs out of the way.”

McKellen differentiates between the principal shooting set-ups and those finished during his return to New Zealand’s makeshift Middle-earth. “Peter said, ‘That’s the end of principal photography’ [the first time], but this time, when we finished, at the end of the day, the crew and anyone working on the film was invited to the reception that, in my case, took place after dark on the battlements of Minas Tirith.”

Unlike McKellen, who seemed to regard the end of his shots with the resolve of his stalwart character, Elijah Wood found more than a little emotion bubbling to the surface as he finished his responsibilities. “I was completely drained. I had knots in my stomach all day, and it came time to do my last shot, and the last shot was actually too perfect, because it was one of the last scenes in the movie, where Frodo is in Bag-End before he goes to the gray haven. There’s a shot where he’s writing the last bit of the book and Sam comes and says, ‘it’s all over,’ and Frodo says ‘no, there’s room for a little more,’ and it had this whole meaning tied into it.”

Wood indicates that it was as trying a moment for his director as it was for himself. “Knowing it’s my last shot and also the symbolism of the scene and I’m like, ‘oh fu----- hell!’ Everybody came to see it, and I remember we did five or six takes, and they checked the gate, and Peter came over to me and broke down, like gave me a hug and broke down on my shoulder. It was so, so sad- everybody was crying.”

Sean Astin, who plays Frodo’s hetero life partner Sam, was as physically as he was emotionally exhausted by the four-year experience. “I was just so exhausted, so tired. When we were down there, maybe it was that I’d put some weight back on for that last little thing. It was in slow motion and Elijah’s got to fall down, and so there was a lot of falling and getting up and falling and getting up, and slow motion turning and looking at the wind.

As trying as that last sequence was for Astin, his director for that day - writer/co-producer Fran Walsh - clearly wasn’t ready to let her actors go quietly back into the underbrush of Middle Earth. “Fran didn’t want it to be over. She wanted us to run over to the sound-mixer and record this four-page speech of poetry that they could use. She didn’t really need to do it then, but I think she didn’t want to let go of that moment.”

For Liv Tyler, her final moment on set was a particularly memorable, if succinctly described one: “The last scene, where I’m kissing the King.” For Orlando Bloom, her elvish partner in mischief (both in the film and the press day), his last sequence set the standard for what the end-of-shooting celebrations would become as the production came to a close. “My last sequence was running into battle with Gimli and taking down some Orcs,” which he later noted did not make it into the final theatrical version. “I was the first person [to finish], so I had absolutely not a clue what it would mean.”

“I was finished, and then Pete sort of shushed everyone up and I completely forgot what I had to do,” Bloom continues. “I wasn’t sure if I had to join in. So I was standing there thinking, ‘do I join in?’” The actor also reveals that a last-minute prop failure ended up being prophetic it was time to say goodbye to yesterday. “My bow actually broke two takes before my last take in the entire movie, the bow that I’d been using for the whole movie. It’s like a steel rod with like a rubber sort of effect as wood, and, I mean, it’s been eighteen months.”

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Bloom saw the demise of his precious weapon as an eerie omen that his experience was coming to a close - even if they were able to easily replace it for the last few shots. “Two takes before last it’s like, ooooooowwwwweeee - it’s coming to an end. We had doubles and I used the double different times as well, but I couldn’t believe it, I was devastated.” Bloom embraces those final emotions one last time sitting at the roundtable in front of the eager journalists poring over his feelings and jokingly recounting that difficult moment. “I was like my bow, my bow.”

For both Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, who as Merry and Pippin experience life-changing transformations (both on and off screen) as intense as any of their marquee-name costars, the final shot was one of third-act triumph rather than the sort of tomfoolery that got them into trouble so frequently in the first two films. “My last shot of principal photography was really dull,” explained Boyd, who shows his color in the final moments of Return To the King. “[It was] a blue screen shot climbing up to like the beacon, looking around the edge of a thing that's not even in the movie. And I remember being quite disappointed that it was my last shot.”

Thankfully, the reshoots allowed Boyd to enjoy a more fitting conclusion to the experience. “My last shot was killing the Orc that's about to kill Gandalf (in ROTK). I thought, that's a great shot to have shot. So that was, kind of looking at my sword with the blood on it, and I thought ‘that's great.’”

Monaghan suggests that the actual on-set time was boring, but for audiences who will witness his seemingly single-handed defeat of a mammoth adversary, the end result was anything but. “[It was] going through the Oliphant and slicing the legs with my sword, which is blue screen. There was no one there. Everyone else was on Stage A and I was on like Stage like D with Miranda.”

With the physical tumult of shooting having been completed, Monaghan quickly realized that the emotional one had yet to be conquered. “We finished it and then I walked over to Stage A and saw Pete and Fran and they knew that I'd wrapped, and they gave you the opportunity to try an impossible task of summing up four years of your life in front of all these people.”

Expectedly, it was an enormously difficult task to encapsulate four years of one’s life into a five- or ten minute speech. “I tried to get across more than anything else that the experience I'd had changed the way that my life had been leading, and moved it on a 90 degree angle to a different way of thinking about everything in my life.”

“Not only was it hanging out with Bill and with Elijah, but down to the people behind the camera and the people that made our swords and the people that dressed us in the morning, their influence over the past three years made me want to try and change huge facets of my life.”

Jackson, as ringleader of so many hellos and goodbyes through the four-year process, found each and every one of them as touching as the last. “Back in May and June, when we were shooting pickups and we had most of the actors in for a few days of shooting, we had like 15 farewells. For each actor it was emotional because it was either Elijah's last day or Liv's last day or Ian or Viggo and we'd go through the day shooting.”

“We had our shot list and we'd get to the last shot, and we didn't say this is the last shot,” adds Jackson. “It was unspoken, and we'd set it up and I'd say cut.” The filmmaker had a way of verbally acknowledging each concluding sequence, one that the actors weren’t aware of but which became familiar to the crew as the farewells spread through the remainder of the cast’s set-ups.

“The [actors would] be waiting- do I say ‘let's go for another take,’ or do I say ‘check the gate,’” he explains. “If I said check the gate, that was the door slamming shut, and I got what I wanted. We had to go through it 15 times each day. It was a traumatic period of shooting, actually.”

“We had a party for each person individually as they finished and a blooper reel,” adds Jackson. “For me, they waited until the wrap party. Of course, most of the actors had already left because they had finished earlier. By the time we had the wrap party there weren't too many people around other than the crew. Then they had a blooper of me. They put it to music-they had some Beatles music and cut it together.”

Jackson, who was in many ways the workhorse that determinedly pulled the Lord Of the Rings’ cart from its mired history of questionable adaptations and commercial failures, received a gift at film’s end that seemed apropos of the great effort he bestowed upon Tolkien’s lauded, much-protected work: “We tried to give most of the actors a prop that was synonymous with their characters. In most cases it was a sword for the guys.”

With Liv, we gave her a dress and her ears. I'd play these cameos, and he cameo I did in Fellowship of the Ring was in the street of Bree (sp?). I was eating a carrot, so they gave me a framed carrot.”

“I thought, Viggo got a sword, how come I can't have a sword. I wish I had done a cameo with a sword. I didn't, so I got a carrot.”

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final in FilmStew.com’s trilogy of celebrity interview features about Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a film that is very likely going to be a main Academy Award contender for Best Picture of 2003.