The New Hobbit Hole

This is a continuation of the infamous thread New Zealander Builds Hobbit Hole originally posted on January 26, 2001 by John Farson, who at the time undoubtedly thought he had found a rather obscure article that would elicit a few replies and die out. Without knowing it, he became the founder of the Hobbit Hole. For reasons incomprehensible to some, the thread grew to over 4100 replies. It became the place for hobbits and friends of hobbits to chit chat and share LoTR news and views, hang out, and talk amongst ourselves in the comfort of familiar surroundings.

In keeping with the new posting guidelines, the thread idea is continuing here, as will the Green Dragon Inn, our more structured spin-off thread, as soon as we figure out how to move all the good discussion that has been had there. As for the Hobbit Hole, we will just start fresh, bringing only a few mathoms such as the picture above with us to make it feel like home, and perhaps a walk down memory lane:

To fun but heartfelt debates about the integrity and worth of some of the characters…

So as you can see, everything JRR Tolkien (and Peter Jackson) is welcome here in our New Row, our soon-to-be familiar New Hobbit Hole…; philosophy, opinion, good talk and frequent silliness.

Film Review from Film Threat.com:

I don’t really remember a nice, happy scene in the entire film...

This one also leaves you wanting hours more...

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS
by Eric Campos
(12/11/2002)

2002, Rated PG-13, 179 Minutes, New Line Cinema

Uh…s**t, what can you say about this one that you won’t already know going into it. I know there are very few of you out there who have any doubts that this movie will be one of the greatest cinematic experiences ever. But for those few of you…you probably thought that Men in Black II was pretty sweet, didn’t you? No, there’s no question here that moviegoers will be treated to a completely enveloping, three-hour vacation from reality. This is exactly what we get…and then some.

We also get a way darker film, too. Now that I think back, I don’t really remember a nice, happy scene in the entire film. There are a few light moments, but they are fleeting. There are no horse and carriage rides through the countryside with Gandalf; there are no wacky Hobbit parties in the Shire; and there are no peaceful pipe weed breaks with friends. The Fellowship of the Ring set everything up; now “The Two Towers” picks up exactly where we left off and relentlessly kicks our asses for three hours. The first third of the film is basically one long chase scene with the last third being composed of one of the most epic battles you’ve ever seen committed to film. There’s definitely a lot more action this time around as the Fellowship remains divided, each coupling or group having to face their own dangers. The film also has a darker look and feel. Gray is the color of the day here, so I hope you like it.

Completely immersing as this film is, I still had a few reality check moments throughout the screening. One of these moments had me wonder if George Lucas is feeling like an asshole or not. He’s still making tons of cash off of his raping of “Star Wars,” so probably not. But if he truly gave a damn about filmmaking anymore, he’d just have to hang his head in shame when confronted with Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films. Lucas must be wishing that his new “Star Wars” films had just a fraction of the movie magic Jackson and crew have poured into “Lord of the Rings.” Oh well, I think most of us have given up on Lucas anyways. It was just a thought.

As far as calling out which LOTR film is better, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that with this trilogy. What we’re watching, over the space of three years, is a 9-10 hour movie cut into three parts. So, I couldn’t say that I enjoyed this new film better than Fellowship, but I can say that it’s definitely more of an action-packed ride. And as with the first film, this one also leaves you wanting hours more once those end credits begin flashing across the screen. I haven’t seen mainstream movies made like this since the 80s – a time when people seemed to care more about the actual craft of filmmaking. Thanks, Peter.

There’s no question here that moviegoers will be treated to a completely enveloping, three-hour vacation from reality...

SAMWISE SPEAKS: SEAN ASTIN INTERVIEW

12.11.02
By Devin Faraci

Sean Astin will always be remembered for his roles in Goonies and Rudy, and now as Frodo's faithful companion Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings.

One thing I noticed in all the interviews with the cast and crew of The Two Towers was their genuine nature - it seems cliché, but these people felt untouched by Hollywood and the success of Fellowship of the Ring. Sean Astin was perhaps the most genuine of all the actors, and really loved talking to journalists, complaining to his publicist that he didn't get enough time. Considering his Hollywood family background (his mother is Patty Duke and his father is John Astin), this is all the more amazing.

WARNING: This interview contains some spoilers for The Two Towers as well as the television series Angel.

Q: Sam really has a chance to assert himself in The Two Towers. He goes from being reactive to being proactive. How did you approach that?

Astin: We thought that we were going to be filming scenes roughly chronologically. But six weeks in, when we were on the south island, there was a day where we were supposed to go film on the river Anduin. There was a river that the Department of Conservation had set aside that we could use. And there was a massive flood, like 100 year flood, in Queenstown. It did all sorts of damage and that portion of the river that we were going to film on, was washed away. So the next thing we knew, we were driving to a Ramada Inn-type hotel and there were some polystyrene rocks set up on the tennis court and we started filming one of the climactic scenes from the third movie! Elijah and I looked at each other that morning and were like, "Uh, we're not ready yet." Somehow, through the make-up process and through the sheer terror that we both felt, we found a way to get there. We filmed one of our sides, meaning one of our close ups, that day. Then we ended up filming the other side of that scene like thirteen months later. I remember thinking, "Wow, we're so much better now, can we go back and do the other side?" "No, it's good!"

The scenes drive how you approach the work. The language, and the dynamics in the intellectual and emotional intensity that attends the trifecta of Frodo, Sam and Gollum is so compelling and interesting that you can't help but start leaning forward as the actor when you're ready to play it. It was great for me to be able to take a more active role, to be able to get angry, to pass through those emotional phases of frustration and jealousy and disappointment. All those things that weren't really a part of the stuff that people see in the first film, where he's sort of a more constant, loyal, sort of attendant. Which is still there, on some level, for me throughout all the movies. But to be able to go there, to fight with Gollum, was great for me.

Q: What about the fight scene with Frodo, which was not in the book, and was done in reshoots? That is such a pivotal scene.

Astin: Yeah, I can't wait to see the extended version DVD and see if they put more of that in, because we filmed a MUCH more aggressive, much longer fight scene. The emotional complexity of the characters is so rich in the books that it's really hard to dramatize. It's hard to explain what is going on psychologically with certain characters without extended voice over narration or characters talking philosophically about themselves, which is sort of a buzzkill dramatically. So I think that Peter is a devotee, a true purist, as far as being a fan of the books, but he is not a slave to them. He is very confident with the fact that this is his interpretation of them.

I think they also, they meaning Peter and Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, wanted to be kind of responsive to world events. The first movie came out a couple of months after the September 11th attacks, and all of this; American deployment in Afghanistan, the brewing issue with Iraq and everything else, I think they wanted to echo and contend with those issues. The film was such an amazing marriage of moment in time and sort of political and cultural history that the movie came out in. A movie where the goal, the intention of the filmmaker was to do something new, something original; to take filmmaking to the next level. When you think of 500 days of miniatures photography - 500 days they had a world class cinematographer filming models. And then hundreds of animators working for years. I know a lot of movies do similar things, but I think the level of creativity and the fact that the studio is willing to let Peter drive the creative process the way he wants to is unique. I think the fact that that all coalesced at a particular moment last year is special.

Q: Peter says the war themes are, like in the original Tolkien, not purposefully echoing current events [see the Peter Jackson interview on November 18th for that full story]. Do you get a different sense?

Astin: I feel the same way about Peter saying that as I felt about Tolkien, in his book of letters, saying it's not an allegory. Tolkien is adamant in his letters that it is not an allegory for the Second World War, that Sauron is not Hitler. When I was reading that, I just didn't believe it. I thought, "You fought in the First World War. You were writing chapters of the book and sending them to your son, who was in trenches during the Second World War, how could it not be about Hitler?" But I think ultimately I've sort of grown to accept that what Tolkien meant is that his themes resonate with different people at different times for different reasons. If it's a direct analogy, it's too limited, it doesn't allow for the kind of mythology to be created that was his intended project. He wanted to create a mythology for the British people.

Q: Didn't he say it was OK that it suggest current events as opposed to being an allegory?

Astin: Yeah, I think Peter feels the same way. I don't think Peter wants to get bogged down in specific political details. You know, the line that I get to say is "There's some good in this world and it's worth fighting for." What does that really mean? How do you extrapolate that out and apply it? I'm an American. I'm a patriot. I believe in my country, I support my president regardless of my own partisan idealogy. I want to live in a safe country, in a safe world. I don't know what the leaders know. How do I feel about that? How do we know? I really don't know how to feel about that. All I do know is that the battle scene at Helm's Deep is so realistic and so effecting that it's not just violence for violence sake, it's not cavalier. There's poetry in the movie. The language is rich, and the ideas are taken seriously. The stakes, the cost of war, and what the potential loss is, is palpable enough in the movie that it doesn't feel irresponsible to be engaging these issues at this time.

Whether it was conscious or not, they had not written that dialogue - Peter, Fran and Phillipa had not invented that line of dialogue - until June of this year. So whether they were specifically making a comment or whether they were responding organically, emotionally, they finally had that creative epiphany, I'm not sure. But to me, one of the things I love about watching West Wing is that Aaron Sorkin and the team of writers and actors on that show seem to wrestling, week in and week out, with ideas. And they are responsive to the real world. Much more immediately responsive than television has ever been before, in my estimation. I just love that, even on a $370 million movie that they have been working on for years, on some level the filmmakers can echo or engage. When the movies were made we weren't thinking about this. People would say, "Lord of the Rings is going to be such a success," when we were filming in '99 or 2000. And I said, "You never know." I produced a play in Los Angeles that we had to close because there were riots. When you sign your contract there's force majeur language that talks about floods and pestilence and acts of God. You almost don't think about it being real when you sign the contract, but anything can happen. I would say that to people.

Then, on September 11th, when the tragedy hit, I was getting ready to do something with Lord of the Rings that day I'm sure, and I knew that Elijah was in New York, he was on a plane back from New York. What does that mean? What does that mean for the victims, what does it mean for all of us? What does it mean that I spent two and a half years and my career is like - I don't know if it was an hour or five hours after that I started thinking this - but, "Wow, I'm so grateful and proud that I am part of a movie that will have value, even more currency, in light of this tragedy, even more than it would have before this tragedy."

Q: You had a strong career before Lord of the Rings. Has the incredible success of the movie affected you? What has changed, if anything?

Astin: I lost 35 pounds. I had a baby, now a four month old baby.

Q: There are those 35 pounds!

Astin: Talk to my wife about that!

Q: A boy or a girl?

Astin: Another girl. I don't know how to make a boy. I would have five girls. I'm more than happy to have girls.

I'm acting in a television show in Vancouver called Jeremiah, with Luke Perry and Malcolm Jamal Warner.

Q: How did that come about and what is your character?

Astin: I play Mr. Smith, who is either an unwitting prophet of sorts or kind of a Shakespearian fool, you don't know which. He claims God is speaking to him and he seems to know a lot more than he rightly should. It's a fun part to play.

It came about because my name was on a list at MGM, and I'm sure I was higher on that list after the success of Lord of the Rings than it was before, and it came to me as an offer. I watched a lot of the episodes of the first season, and read the script and looked at the money and thought about my family and saw what the time commitment was and said yeah. I got the comic, it's based on a Dutch comic book, and I met with Joe Straczynski, the creator of the show who worked on Babylon 5 and thought I don't mind allowing this guy to be my puppeteer for fifteen episodes. He seemed like an intriguing, interesting guy who had something to say, so it's worth giving myself over to his vision for fifteen episodes.

Q: How many episodes are there in a season for this show?

Astin: Fifteen. I guess I'm in thirteen of the fifteen. I'm not in this episode because I'm here and I wasn't in an episode three weeks ago because I was directing Angel.

Q: What episode is that?

Astin: The episode of Angel is called "Soulless." I felt like I had arrived! I was driving onto the Paramount lot and I was a director. When we would go on location before I would get there I would see this huge line of trucks and this catering tent and I would look at the slate and it would say "Director Sean Astin," and I would be, "Wow, cool."

But it was hard! It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It's a very specific challenge, directing episodic television. I was fortunate enough to, right after Lord of the Rings, observe Alex Graves on West Wing for a week, and to observe Alan Ball for a week on Six Feet Under, and to observe Richard Lewis on CSI. So I literally just say there on the set watching these directors work, and trying to get to know the Powers That Be on the shows so that I could maybe get a slot. It's a very unique beast. It's not like what Peter Jackson was able to do in terms of creating his vision. You have to synthesize 37 different personalities and attitudes. I thought of it like Green Mile, remember Michael Clark Duncan, when he would sort of suck the cancer out of somebody and kind of blow it off. I had to suck all the disparate feelings from all these different people and then get rid of it and allow them to do their work. It was a fascinating challenge, and I look forward to doing more of that.

Q: How was that episode to shoot?

Astin: It's a good episode. I'm nervous about what to say about it because, it isn't the highest ranking show, it's lower in the ratings, but it has a very loyal coterie of followers on the Internet and they want to know what happens next. It was a great episode, where Angelus factors prominently.

Q: When does the episode air?

Astin: February sweeps, I think.

Q: So do you think you'll do more directing?

Astin: On some level, yeah. Things are really clicking for me right now, I'm having a fun ride. A producer said to me, "You're really riding the peak of a lot of crests at the moment." I know at some point that will wane and I think I'll be prepared to relax a little when it does, but I'm getting to do what I want to do. I really want to carry a picture, to be the lead. I don't want to be the friend or the fat guy. I was determined to lose the weight before doing publicity so that when I go on talk shows or I'm in magazines and stuff like that, and executives see it, they might be able to think of me as a leading man. That is something I would love to be.

Q: In Rudy you were the leading man.

Astin: See there's some precedent there!

The above interview with Sean Astin and the following interview with John Rhys-Davies is from Cinematic Happenings Under Development (Chud.com):

GABBING WITH GIMLI: JOHN RHYS-DAVIES INTERVIEW

12.10.02
By Devin Faraci

John Rhys-Davies is well known for dozens of film roles, including parts in the Indiana Jones films, but it seems safe to say that his turn as Gimli the dwarf in Lord of the Rings will be one of his most memorable parts. In the Two Towers, Davies does double duty both as Gimli and the voice of the ancient Ent, Treebeard, who is basically a walking tree.

Davies came into the interview room on a cane, much thinner than I had ever seen him. He immediately launched into the story behind his injuries.

Davies: I was filming La Femme Musketeer in Croatia. The children of the Musketeers have grown up and they have all become Musketeers themselves, including Valentine, who is D'Artagnan's daughter. They get into trouble in Paris and the old guard rides to their rescue. Depardieu as the evil Cardinal Mazarin, the wonderful Nastassja Kinski plays Lady Bolton. Michael Yorke plays D'Artagnan!

So I'm called to the set and they say "Hang on John, we're just fixing up the crane with a safety harness. So just stand by for a second." Suddenly there is that "Whoooooaaaaaaaa!" At a certain pitch it transcends language. You suddenly realize somewhere something is falling. And just instinctively I put my hands up, because I'm wearing this big Musketeer's hat. So I figure something is falling somewhere, I hope it's not a lamp on my head, and as I put my hand up, this wall, it's about three feet away - it's about twelve feet high. It's two feet deep, and it's ply and all that sort of thing. It's capped with about six or eight rows of that Mediterranean roofing tiles. One of which hits me here [points to a shaved portion of his head, just above his forehead]. You must admit, the haircut's a little unusual! It scalps me through the hat, and if you had looked about seventeen days ago you would have actually seen a very large quantity of bare bone.

Q: This happened seventeen days ago?!

Davies: Yeah. It hits me; fortunately because I had my armor I was able to break it. It knocked me on my back. I hit the ground and I heard the forearm go, it was like pencils breaking. I'm lying there, under the wall, and normally - I was playing with a car once and the jack slipped and I was pinned by the car. There's always a fudge factor. You can always just turn slightly enough to get the breath back in you. There was no fudge factor with this. It took thirty guys to lift it off of me. When they did, I just begged them, "Don't move me, don't move me!" I had blood pouring from my head, and I was sure my pelvis was gone. I could not believe, from the pain in my back that I hadn't got spinal damage. These guys held this wall up for the 28 minutes it took the ambulance to get there. It was one of the most incredible things you've ever seen. It was so primal. Suddenly the hunters had gathered around someone who was trapped under a mammoth, trying to hold it up. There was absolute silence. These wonderful, tall, handsome, strong stunt guys, these crew members, all covered in dust, some in costume with some of my blood splashed on it. They were all braced in these positions of lifting, absolute silence until there would be this little interrogatory query, and a grunt, and one of them would slide out and someone else would slide in to take his place. It was such an exaltation of what manhood is really about. The courage of the tribe. The courage of the hunters. It is a glorious thing to be a man, I can tell you.

Q: You must have felt so suddenly mortal.

Davies: Mortality you feel certainly. You go through that full cycle: of when the shock hits you; you survive three days in hospital without more than the occasional whimper of abject pain. But the moment when I was back in the hotel, my fellow actors were visiting me all the time and [director] Chris Cazenove came in and said, "John, I couldn't believe it. One moment you were standing there having your photograph taken by a woman with her two little children. I turned away and it seemed literally a minute later the wall was on top of you. And I thought, 'Good God, there are children under there.'" And that was the moment the shock actually hit and I burst into tears. I was thinking about these children. They had been standing there just a minute before.

To be honest with you, I'm lucky that I'm a tough old cookie. And because I have a very deep and barrel chest, that took the burden of the wall.

Q: So what was the final damage?

Davies: Well, the back was pretty mangled. Nothing broken. This is broken still [At this point he rolls up his sleeve and shows us his broken forearm, not in any sort of a cast. As he flexes the wrist you can see where it's broken. Kind of creepy], but look at that. It's just over two weeks but look at that mobility. It'll be wrapped up for the premiere; I don't want people hitting it. And I was so scalped. If one of the tiles came off that way [points to the bridge of his nose] or that way [right at his forehead], I'd be done.

Q: What is a Croatian hospital like?

Davies: Soviet factory, 1950. Leaking radiators and all that stuff. BUT- if you are going to have traumatic injury, pick a place that's just out of a civil war. They have more experience with traumatic injury in a month than most surgeons get in two or three years. Every doctor I've shown the x-rays [of the arm] to have said, "God, beautiful job, who did it?" This never had a cast on it.

I'll tell you, two weeks ago, I spent a day, and the whole goal of the day was to get this nurse to teach me how to get out of my bed. That was my whole horizon. It's such an extraordinary thing to sort of go from be limitless in one's imagination to thinking "How can I get this hurt reduced to the point that I could actually get out of bed and stagger to the bathroom all by myself?"

I remember once I had a plane crash in Zimbabwe, and the doctor, when he patched the leg up, said, "Well we've done as good a job as we can with the leg," and I said, "Am I going to be hobbling for the rest of my life?" He said, "No, I think you'll get that back. But you'll never run a four minute mile again."

Q: What made the wall fall? What happened?

Davies: Therein lies the lawsuit! By and large you should not design sets that fall over and threaten the lives of your actors. That's one of the rules. I think I'm allowed to say this.

Q: Lord of the Rings is something we would think of as a much more arduous shoot. Any injuries on that?

Davies: Nothing. I mean, there are always bruises and bumps and things go wrong. Whenever you're doing those fights. It always happens at the end of the day, when you've been doing it a lot, and the muscles are just a little bit tired and you have one more take. Somebody's control is just lessened slightly. I believe Viggo had a tooth knocked out. You can't help those things. That's just par for the course. But by and large, particularly us older guys, we've been around and seen a lot of stupid stuff happen, we're very wary. First thing is now, wait a minute, how safe is this, how can we make this easy for ourselves? What matters is what it looks like, not that we actually put our lives on the line. But filming is like farming, it's a dangerous old business. A lot of accidents happen on the farm, and a lot of nasty things can happen on a film set too.

Q: Is it easier to just do the voice?

Davies: Do you know, no? When Peter Jackson came to me and said, "Would you like to do the voice of Treebeard as well?" I said, "Of course, yes, absolutely." But I lost more sleep over Treebeard than over Gimli. You read the book, you see what Gimli is like and if you're an actor you realize you've just got to commit yourself to it. Find the voice. Find the way he walks. Find the shape. Find the belligerent face. And do it. That's just part of the sort of normal construction work all actors do when creating a part that's well-written.

Treebeard is different because you cannot play Treebeard as it is written. He is very slow: "Now……….young hobbit………let's not… be……… too hasty." The film is dead. The film is absolutely on the ground. So what you have to do is find a way of suggesting the slowness and the ancientness, but at the same time you can't lose the huge elemental anger that exists in him as well. We set ourselves this limit: We would do anything with a human voice that we could, but we wouldn't use more than a human voice. We wouldn't synthetically create something from scratch. We spent really three, four, five weeks just experimenting. We were making every voice that you can. You remember the wonderful Jack Hawkins? You remember when Jack lost his voice to cancer, he had to learn speak with belches. [burps out some words] That was how he communicated. Did you understand what I said?

Q: Good morning to you all.

Davies: Yes, very good!

Q: I speak Belchish.

Davies: We even used some of that. Think about it - a tree doesn't have lungs, per se, so it should be possible to speak on the inhale as well as the exhale. It's madness to try and think how you are going to do this damn thing. I would wake up at night thinking "I don't know how to do this." You try so many things. Now I haven't seen the film yet, but I gather that what we ended up doing was the simplest thing we could do.

Q: Do you find that you now have kids coming up to you on the street? A new generation of fans?

Davies: No. How dumb do you have to be? Thirty years trying to be recognized and you bury yourself in a full prosthetic for three major movies. My career is over. All I should be offered now is the chance to play dwarves in German porno films with a strap-on. Now that's the real insult, isn't it?

Q: Tell us about Highbinders. What is that about?

Davies: I play another minor role in another of Jackie Chan's extraordinary - Jackie is one of the great physical comedians of our time. I have such a great admiration and respect for him. I bumped into him at Cannes and I just happened to say to him, "You are the Buster Keaton of our time." He managed to find a little part for me in Highbinders.

Q: What kind of movie is it?

Davies: It's an action, eh, I could tell you but I would probably be tortured. It's an action thing but it has a great fantasy element. It's got a sort of supernatural quality to it.

Q: You play what?

Davies: I play an Interpol policeman, his superior.

Q: In The Two Towers Gimli is very comedic. Did you know that going in?

Davies: One of the functions of being a character actor is that you really have to look at the script. I remember when I did Shogun, my function was to act as an engine for Richard Chamberlain. He was playing a passive hero, added to which he was surrounded by actors who weren't speaking English as a first language. So the whole… thing… got… very… slow. My function was to come into scenes with double the energy, chew the scenery - now I've become part of the scenery - impart an explosive energy so he could underplay and take his time. If I put enough energy into it it would carry for the next two or three scenes for him, so he could sculpt.

And with Gimli, part two is such an unrelieved act of tension. There isn't the humor or gentleness of the first part, it's action action action, and you can't have that arc through three hours. You have to build it and earth it, build it and earth it. It seemed natural to try and use Gimli, the earth figure if you like, as the lightning rod to try and take the tension out of things. And that can stem naturally from his own extraordinary and wonderful character. So we took a few liberties, but you understand Tolkein didn't write a film script. He wrote an impossible and an incredible and an imaginative work of fiction that he believed would never be filmable. So any attempt at it, you have to take certain liberties. But you're safe with Peter Jackson because he's the supreme fan. He loves this. The same thing with Treebeard. Because the part can be so risible -a walking, talking tree? We've seen this in Disney! - you run the risk of destroying the film if you don't get it right. On the other hand, the safe thing is just to cut it out. "We had so much material we just had to select." But what a disappointment for the readers. And one of his great tributes as a director is that he rises to those challenges. Those who run the risk of failure, knowingly, should get greater rewards.

I think we've made a masterpiece. I think Peter Jackson has made a masterpiece. When you see these three films all together you're going to regard it as one of the great pieces of epic filmmaking of all time.

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