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EE Commentary Transcripts
The Passing of the Elves

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Peter (cont.): [The Passing of the Elves] This was a sequence that we deleted from the theatrical version of the film, and it’s actually a sequence in which a couple of stills – a couple of photographic images – have appeared in lots of books and magazines, and I’m sure people that were paying attention wondered, when they saw the movie, just the fact that these shots were not actually seen; I know Frodo in the tree was… quite commonly appeared in magazines at the time of the film’s release, and another shot that I saw a lot of in magazines was this one here of Frodo and Sam peering over the log, so here you get to finally see where these shots came from. (beat) We liked the idea of this little episode from the… it’s sort of from the book, it’s –. Obviously in the book, they stop and they talk to these Elves that they encounter walking through the Shire, but in the movie, we never filmed the conversation, but we did want to at least get the feeling of the sadness of the Elves leaving Middle-earth; it’s something that we encounter again when we reach Rivendell, but we initially didn’t intend for Rivendell to be the first time that we encounter Elves. (beat) [Frodo and Sam trying to sleep] And I liked just this little moment: it’s very slight, but it just acknowledges the fact that Hobbits, which are very comfort-loving creatures, are now having to sleep rough; they’re not in their own bed: something that Frodo manages much better than Sam, who really is not used to this sort of lifestyle in the slightest. These were amongst the very first shots that we ever did. We… I think this particular shot of the boys by the campfire was shot on our third day of shooting.

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The Lord of the Rings and its content does not belong to me, it is property of the Tolkien Estate;  the commentaries transcribed here, as well as the images used, are the property of New Line Cinema.