Fran (cont.): … and the centipede murdered it on camera! I didn’t know they were so [Philippa: Oh!] dangerous!

Peter: No.

Fran: It was terrible –.

Philippa: [surprised] The centipede took out the weta?

Fran: Yes! Yes, it –.

Peter: [at same time as Fran] It wrapped itself around the weta and, kind of, killed it – it was horrible!

Fran: It just, sort of, crushed it to pieces!

Philippa: Oh no!

Peter: It was a bit of a tragic moment.

Fran: And we were horrified!

Philippa: [Merry: “That Black Rider was looking for something… or someone”] Mount Victoria again. [screen cap]

Peter: Yeah.

Philippa: Night time.

Peter: Yup.

Philippa: [Hobbits crouch down, hiding from the Nazgûl] And that is not Mount Victoria. [screen cap]

Fran: It’s Nelson.

Peter: That’s Nelson, yeah. Now these shots of the horse are on Mount Victoria at night, at, like, 2 o’clock in the morning [screen cap]; these shots of the Hobbits are at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. That was another scene we shot at Nelson while we were waiting for the weather to clear on the mountains. We took the guys into the trees and we shot all these close ups, and we, sort of, put a dark cover over the trees, made it as dark as we could, and we filmed them so they’d match. All this dialogue here is actually done in the middle of the day. [Hobbits run away from hiding place] But now we’re back to Mount Victoria, in the middle of the night [screen cap]. And this is… This stuff here was shot on my birthday: this was the first birthday I had.

Philippa: 1999

Peter: I had two of them, yeah, two of them while we were shooting, but this was the first one.

Philippa: That was your 29th birthday.

Peter: Oh, I don’t know, it was my 16th, wasn’t it? [Philippa laughs] It seems like such a long time ago!

Philippa: Child genius! [All three laugh]

Peter: [Hobbits run towards Bucklebury Ferry] Ah, this was funny, this day! This was one of those great nights, too, where you get a hell of a lot of stuff shot, and this Bucklebury Ferry was built, again, up in Otaki about twenty miles north of where we were based, and we shot this all through the night, and Elijah was just great, I mean, he ran –. And watch this jump, because this is the real jump – it’s not a stuntman, it’s actually Elijah, and he does this huge jump! Bang! It looks pretty –. It’s more dangerous that what it actually looks like, because the boat was really floating, and floating away, and he had to make that huge leap. And what was funny about this night too was that the Bucklebury Ferry started to sink! [Philippa laughs] And our producer, Barrie Osborne, who had some yachting experience, sort of stood on here at about 3 o’clock in the morning, trying to explain to the crew how bilge pumps work, and we had these hand-operated pumps that pumped the water out of the Bucklebury Ferry so that it wouldn’t sink.