Peter: [The Sword That Was Broken] And this is where we start to flesh out Aragorn’s character, because, you know, at this point in time, we’ve only known him as Strider – a fairly enigmatic Ranger – but, you know, Aragorn has this very complex, sort of, psychological story, really. Well, we’ve made it more complex, in a sense that what is actually in the books, of the fact that he is the heir to the throne of Gondor. The Broken Sword – which I didn’t want to introduce in Bree being pulled out of the scabbard –, so this is the way that we decided to present the Sword. Alan Lee designed that wonderful statue holding the shield.

Fran: And painted the triptych on the back wall that Boromir’s just looked at.

Peter: Yeah.

Fran: Which is beautiful.

Peter: The introduction of Boromir, and his relationship with Aragorn, was fleshed out slightly more in the original footage that we shot. We trimmed it back in the theatrical version, but we just had this little piece of dialogue between the two. When we were making our decisions about what to include in the film, we felt that the scene in the Council where Boromir and Aragorn have their little confrontation was a strong enough scene to be the first time that we see the two of them interact together; but we had already shot this, which was very nice, I mean, it’s very evocative, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it. We just felt that there was a slight piece of redundancy since they do have a moment together later in the Council. We really wanted to create a nice story between Boromir and Aragorn, because really, from this point on until the end of the film, the relationship between Boromir and Aragorn becomes one of our central pieces of dramatic structure, really.

Fran: [in agreement] Mmm.

Philippa: Ironically, one of the first scenes you shot with them together was the last scene that they had together; and the connection was so great and they worked so brilliantly together that we tried, from that moment on, to earn that scene.

Peter: That’s an Alan Lee painting – original painting – behind Liv, there. [screen cap] (beat) And this was a critical moment, too, to connect Aragorn and Arwen in a way that we only hint at in the forest, in the Trollshaw forest.

Philippa: [Arwen: “Your time will come”] I love Liv’s conviction here, and her strength.

Peter: Yeah. (beat) She has wonderful Elvish dialogue, and she makes it sound so real.