Peter: [The Song of the Entwives] Now this scene, in the theatrical version was sort of a slightly different form. It was – it had some of the same content, but it was much shorter, and this is the full-length version of the scene, which we made a lot funnier, and it was… The one thing that I wish we could have hung on to, actually, is Treebeard’s poetry, because it kind of gives the character an unexpected, humorous slant, which I think the theatrical would have probably benefited from a bit; but it was slow, and it was something that, you know, when we were dealing with a film that we had to get down to three hours was just something we decided that we could do without.

Philippa: I think it’s lovely, and it’s a real nod towards Professor Tolkien’s own love of poetry.

Peter: Yeah. Bad poetry or good poetry?

Philippa: [laughing] Well…

Peter: [laughing] A lot of people have criticised –.

Philippa: We’re Merry and Pippin, so that’s not to say it’s –.

Peter: A lot of people have criticised Treebeard for being a bit slow – you know how a lot of reviews [Philippa agrees] said that Treebeard was kind of slow and boring; and what this scene does is it sort of celebrates the fact he’s slow and boring [laughs] and it makes a [Philippa: Yeah.] humorous point of it, which I think, actually… The film would have benefited from that, because then you would have got it: you’d have thought, “Oh, okay. Oh, right. This guy’s slow and boring” and accepted it more…

Philippa: Mmm.

Peter: Rather than it being, sort of, an irritant.

Philippa: Who said he was slow and boring?

Peter: Oh, there’s all sorts of reviews have said that… some of them. I mean, the bad reviews have said that. The good reviews like him.

Philippa: Yeah. (beat) I love that shot. [screen cap] It’s so [?great].

Peter: So, in a shot like this, you see, you’ve got… Dominic and Billy are actually riding on a big prosthetic creature that Richard Taylor’s guys made, and we replaced just the head with a computer-generated head: everything else is rubber – is a big rubber rig. [Treebeard lays Merry and Pippin down to sleep] They were lowered down on wires and then the wires were painted out and Treebeard’s arms were added in by the computer. [Treebeard: “I have business in the Forest.”] And this stuff’s all about Treebeard and the Forest; because, I think if you don’t know the ‘law’ of the Forest that Tolkien wrote, you know, you get confused with what Treebeard actually is: people obviously think he’s a tree, but Ents are not trees. They’re sort of like humanoid creatures who obviously look like trees, but they are Shepherds of the Forest; and the Forest is a whole other form of life – the natural trees – which are actually very dangerous.