Philippa: But more importantly that he wanted to go home.

Peter: Yeah. And that –.

Philippa: That was the critical part of it.

Peter: Yeah, and that this scene with Elrond and Gandalf is deliberately attempting to retch at the tension back into the story again. (beat) This was another pick-up.

Fran: And it was –. This one was done so close to the bone that we didn’t have time to ADR Ian’s side of the dialogue, so all of that had to be cleaned, do you remember?

Peter: Yeah.

Fran: We had to check it on the day.

Peter: Because Ian was, like, shooting this scene, and then he was flying back to England.

Fran: Yes.

Peter: Oh, he was actually flying to New York to do his play, and so we didn’t have time to do any voice recording afterwards, so we had to do it as –. We had to stop for the aeroplanes, we had to get as clean a dialogue track as we possibly could.

Fran: Yes.

Philippa: And they are shooting, sort of, right next door to Wellington Airport! [Philippa and Fran laugh] So you can imagine what that was like!

Fran: Well we used to have a plane-spotter…

Philippa: That’s right.

Fran: …who was positioned somewhere near the airport, and would radio in when a 747 was about to take off! And we’d get a two minute warning [laughs], and we’d [?] the cast down and let a plane over.

Peter: That’s right,

Philippa: Hugo had a cold, didn’t he? He had that great, deep, sexy voice on that day!

Peter: He had the flu. He was sick.

Philippa: [at same time as Peter] He had the flu, yeah.

Peter: He was very, very sick.

Philippa: But he sounded great, I thought.

Fran: Yes, we kept that voice. (beat) [Boromir rides into Rivendell] Here’s Sean.

Peter: These are introducing three of our key characters now, obviously. We grappled again with how we introduced Boromir, Legolas and Gimli, and we tried various things through drafts of the script, didn’t we?

Fran: Yeah.

Peter: You know, at one point I remember that the script had a big Rivendell party. We had a, like a big [Philippa: Yes] reception, and there was singing [Philippa: Yes] and food and much jolly…

Philippa: Merriment.

Peter: …partying. Jolly merriment! [All three laugh] And that these characters would be introduced at the party: this was, like, the night before the Council; but we abandoned that, and…

Philippa: Yeah.

Fran: Well we did: we counted that within the Rivendell sequence – which itself is about twenty-five minutes long – there were seven introductions of…

Philippa: Yes, yes.

Fran: …of character introductions, which was really horrendous.

Philippa: [at same time as Fran] It was overload.

Fran: And to try not to base whole scenes around introducing people, because that would become fairly dull. It was a real challenge.

Peter: What I like about the way we ended up using our prologue was that, apart from the prologue itself at the beginning of the film, we… A couple of times during the course of the movie, we keep building on the prologue, so rather than just reprising the same thing that you’ve seen before, you’re developing it, so, you know, here we are in the Crack of Doom with Elrond and Isildur that we didn’t –. We never saw this at the beginning of the movie, but you’re able to now piece it together. It was quite a good device, I think, of trying to let audiences – especially those that hadn’t read the book – sort of put two and two together in a way that was easy enough to understand and yet wasn’t too obvious. (beat) This was a scene that Fran directed, big scene in the Crack of Doom.

Philippa: Also, the other character that Hugo Weaving voices – he actually voices two characters in this film – the other being Isildur’s great “No”.