Peter (cont.): – and you’re basically sitting in this rugged, hilly landscape with cliffs and lakes and 360˚ around you are snowy mountains; and it’s where we shot all of the Warg fight, shot – actually, scenes even for ‘The Return of the King’ are shot there. (beat) [The Forests of Ithilien] That was Andy Serkis actually going into that mountain –

Philippa: Icy river!

Peter: – river in the middle of winter.

Philippa: He’s mad!

Philippa: Freezing cold... freezing cold! Like, it was snow there: it was below zero. (beat) This location’s a good example of the simple art department: that we were filming in this slightly bushy kind of landscape – we just had a truck that used to drive around with pieces of polystyrene ruins; and it’s actually –. The ruins that we’re using in this scene are the Weathertop ruins: when we did Weathertop, we sort of saved the set because it had some quite nice polystyrene carved archways.

Philippa: Mmm.

Peter: When we wanted to dress up this location, make it look, like, a little bit ancient with the ruins, we just got the old Weathertop bits and pieces and just stuck them in the ground. (beat) We were shooting this in the North Island of New Zealand on an army artillery range, and we were filming it at the weekend and we thought there wasn’t going to be anything there – we obviously had permission to go there – but just at the moment that Sean said the line, “It’s the Ring” this huge artillery shell exploded about five hundred yards away! [laughs] And everybody just thought… had this huge shock; we were rolling the film, and you see Elijah, who flinches at the sound of this huge explosion, but then just, kind of, carries on acting – like, he’s a real trooper. It was also kind of nervous because it was right on the edge of an active volcano [Philippa laughs], and when you suddenly have this huge ground-shaking explosion happen, my initial thought was that the volcano had just blown up. It shows you how stressed out I was at the time. [All three laugh] (beat)