Peter (cont.): This shot of Viggo floating down the river [screen cap] was one in which he nearly drowned. I wasn’t there shooting the wide shots of him floating down, and I didn’t actually know he’d nearly drowned until I read it in an interview in Premier Magazine! [laughs] But he said he got –

Philippa: [at same time as Peter] Determined to do it himself.

Peter: – sucked under the, sort of, undertow; and I never actually heard about it [Philippa: Mmm.] while we were shooting, for some reason.

Fran: Oh, he told us about it.

Peter: Sounded terrifying. (beat) [Arwen: “May the grace of the Valar protect you.”] Fran shot this moment. It was one of the last days of pick-ups, wasn’t it, Fran? At the very…

Fran: Last day.

Peter: Yeah, the last day of pick-ups.

Fran: One of the things that became apparent with us working with Liv was that we needed to bring the character back to the books: that we had to somehow make her bigger than the books and make her more actively involved in the story and in the plot of the story; and the more we did that, the more it moved away from being the true sense of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, and so… It was Liv that pointed that out to us, and in the trilogy, she remains true to her essence and to the world of the Elves, rather than to the world of the Fellowship, if you like, which is all of Middle-earth.

Peter: [Brego awakens Aragorn] So this is Brego, who is played by Uraeus, and it’s a horse that Viggo now owns. The horse and Viggo had worked together to work this routine up, because, you know, the horse needs a certain amount of training and trust to be able to do this, and so Viggo had –. The weekends –. He’d gone up and worked with the horse in his days off to make sure that we could do that. I know that Viggo, in order to connect with the horse and to get to know the horse – and for the horse to get to know him – he actually used to occasionally sleep in the stables with the horse [Philippa: Mmm.] …