Look, Tolkien in his academicals!

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
2003 | dir. Peter Jackson

Continuing to watch through the Writer/Director commentary of LotR (with Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh) and jotting down any new-to-me information I come across. Here's what I gleaned from TTT:

• When they got the New Line logo to put on the movies, it was very old and scratched, so PJ gave it to Weta to touch it up. They joked about how they should bill New Line for it XD
• Originally, the studio wanted TTT to start off with a prologue too, with Cate Blanchett narrating what sounds like it was basically going to be a "Previously on..." spiel, even though they didn't like the idea of the prologue in the first one. Thankfully, these three ignored the studio's advice both times XD
• The Uruk who says "Manflesh" is also the guy in Sauron's armor in the prologue!
• In the scene where the Rohirrim find Theodred, it's not actually raining! They used rain towers for the close-ups, but any wide shots just have CG rain. I would never have guessed!
• Andy Serkis did the voices for the Uruk-Hai who says the "maggoty bread" line, and the orc who says, "Yeah, why can't we have some meat?" (The actor in the suit for the latter is, of course, Jed Brophy, who went on to play Nori in the Hobbit movies.)
• Somehow it never registered for me that Orlando Bloom has brown eyes, and so he had to wear blue contacts when he played Legolas ^^' But sometimes he wasn't able to wear the contacts (or forgot), so there are some scenes where they had to fix it in post.
• PJ called the Treebeard from the animated Bakshi movie "a walking carrot" XD He also said that Treebeard is his favorite character!
• The scene with Smeagol killing Deagol was originally going to be a flashback right after Frodo says his name, and then the Nazgul shriek would pull the audience out of the flashback. They decided not to do that for pacing reasons and because we haven't spent much time with Gollum yet, so that's why they put it at the beginning of RotK instead.
• Bernard Hill had his son with him on the shoot and would play with him in his downtime on the Edoras set. Puts things into perspective when you hear that he was the one who came up with the line "No parent should have to bury their child."
• They were originally looking at Bernard Hill for Gandalf! (I feel like I've probably heard this before, but anyway.)
• They filmed a flashback to Aragorn and Arwen's first meeting?! Viggo shaved to make himself look younger, and it was a scene of the two of them "frolicking about the forest." It was originally going to be put in the Lothlorien sequence, but they cut it out in favor of that scene between Aragorn and Boromir, because they decided it was more important to earn Boromir's death scene than to remind the audience of the romance. I agree with that decision, but it would be cool to see that footage! (I say as someone who prefers to skip the TTT Aragorn/Arwen scene entirely XD)
• Originally, the warg battle was going to happen at Edoras itself. It was going to be at night, everything was going to be on fire, and ultimately that was going to be the reason everyone evacuated and went to Helm's Deep. Also, a warg was going to be set on fire and end up dragging Aragorn through the streets, and that was going to be how Aragorn would be left for dead. Ultimately, the reason they did it the way they did was because the studio wasn't sure Weta could do a flaming warg (something all three of them laughed about, considering everything Weta did manage to do with flying colors), and because it would have been a nightmare to light the Edoras set at night, because that location was so remote and so windy. Which is why every scene in Edoras takes place in the daytime!
• In the scene where Faramir talks about his dream where he saw Boromir in the boat, you can see a sort of pinkish color in the water around Boromir's body. That's because the dye from his shirt (surcoat? idk) was leaking out into the water! XD
• When Andy Serkis did ADR for the Forbidden Pool scene, he couldn't manage to sing the song off-key, so they had to use the audio from the motion capture footage XD
• They shot some additional footage of Aragorn unconscious on Brego's back, riding past an orc encampment, that they never ended up using.
• Theoden was originally going to give a speech to the soldiers in the armory, but Bernard Hill's performance was so inspiring that it defused most of the tension they were trying to build up before the battle, so they took it out. Would love to see that footage!
• So the boy Aragorn encourages before the battle ("There is always hope.") was Philippa Boyens' son, who was 13 when they filmed the scene. But by the time they went to do ADR, his voice had broken, so they had to get a different child actor to say his lines.
• Aww, the extra who was missing an eye said he always felt self-conscious about his missing eye, so he always wore an eyepatch. But then after they gave him a close-up and the guy saw the movie, he said he felt much better about his appearance! :')
• Treebeard's line "I always like going south; it feels like going downhill" was ad-libbed!
• When Saruman turns and reacts to all the water pouring in and washing his machinery away, that shot was actually a reaction shot to Wormtongue on top of the tower from the RotK movie that they repurposed for this scene instead, since they hadn't shot any reactions to the flood.
• At least at the time of the recording of this audio commentary, the final shot of Gollum, where he's arguing with himself and ultimately decides to lead Frodo and Sam to Shelob, was the longest CG shot in any movie. (I tried to google what the current record is, but couldn't find anything, so if anyone knows, I'd love to hear about it!)
• Fran Walsh: "All cinema storytelling, to a degree, is shallow. That's the nature of the medium. You've got two or three hours to present a world and a dense story with a hundred themes and a ton of backstory, in this instance, and 22 characters...so you can only really have the veneer of depth. You really can't have anything that comes close to the depth of the books, or the experience of the books. So I think what we attempted to do was to use the language of the books where we could and to certainly invoke them, the iconic images, where we could, but to keep the storytelling very much...to modernize it, if you like, in terms of cinema language. So we didn't, for example, use the style of storytelling that was in the books between these different after-the-fact storytelling, of Sam and Frodo and then a chunk of the Aragorn story. We completely undercut it. That was a far more immediate and engaging way to connect it to the audience. You can't really hope to satisfy people who adore this book, with the movie. You can only ever give them the sense of what might have been. That's all a film can do. I think, in that sense, films...I mean, they're entertainments. They're just not going to give you the pleasure that a book can give you."

ARAGORN in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) dir. Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring

• Most composers spend just 10-12ish weeks working on a film’s music. John Williams spent around 14 weeks on each Star Wars movie, 40ish weeks total for the whole OT……but composing the LOTR trilogy’s soundtrack took four years
  
• The vocals you hear in the soundtrack are usually in one of Tolkien’s languages (esp. Elvish). The English translations of the lyrics are all poems, or quotes from the book, or occasionally even quotes from other parts of the films that are relevant to the scene
• When there were no finished scenes for him to score, Howard Shore would develop musical themes inspired by the scripts or passages from the book. That’s how he got all Middle-Earth locations have their own unique sound: he was able to compose drafts of “what Gondor would sound like” and “what Lorien would sound like” long before any scenes in those places were filmed
• Shore has said his favorite parts to score were always the little heartfelt moments between Frodo and Sam
  

Originally posted by tlotrgifs

• Shore wrote over 100 unique leitmotifs/musical themes to represent specific people, places, and things in Middle Earth (over 160 if you count The Hobbit)
• The ones we all talk about are the Fellowship theme, the main Shire Theme, and the themes for places like Gondor, Mordor, Rohan, and Rivendell…but a lot of the more subtle ones get overlooked and underappreciated
  
• Like Aragorn’s theme. It’s a lot less “obvious” than the others because, like Aragorn himself, it adapts to take on the color of whatever place Aragorn is in: it’s played on dramatic broody stringed instruments in Bree, on horns in  battle scenes, softly on the flute with Arwen in Rivendell….
• Eowyn has not just one but three different leitmotifs to represent her
• Gollum and Smeagol both have their own leitmotifs! Whose theme music is playing in the scene can often tell you whether the Gollum or Smeagol side is “winning” at the moment

Originally posted by middleearthsource

• The melody for Gollum’s Song in the end credits of the The Two Towers is the Smeagol and Gollum themes smushed together (it’s Symbolic)
• And then there’s the really obscure ones. Like there’s a melody that plays at Boromir’s death that shows up again in ROTK in scenes that foreshadow a major death or loss
• Wikipedia actually has a list of these leitmotifs, click this link and scroll down to check it out if you’re bored
  

Originally posted by arwencuar

• Shore wanted the theme music to grow alongside the characters– so that as the characters changed, their theme music would change with them.  
• You can hear that most clearly in the Shire theme. Like the hobbits, it goes through A Lot 
  
• Like compare the childish lil penny whistle theme you hear in Concerning Hobbits/the beginning of FOTR with (throws a dart at random Beautiful Tragic Hobbit Character Development scene because there WAY TOO MANY to choose from) the scene when Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield, where you hear a kind of shattered and broken but more mature version of that same theme in the background 

• I could write you a book on how much I love the way the Shire theme grows across the course of these films 
• Unlike the hero’s themes, which constantly change and grow, the villain’s themes (The One Ring theme, the Isengard theme, etc) remain basically the same from the very beginning of FOTR to the end of ROTK. Shore said this was an intentional choice: to emphasize that evil is static, while good is capable of change
• Shore has said that between all the music that made into the movies and the music that didn’t, he composed enough for “a month of continuous listening”……..where can I sign up

I’ll just leave that here for your viewing pleasure…

SANTIAGO CABRERA as COUNT VRONSKY in ANNA KARENINA (2013)
requested by anonymous

Season 1 Musketeers

Season 2 Musketeers

Season 3 Musketeers

3. Old Friends.

(The Musketeers Season 3, Episode 1 - Spoils of War)

BBC Musketeers couples ⚜️⚔️⚔️⚜️

Thought I’d post them all together

The Confession.

(The Musketeers Season 2, Episode 9 - The Accused)