Peter Jackson, who helmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit prequel movies, has overseen over a thousand minutes of hobbits, elves, and dwarves in action – so it may come as a surprise that the director can narrow things down to pick a favourite scene.
In an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jackson revealed that the scene in question was written and directed by his partner, Fran Walsh.
“We were shooting Two Towers and it was introducing Gollum," he said. "A key thing with Gollum is that most people know he's Sméagol and he's Gollum, it's like a split. But we hadn't got a scene where you really got the idea of, 'This guy is two people.' So we knew that we needed it but we had no time to shoot it.
“So Fran wrote a scene where Sam and Frodo are asleep, so they can be just lumps in the bed, we don't even have to have Elijah and Sean. We didn't have anyone to direct it, so I said to Fran, 'You wrote it, you should shoot it.' So she went in for a day and she wrote and directed a scene which has become pretty famous now.”
Both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies are being remastered in 4K to fix visual inconsistencies between the two trilogies and give us a fresh glimpse of the fantasy epic. Plus, we’ll have the chance to see Middle-earth on our screens anew on Amazon Prime – here’s everything we know so far about the Lord of the Rings TV show.
