December 2011
62 posts
2 tags
3 tags
6 tags
Orlando and Flynn's Birthday Fundraiser is only at... →
Orlando Bloom fans are following in his footsteps to give him a wonderful birthday present. They are raising funds for charity:water, to provide clean and safe drinking water to those in need of it.
Please visit http://mycharitywater.org/bloombirthdays and be a part of this charity project.
1 tag
2 tags
8 tags
2 tags
So I got a Christmas theme going on right now!
You should check it out ;)
Happy Holidays! :D
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
1 tag
25 Things You Didn't Know About 'The Lord of the... →
1. There had been many attempts to make a live-action version of ‘Lord of the Rings’ dating back to the 1950s, when monster-magazine mogul Forrest J. Ackerman tried to develop a version. In the 1960s, the Beatles wanted to star in a version (it would have featured John Lennon as Gollum, Paul McCartney as Frodo, George Harrison as Gandalf, and Ringo Starr as Sam), and they approached...
4 tags
6 tags
2 tags
7 tags
7 tags
7 tags
Charity Water: Fans donate in honour of Orlando... →
Orlando Bloom’s fans have once again decided to give him and his baby boy, Flynn Bloom the gift of giving for their birthdays in January. Orlando Bloom has been very inspirational and supported many charities. Inspired by Soccer Aid 2008 by UNICEF, this fan initiated project aims to bring clean and safe drinking water to people across the world.
$2000, our aim, can bring safe drinking water...
1 tag
1 tag
4 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
4 tags
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
4 tags
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
lastallianceofelvesandmen:
7 tags
The Hobbits Reunited: Empire celebrates the 10...
Q: When was the last time all four of you were together?
Sean Astin: Shouldn't we say something like, 'there was a natural disaster and we all flew in, and Billy was doing the sand bags...'
Dominic Monaghan: Katrina. Um...
Billy Boyd: When was the last time we were all together?
Dominic Monaghan: You probably know, Billy, 'cos you're the missing link. The three of us (indicates Wood and Austin) have seen each other in America.
Sean Astin: I honestly can't remember.
Billy Boyd: I can't think of us all being together since after 2003.
Dominic Monaghan: No!
Billy Boyd: Even for a dinner, or something?
Dominic Monaghan: No, because I feel like we all had dinner...
Elijah Wood: I'm going to say it was in 2003 for Return of the King.
Sean Astin: No, I think it was after that.
Dominic Monaghan: A convention?
Sean Astin: If I had a gun to my head, I'd say it wasn't after 2006. Probably '05.
Dominic Monaghan: I think the simple answer is we don't know!
Elijah Wood: We're always together in our hearts.
(All, mockingly): Awwww....
Sean Astin: It's my heart, I need some space, bro.
Q: Sean, when you arrived, you said it feels like a lifetime ago that you were shooting, but when you get together, it's as if it were yesterday. Is that the way everyone feels?
Elijah: I think it's a weird mixture of both, to be honest with you. It feels like... It's 12 years ago in August that we all flew out there, so it feels crazy to conceive of that span of time, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like that much time has past.
Dominic: We fit into our dynamics easily enough, which makes you feel as if no time has passed. We fit into those slots really easily.
Sean: When people die, sometimes I just wait for them to walk into the room again and it's like that. We exist in each other's minds so indelibly that when we walk in the room it's easy.
Dominic: There's shorthand we have which is always there. And also, so much stuff happens separate from each other... I'll be in my office or something and I'll go to a bookshelf and pull out something and there'll be a picture of all of us. I'm always around that energy.
Elijah: And there is that thing too when we do see each other... I haven't seen Billy in months, but we reconnect instantly.
Sean: Whenever you experience something that's intense and life defining as we did together, it never goes away. You see it with people who were at war. Nobody has to say more than a syllable on the telephone and you know who it is. Just the tiniest sound of someone's voice.
Dominic: There's not even a need to speak about it.
Q: Well, I'm glad you're speaking to us about it. It would be very short interview otherwise.
Dominic: This interview is over!
Sean: No one can ever understand! But you're welcome to try.
Q: The first time you were in a room together, what were your first impressions of each other?
Sean: I liked Billy's accent.
Elijah: Our rapport was kind of instant. I will say there's something about the fact that we all knew it was unique what we were about to start. We had left our lives and were going to be together for more than a year. And there was that sense of being in it together. I remember the first time I met Dom, I was getting a wardrobe fitting and he came in. I hugged him immediately. I'd never met him before! So that was kind of a linking force for all of us really quickly. We knew it would be something we'd never experienced.
Dominic: It was intense, wasn't it? My personal thing... I met Billy and Elijah at the same time and I met Sean in the hotel foyer with the girls. No, just with (his daughter) Ally, in a stroller. I think I was a little bit intimidated by meeting Sean, because including everyone in the cast, Sean was the person I knew the most in terms of his work. The Goonies was a huge thing for me when I was a kid, and obviously I'd seen Rudy, so I was all nervous - "Sean Astin!" So I think I semi-avoided that interaction and tried to get to know his wife and daughter. How weird was that? I met Elijah and Billy in that costume fitting and it was, like, "Hey!” hug. So it's going to be like this. Then Elijah had to do something else and Billy and I ended up going into Wellington for a coffee and sat and asked each other for their story and what we'd been up to.
Sean: The thing that jumped into my mind was going to that military base... Do you remember the name of it?
Elijah: It's where we did all of our training.
Sean: Right. So the first day we did our training, remember the minivans which became the magical mystery minivans. They were always there whenever we needed to go, and Tall Paul was driving and we get there and I remember walking down this hallway into this big empty, open room and Bob Anderson was in there, the legendary English sword master who taught Errol Flynn and all those guys...
Elijah: Darth Vader...
Sean: Exactly. And there are our swords lying out and I remember it was awkward because while it was like Elijah said and we all hugged each other, and felt so lucky to be part of it, but this space we were in felt like, 'okay, now we're at work.' We needed to figure out who we were to each other and who owns their own space and then you got to pick your own sword.
Dominic: (To Elijah) You and I just slotted into being each other's sword partners and we'd never really talked about it. We just picked up swords. And Sean and Billy just partnered up.
Billy: I think it all had to do with upper body strength. (Elijah howls with laughter). Me and Sean thought if we fucking hit you guys with a sword, we'd put you through the fucking wall...
Dominic: Whereas we were the more sprightly ones.
Elijah: I think one of the first times that we would've all been in the same room after we initially met would've been an organised dinner. With Peter and, I think (Ian) McKellen.
Billy: This is my memory of that time...
Dominic: This'll be wrong...
Billy: There were three witches... No, wait a minute! That's wrong. No, my memory of it was there were dinners every night with someone else arriving. They were wanting to show us that Wellington had cool restaurants and all that, but they were sort of running out of them, because every night someone new would arrive. It felt like we were having dinners every night.
Elijah: That first couple of weeks was just all arrival dinners.
Sean: I remember Brian Bansgrove (chief lighting technician), when Elijah was sitting in the crook of a tree, going, "Let's get some light on the little bloke!" That's the first time I think we really met the crew. We'd been in this hermetically sealed preparation zone for six weeks and we show up like the trained bear in the circus. And suddenly we realise there's a good 200 people we're going to see every day.
Dominic: I think there was a feeling with the crew that there'd been so much preparation that we'd not been involved in, to finally see it come to fruition with the four main, iconic characters on set, that the crew were, like, "All right, this is it. This is what we've been working towards."
Q: Any particularly memorable crew members among them?
Dominic: There was a guy whose responsibility it was to clean out our toilets. And I felt like he must have felt sometimes like it was the best job ever. "Just sluiced out Ian McKellen's toilet, next I'm going to do John Rhys Davies'. Wonder if he's had a big breakfast? Never going to get to these dizzy heights again..." And he dumped the contents of Billy's toilet all over his body.
Billy: Yeah, someone told me that if it had been John Rhys Davies' toilet, it would have killed him.
Dominic: That's a true story actually.
Sean: He didn't do it intentionally, I add.
Dominic: It wasn't a sexual thing.
Sean: "At least I saw what Billy ate yesterday..."
Dominic: It was a shame because Billy had spinach quiche.
Billy: The good thing is, I could never use a toilet in a trailer.
Dominic: Because of that?
Billy: No, never even before that. I just don't like it. I don't like the idea of having a poo in a trailer. I'll go somewhere else.
Dominic: Like my trailer.
Billy: Yeah.
Q: Elijah has a role in The Hobbit. Are the rest of you planning to visit? And would you have any advice for Martin Freeman?
Dominic: I'm sure he's doing pretty well by now!
Sean: I saw him in the Empire pictures and he looked great.
Billy: Elijah said the feet are different now. Not that it's all about the feet. But they're easier to put on?
Elijah: They are. I don't know how much I'm at liberty to say...
Billy: All right! They're not different!
Elijah: Apparently they are new. They've changed the technology, which you would all be pissed off to learn!
Billy: Especially Sean.
Sean: I kept count of how many times we had the feet on, when they weren't on screen. It was at least 50 times.
Billy: My pinkie toe now lives beneath the other toes.
Elijah: Are you kidding?
Dominic: I think that's a Boyd hereditary thing.
Billy: Why?
Dominic: Because I've examined your son's feet.
Billy: And does his do it?
Sean: That's because he was born after shooting!
Elijah: And his feet are really hairy too...
Billy: They'll probably find that his feet are evolving. He can fun faster, swim better.
Elijah: That's not saying much...
Billy: No, human kind, not us! We can't run!
Dominic: Elijah and I have planned, because we try to get together around New Year's and one of the things we threw out this year was New Zealand. But with Elijah going back there in... a few days?
Elijah: A couple of weeks...
Dominic: And a few other factors, but Billy and I, and hopefully Elijah might go out to New Zealand next year. I want to go back to find a Weta (the cricket, not the FX house) and visit some of the places we filmed.
Billy: When were you back, Sean?
Sean: I did a movie, a miniseries called Hercules in 2004...
Billy: I haven't been back since the premiere of Return of the King.
Dominic: You would be welcomed with open arms. And what they do now is, it's weird, but any Hobbit walking down the streets of New Zealand, they throw Oleander lilies on the floor. You just get used to it. They did it at the premiere and they continued it on...
Sean: I'm excited to see how they do it. I haven't read the script, but I remember Peter distinctly saying when we were doing Rings that the reason he chose that as opposed to The Hobbit is because there's so much more, so I'm just curious to see how they'll get two films out of it, what they're going to pull from Tolkien's literary canon. It's going to be weird. It's weird to think of the crew being back together. What's going to happen is, there's going to be a lot of nostalgia for Lord of the Rings.
Q: Is it going to be weird watching The Hobbit and not having been involved?
Billy: I feel excited by not being part of it. I feel like I should have been hypnotised for Lord of the Rings so I could watch it fresh.
Sean: I think it'll feel like we are a part of it on the one hand and I feel like we'll enjoy it.
Elijah: It's like watching your family continue on a journey.
Billy: And I'm really excited it's Pete that's doing it.
Sean: It had to be.
Billy: It was interesting when it was going to be other people, but I just love that it's going to have that continuity.
Elijah: I love Guillermo and I was very exciting at the notion, because Pete originally didn't want to do it at all. When they chose Guillermo, it just made so much sense. They're cut from the same cloth. But I'm glad it's back in Pete's hands.
Billy: Even with what Pete did from Fellowship to Return, how he opened up his visual palette of what was allowed to be in there was exciting. So now after a few years...
Dominic: It always felt like to me, in his heart he never wanted to let it go. He was okay with producing and having his team do it, but something felt weird to let someone else direct it. And when it came back around...
Sean: I'm on record on about four trillion interviews from 2001 onwards saying there was no question in my mind that it would get made, even with the rights issues and Peter Jackson will direct it. When Guillermo was announced, though, I could just picture Peter and Fran watching Pan's Labyrinth and falling in love with it. But I couldn't accept that anyone else would make The Hobbit. I'm sure we'll get questions about whatever comes after The Hobbit too, for the rest of our lives.
Elijah: (Singing) The Silmarillion!
Sean: How do they do that?...
Q: What do you miss most about the filming process? And what do you miss the least?
Elijah: Aside from our issues with the feet? Because we've covered that for, what, 12 years? (Laughs) I miss Wellington. In terms of the filming experience, I miss that collective sense of camaraderie and family that we all felt. Certainly in the cast we were united, but also the crew. There was this large extended family in New Zealand and I miss them, that experience the most.
Dominic: Yeah. I've never ever had an experience since where I've felt like I've been working on a really huge small movie. This massive blockbuster beast, but you had a certain amount of connection to it, a certain intimacy. And then missing the least... I don't know man... My grumbles would be early mornings, but I didn't really mind them too much.
Billy: What about your cloak?
Dominic: Oh yeah! When we were in Rivendell, they give us these cloaks to help us disappear a little bit. And I had a real, violent reaction to them. So they put a piece of felt in where it would touch my neck. But if any part of the cloak actually touched it, it would go bright red and then I wouldn't hear the end of it from Billy. He'd call me Itchy Boy...
Billy: I kind of miss the acting experience. To have a character that goes through such a long arc is unusual, I think.
Dominic: I wasn't doing any of that stuff. I just put on the outfit...
Billy: Just trying not to get an itchy cloak...
Dominic: Hit my marks, remember my lines.
Billy: "It's really itchy... Wish it was seven o'clock..."
Elijah: The thing too of being in Wellington is it's a really special place to make a film because what Peter has done has literally created a home base for filmmaking. So every aspect of it exists there from the miniature unit to the mocap unit and it's like this little town of moviemaking and community. There's no place like it on the planet. It was in its infancy when we were there, it was being built up. There was a sense you could get in your car and go over to Weta and check in on what they were doing.
Billy: Yeah, the guy who was putting on your feet was also the guy who was making your doll, and you could see how it was coming along. "Make it more handsome, please..."
Sean: My daughter and I are rebelling against favourites lists. Like, what's your favourite movie? Fuck, I don't know...
Billy: She says fuck?
Dominic: Fuck, daddy!
Billy: Fuckin' movie, what do you think?
Sean: On any given day and on any given moment, you could step out of your trailer and take a deep breath and think, 'I am a part of something right now that is as important from a career perspective or artistic as anything I'll ever do.' You're in the South Island and you're looking at this majestic scenery - the mountains and the clear water... You're so filled with a sense of confidence and pride and looking around and knowing people are doing the greatest whatever it is and are operating at the top of their craft and I'm a part of it. The other side is, there are times where you think, 'I don't know if I can get through this, it's too hard.' It's overwhelming, the hours and the feet and the Elven broaches which would just jab into your throat. Elijah's feet were bloodied every day. And the pack I had to carry...
Elijah: Sam had to carry our fucking vittles...
Sean: It was like my suit of armour on the one hand, but you don't get when you're watching the movie that a bag probably wouldn't lay that looks iconographic. They have to put a post in it and tie it and cinch it down. The different people whose job it was before every shot to come up to me and basically tie me into a corset: "Okay, breathe in!" (Mimes sucking everything in). "Okay... It's tight... it's fine." You don't miss that either. It wasn't like we were doing work that was like in a steel mill, but for me it was hard.
Elijah: Endurance. You add up that many hours over that much time and it's hard to get through it. It was 16 months, but when you start, that seems so far away that you don't even focus on the end, you're just in it. The length of time was big physically, but in three months you could do a movie that feels just as long...
Sean: The thing I miss the most is about every three or four weeks we'd be going out on another of these dinners. And we'd usually all go together, but Billy would be, like, "No, no... I'm going to have a bath."
Billy: There are only so many dinners you can do, right?
Elijah: Billy in the bathtub became a thought in my mind. 'Oh, okay... Billy's in the bath.'
Billy: To the point that when we were doing the premiere tours that we'd seen the movie so much that we'd sit down, the movie would start and we'd go out and have dinner. But then those dinners got a bit... There's only so many times you can go out. So I'd just go back to the hotel, suit off, get into bed and get two hours' sleep before the party.
Elijah: We used to pile into each other's trailers. We'd never stay in our own. We'd occupy every available space and just crash out. It would get really, really hot in there!
Dominic: Mine was movies and Elijah had video games. It's interesting that we always talk about the intensity. But on a working day it would be 5:20-5:40am pickup and we'd be done maybe 7:30pm. It's a long day and we all chose to hang out with each other afterwards. We sought each other out.
Elijah: Consider the fact that we're working with each other so frequently, it's sort of a marvel that we didn't tire of each other. On our vacations we would spend time together.
Sean: At the end of six day weeks, we'd be exhausted, but we'd all go out to a bar and drink together until four in the morning, then throw up and be ready to get up, do a little shopping and be ready to start the week again.
Q: Were there never any arguments? Even like those among brothers?
Billy: There were minor grumbles here and there. Nothing too hectic. I can't remember a specific fight, but if we ever did it would be squabbles like one of us was late for dinner.
Dominic: I was in the middle of an intense dream.
Billy: Was that when you shouted "I will physically hurt you!"?
Dominic: That was to your wife!
Billy: That's right!
Dominic: I used to be - still am - a very deep sleeper, but combine that with alcohol the night before and I would sleep even more.
Elijah: We didn't really fight. I don't remember arguments.
Q: In the years since, do you keep tabs on each other's careers, watching Lost for example?
Dominic: Yeah, we're in each other’s lives, so you can't help but watch what the others are doing. I'm actually just watching Season 5 of 24, which Sean is in.
Sean: My way of keeping tabs on Billy is to show up on movies that he's worked on and add myself to the movie. He did this TV movie called Witches of Oz, and they called and offered me the part of this little creature he carries. They'd already all finished the movie but they had these dolls that they'd carry around that they were going to replace with someone. I went and did it and asked if he knew that he was carrying me around. So I'm like a pop-up video.
Q: And you stay connected?
Sean: If you could see the email chain for this one interview...
Elijah: Dom and I see each other frequently. Bill, when he's in town or I'm abroad. And Sean... I haven't seen you since...
Sean: I'm just out there in Calabasas with my wife and kids.
Dominic: You roll in a slightly different way that we do, because you have your own children and stuff.
Sean: I'm a fixture, they know where I am. I don't feel like we've gone off in different directions, though.
Elijah: It's sort of wild. We always sort of knew that regardless of where we'd be in our lives and in the world after it, we're so linked. We haven't seen Viggo in two years, but I feel like if I saw him tomorrow, it would be the same.
Dominic: I was semi-heartbroken when Sean and I hung out with Elijah at a shoot and Sean's now eldest daughter, Ally, was there. She's 14? She was a regular fixture in the social group, because obviously Sean came with his wife and daughter. She was a little baby, and she would get passed around with all her surrogate uncles - so Orlando, or Billy, or Elijah, or me..." We all had a real strong relationship with her. We'd seek her out and play with her and stuff. So when we were at this thing last year, we asked her what she remembered and she said she didn't really remember anything. It was such a bummer!
Sean: She said to me a couple of days ago about how she told you she didn't remember that much. But she told me that it was the most important part of her childhood and of course she remembers it.
Dominic: Oh my god!
Sean: I told her, why would you lie? That's mean! But she said she just couldn't tell the truth because it was so big for her. She walked out from that last event crying. I go through periods where I'll dream about the whole thing. It's like an acid trip.
Elijah: The making of those films is ingrained in our DNA now. I went back and did a little bit of work on The Hobbit and was around a number of the crew and people who I associated with the Rings. I expected the feeling to be really surreal, to be back in wardrobe and makeup again, and it was. But it also felt normal, as if it's built into our bone structure. It's beyond the movies. Beyond what they became.
