Oz Empire, May 2004

Frodo Czechs In

AFTER FIVE YEARS in Tolkien's world, Elijah Wood should be burned out. Far from it. With two films just wrapped – Sin City and The Yank -- Wood took time out from filming Everything Is Illuminated, the directorial debut of The Sum Of All Fears star Liev Schreiber in Prague, to visit the nearby Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

At a press conference for the local release of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Wood looked relaxed and happy as he discussed making more personal movies.

"The experience of making the Lord Of The Rings movies was so massive," he said, "it was a relief to jump onto something else that was a lot smaller. We'd all gotten used to the scale of that production and there was a certain amount of madness and exhaustion that came with those films and the process of making them."

"But the idea of then going onto something else was also kinda scary," he continues. "We'd all become so used to being part of LOTR; we'd created a kind of bubble around us and it was difficult to see ourselves outside it. I think the first thing that I did was a movie Edward Burns directed, called Ash Wednesday. The film was shot over 27 days, of which I worked about six or seven days. And it was so completely short! I only had four minutes in make-up and I didn't have feet to apply!"

For his latest film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer's cult novel, Wood plays a nerdy American trying to find his roots in the Ukraine. A road movie of sorts, it requires Wood to spend much of his screen time in the back seat of a Trabant with a farting dog. "I'm not sure if it's reliable enough to drive back home, but I do have a fondness for that car. It's a bit of a jalopy but it's got character."

Sadly, Wood's friendly approach backfired after opening an envelope presented to him by two fans labelled, 'Sit down before you open this.' "Ohhh, ohhh," he wailed. "that is so wrong! Where did you find that?"

Turning to the crowd, he said, "I don't know if you guys know about this but there are these web sites out there that have pictures of various actors from The Lord Of The Rings in homosexual positions, and that's one of the pictures that they just gave me, But the funniest thing about them is they all took a little too real. So you look at them and think, 'I didn't do that... did I?"'