12.17.02
By Devin Faraci
Contributing sources:

From now until the opening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, CHUD will feature interviews with the actors and creators of what may be the best film of the year. This is the ninth part. Read the Phillipa Boyens interview here, the Brad Dourif/ Bernard Hill interview here, the Andy Serkis interview here, the Barrie Osborne/Richard Taylor interview here, the Sean Astin interview here, the John Rhys-Davies interview here, the Howard Shore interview here, and the Miranda Otto/Karl Urban interview here.

Comic relief is always a difficult thing in a movie like Fellowship of the Ring, but Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) were the warm center of the questing group of companions.

Their journey is much darker in The Two Towers. After being captured by Uruk-Hai in the last film, they find themselves being taken to the traitorous wizard Saruman, where they will surely be killed.

On the behind the scenes footage from the Fellowship DVD, Boyd and Monaghan were irrepressible. At the junket they were exhausted after a week of non-stop interviews. While their humor did shine through often, they also showed a more serious side.

Monaghan: So did you see the movie? Did you like it?

Q: Yes, very much. Have you seen it?

Monaghan: Yeah, about a month ago.

Q: Peter said he was still working on it three weeks ago.

Monaghan: He's a liar.

Boyd: I saw it in March.

Q: You've probably seen Return of the King.

Boyd: Exactly! Because I'm the best.

Q: Everyone I've talked to today has mentioned what they thought of Gollum. What was your impression?

Boyd: I thought it was amazing. The kind of split personality scene was probably my favorite scene in the movie. I thought it was incredible. It should be the first CG to get an Oscar.

Monaghan: The shit that Andy had to go through. Being on his own all the time, having to be on set for Sean and Elijah's performance, giving a performance as Gollum and then having to go on a blue screen set and having to give a separate performance. His physicality and Andy's face is IN Gollum. It's just incredible.

It's great for Billy and I because we hadn't seen it. Things that are involved with the Fellowship I think we got an inkling of what it was all about. But we only saw brief snippets of Gollum before he was brought up onscreen for the entire movie. We were blown away by it.

Q: You guys spend a lot of time acting with a CGI character, Treebeard. What was that like for you?

Monaghan: Well, he wasn't entirely a CGI character. They built an 18 foot Treebeard that we would climb to the top of and sit on his shoulders. His eyes would blink and narrow and he had a lot of character in his mouth. He could pick us up with his hands. His hands could clench, he could hold us in the sky. He would walk. So all the stuff you see on his shoulders, we're not sat on a table or a bench, we're sat on what you see.

There were a few things that would get you down, with the constraints of being strapped down and not being able to move too much. The background was entirely green screen or blue screen, but as an actor you're expected to extend your imagination.

Q: Did the crew ever screw with you and leave you hanging in the tree?

Boyd: Well, yeah, but we kind of asked for it. It was such a pain getting down, getting unhooked and then climbing back up again, it ended up that when there was a tea break we just said, "Get us a cuppa tea up here." And everybody would leave the studio and it would be just me and Dom and Treebeard.

Q: What does Treebeard represent? The forces of nature, obviously.

Boyd: Definitely that. I think that the point that Tolkien was trying to get across was that we can't just go around burning and destroying trees without destroying nature. I see him as a kind of Tom Bombadil character as well. The oldest creature on Earth, he's seen it all happen. It's not such a big thing. He's seen evil. He was there before Sauron was there. "I've seen it all, it's not a big deal." And he's got these two hobbits saying that their friends are going to be killed, of course it's a big deal. So I think he's that character.

Q: In Return of the King you're out of the woods and back on the hunt?

Monaghan: Yeah, in three Merry and Pippin become more dispersed. Merry goes off and heads into battle on a horse, with a sword, and becomes a warrior hobbit. He loses sight of Pippin, which is really sad if you think about some of the strong alliances in the trilogy. You've got Frodo and Sam and after that, Merry and Pippin, because hobbits feel such deep emotions for their kind. They are best friends. Legolas and Gimli become best friends through the trilogy, but these two are like brothers. For them to be apart they really lose their strength. That's one of the big things in the third movie.

Q: There are some scenes featuring Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers that did not make it to the final cut. Tell us about some of the things that will pop up in the Extended Edition.

Boyd: There's the Ent Draught. I don't know if you've read the book, but Ent Draught is something that the Ents drink and it keeps them healthy. Merry and Pippin take it and it makes them grow. It's really a lovely scene actually. Well written.

Q: It's a temporary effect?

Boyd: Nope. When they get back to the Shire Merry and Pippin are the tallest hobbits ever. Pete wanted that, but I can see that the story was getting very dark at that time and I don't know if that was the reason. Also, the film was running at four hours.

Q: So are you taller at the end of Return of the King? Do they explain that?

Monaghan: If it's not referenced in the second movie it probably won't be referenced in the third movie. But in the books as soon as they drink the Ent Draught they become a few inches taller.

Q: Right, but under the circumstances you guys must have shot that, so it seems weird if it just shows up in three.

Monaghan: It's not a huge thing.

Boyd: We are not with anything you would see the scale with.

Q: For me one of the only sequences that didn't work so well was the special effects in the Treebeard scene. From a distance it looked great, but in close up it seemed like an obvious green screen effect.

Monaghan: That's interesting. We were talking about CG the other night and I was saying that CG for me, even though it's fantastic, and I think Gollum is a fantastic CG character, there are still elements that I can tell to me are CG. There's a fluid kind of look to it. A liquid kind of look. The only way I can describe it is that it looks like it's been dipped in water. There's this kind of sheen to it. Which means that at some point CG will catch up and look like we look. Which means that at some point the films that kind of had initial CG will date. But I guess that is just cinema, and new technology. The way Pete's been working with CG, bringing it forward, the future that he has managed to find in CG, is amazing. But I think all CG will date until we get to a point where you will not be able to tell what is CG and what isn't.

Q: It's the same thing with Yoda in the new Star Wars movies.

Monaghan: It's awful. Just awful. Why didn't they use the puppet? They had the puppet of Jabba the Hutt and then they used this new strange looking Jabba. It just makes no sense at all. Sorry George.

Q: Now that you're getting any roles in any Lucas films, what kind of projects are you looking at now?

Monaghan: Hopefully stuff that isn't hobbity. The main stuff that I've been offered has been fantasy, pixie, goblin kind of parts. I just want to play a horrible guy. A serial killer, or a psycho. I'm intrigued in work that I'll never be pigeonholed. In acting if you can be stretched and challenged and do something that you find difficult you'll keep growing. After playing Merry, which there were difficult things about him, I would like to play someone different, a nasty and evil character. Someone a bit more hard hitting. I've been reading scripts all year and I haven't seen anything that has shouted out for me to do it. I'm in a position where I'm financially secure enough to wait, and I realize that the next couple of choices I make are going to inform on how I will be taken as an actor. I just have to wait.

Boyd: Yeah, I've been looking. I just finished, three weeks ago, working on Peter Weir's movie, Far Side of the World, down in Mexico. It's what Dom was talking about. It happened that I was offered this part, which was completely different than Pippin, and it felt like it was going to be a really exciting thing, which it was. I play this sailor. The helmsman of the ship in the Napoleonic War. I was down in Mexico five or six months doing it. Peter Weir was incredible. Russell Crowe is in it.

Q: It's part of the myth of the films at this point that you guys all bonded on the set. Eighteen months together, you became the Fellowship, the tattoos, the whole thing. Is that going to make it difficult on other projects, that you were on the perfect set, now you're on something not quite as tight?

Monaghan: [to Boyd] What's the difference between Mexico and New Zealand?

Boyd: You speak Spanish. But you know, it's a year and a half, it just gives you that time. It's kind of different, but every job always is.

Q: Current events seem to have really caught up to this movie. Do you think was by accident, or did Peter tweak the material?

Boyd: I think it was by accident. Like the books, I think the reason it rings true is that you take any time in history when there is a war about to start it'll ring true. The big point is that people don't seem to learn through history. Lessons are never learned. That's what Treebeard is saying. It's all a cycle and evil will come back again. Human society always seems to be on the lip of war.

Q: You've been doing a week of interviews for this movie. What are people NOT asking you that you want to talk about?

Monaghan: How can you be such a great actor? I don't understand it.

Boyd: [to Monaghan] Is your talent CG?

Q: Maybe you guys should interview each other!

Monaghan: We've done that a few times. I think something that people have asked about but is something that Billy and I are keen about talking about - that's very ungood English.

Boyd: Three abouts!

Monaghan: Talking about is this environmental issue that is brought up in The Two Towers. Treebeard, the person we hang around with, actively helps the humans in their plight. I was speaking to someone I had been hanging about with in LA, who works for Greenpeace, told me that an area the size of 11 soccer pitches of rainforest are destroyed every day. And they don't come back. Tolkien wrote about this in the 1940s. This is a ticking clock. Think about the whole Mother Nature aspect - the forests are the lungs of the world. Regardless of whether we go to war or not in the search of oil and all that crap, if we don't address what's happening with the world's forests there won't be a world to come back to. It's crazy that what's happening with all the huge governments in the world is that they aren't interested because it isn't about money. If we don't do something we're all going to die anyway because there won't be any air to breathe. We hope that gets picked up by the world's media and we can get behind a big tree planting program or something to bring to the young people the fact that the forests are disappearing. Some of the most amazing flora and fauna that will never come back, that could cure some diseases. It's depressing.

Q: What do you feel like your responsibility is as actors and celebrities?

Boyd: I don't think we have a responsibility except as individuals. We don't have any more responsibility than anyone else. But as someone like John Lennon said, well I'm going to get in the paper anyway, I might as well talk about something. So I suppose we have the chance - if you want to write about it if we talk about it - but I think that's the thing, if we're going to take up media space, might as well talk about something that's worthwhile.

Q: And if you don't have more responsibility than anyone else you could add that everyone has some responsibility.

Boyd: Exactly. We're all in this together. And if anything in the Two Towers Merry and Pippin realize that they can do something.

Monaghan: Small individuals can do something. As Billy said, we can talk about it but it's up to you to print it and it's up to people to do something about it. There's a thing that goes on that as actors we're very lucky people, we get to travel the world and do things that we enjoy. To go along with that we should address some of these issues. After hanging out with these people in LA and talking about the environment and nature, which is something that I've always been turned on to anyway, would just like to get behind some planting of trees.

Q: Is there something you are particularly interested in right now?

Monaghan: I don't know if we can talk about it but there's a company called Future Forests that are keen to try to get companies behind this carbon neutral project, which a few bands - the new Coldplay album, the new Atomic Kitten album, the new U2 album I think - are going carbon neutral. Which means they find out how much carbon they burned making the album and they plant trees to offset that. I would like that to come to the film industry. Because you would then have forests in the world that were sponsored by different film companies that you could go to. You could walk around Mirkwood, you could walk around the Shire, and it would represent what we have done during this period.

Drink

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