It sort of slipped my mind to send you these pictures and a report of JRD's appearance last Sunday in Los Angeles. He flew down straight from Vancouver to attend this comic book convention, which is held monthly at the Shrine expo hall in Los Angeles. He is very charming, intelligent and really has a passion for the the trilogy of films, his fellow actors on the project and especially for Peter Jackson. As he put it, if Peter called and said he needed to shoot some footage at a NZ volcano that had been acting up recently, and he couldn't guarantee anyone's safety, JRD is positive that everyone in the cast would just say "sure, I'll be right down for that".
These three pics are of when John Rhys-Davies first arrived at the convention, and then while he was sitting at the panel table and people came up to get autographs and talk with him.
OK, here are two more pictures from the convention. When I asked if I could get a picture with him, he said to come up on the stage, and then proceded to offer me his knee. So yes, I got to sit on his knee, it was sort of like visiting Santa Claus all over again. Malia, she of the quest to form an official Orlando Bloom fan club is in the other picture. She was thrilled beyond words to meet him.
Anyhow, another interesting note on what JRD had to say. Someone asked him what Treebeard sounded like, and I think the person just wanted him to speak in Treebeard's voice, but the answer was much more interesting. It appears they have not recorded the dialogue for Treebeard yet. He said they were finding it tricky to come up with a way to be true to the Book's description of Treebeard speaking in a rather slow, methodical manner, and making it cinematic. In otherwords, Treebeard's speech pattern may be too slow for the pacing a film needs to keep the audience interested. He is confident they will come up with something, but was able to give us another hint. Since Treebeard is just about the oldest living thing in Middle Earth, he will have travelled everywhere, and met just about every race in existence, with the exception of Hobbits, of course. Because of this, he will have learned many languages and dialects, and therefore, might be prone to speaking with many different accents at the same time. In otherwords, one sentence may come out rather Elvish sounding, but another may sound Gondorian. It's clear they are putting a lot of thought into this, and it sounds like a fascinating process. I can't wait to see what they do come up with in the end.