Australia delivers with Richard Armitage interview about ‘Hobbit’ as home video released

The lead actors in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” have done a lot of press so far to support the first of three films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book. Over and over journalists from around the world hit them with similar questions, all trying to deliver key information for their own audience. TORn friend and Australian film writer Alice Tynan had her shot at Richard Armitage, and wow did she deliver. Their lengthy chat contains some gems such as:

“Yes in the book there are losses; they sustain huge losses. You know Tolkien wrote these books based on his experiences of World War I, and he lost a lot of his friends in those wars. I think taking time to really understand his characters in Bag End was really important. . . . But I think we’ve become quite impatient in the cinema. Gone are the days when you’d sit through 3 ½ hours of Gone With the Wind, and it’s a shame because it’s the director’s prerogative to tell the story that he wants to tell. But I found myself engaged from beginning to end; I find all of the characters fascinating.”

And this:

“Years ago I had visited the memorial museum in Hiroshima and I’d seen what happened, and I had a book, and I took it to New Zealand with me. And, I don’t know, just looking at pictures and getting ideas, because it’s all about sensation: just remembering what that fear was, because we were going to go shoot it. So you just have little flashes: I remember seeing a melted bicycle, and I remember thinking, “Oh yeah, the melted bicycle. A child sat on that bike.” So this is what happened at Erebor: there were women and children there that just got annihilated. I wanted to feel the fear for them.”

They cover a variety of topics including discussion of Tolkien, Peter Jackson and New Zealand. Fans of the actor, the films and the books will all likely appreciate the first installment of the interview while fans in New Zealand and Australia finally get the movie on home video. We will post part two when Tynan does, apparently consisting of Twitter questions. She was also clever enough to embed our own video of Dwarves singing in Bag End, a great way to capture emotion from the film again if you follow the link.

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