Today, May 14th is Cate Blanchett’s (Galadriel) Birthday! Cate was born on May 14th, 1969 in Melbourne, Australia. That makes her 34 today! Happy Birthday Cate!
Month: May 2003
John from Sev.com.au e-mailed me saying he is currently running a LOTR-related caption contest. The cartoon has all the Moria orcs fleeing in terror from a scary red glow at the end of the hall. Gimli wonders “What’s scaring the Dorcs away?” The reader gets to write Gandalf’s response. The entries are rated by readers, with the funniest punchline voted on in a week’s time. Check it out here!
NZ’s Onfilm magazine has an interview with Peter Jackson about his next project, where he talks a little about his approach to it. [More]
New Zealand’s Onfilm magazine has an interview with PJ about “King Kong” – I’ll just report the interesting things it covered.
“No film as captivated my imagination more than King Kong….I’m making movies today because I saw this film when I was nine years old. It has been my sustained dream to re-interpret this classic story for a nwe age.
As in LOTR, Peter and Fran will be joined by Philippa Boyens on the screenplay. “We can do a complete rewrite. Now that Philippa has joined the team, it’s a chance to start over,” said Jackson. When he and Fran finished the first script in 1996, he said, “The basic storyline will be very similar but the scenes, the sequences and the detail will be very different.” Now he finds he doesn’t like “the flip, smart-arsed tone of our old script. We are better writers ow than we were in 1996. This new version will be based on the 1933 movie, but not on our 1996 script. This movie will be so much better than the 1996 film would have been. In hindsight, fate has been kind to us.”
Jackson also commented that more of the film- about two thirds – will be set on Skull Island, as compared to previous versions.
He has always said that he didn’t want to make a “colourised version” of the original. That is to my mind rather like his approach to making LOTR – he evidently never intended to make a “visual xerox” of the book.
The results are in from the Ancanar (the indie Tolkien-inspired film) Poster Contest: The EPIC Poster design has been voted #1, and can now be pre-ordered at the Ancanar Store. The posters will arrive on June 5th, but if you pre-order before then, the price drops to $14.99 (normally &17.99) and you get the option to have it autographed by the filmmakers Sam Balcomb and Raiya Corsiglia) and Gregory Lee Kenyon (Ancanar). An Ancanar.com exclusive, this beautiful, full-color poster measures an enormous 24×36″, printed on thick 100lb cover stock. [More]
Michael Cunningham from the Tolkien Society (UK) sends along this review of ‘At Dawn in Rivendell’ featuring Christopher Lee (Saruman). Amidst the respective wakes of commercial flotsam and heated discourse which marked the paths left by Peter Jackson’s cinematically interpretative forays into Middle Earth rises the latest release from the Tolkien Ensemble. Entitled ‘At Dawn in Rivendell’ this release is the penultimate installation of a tetrad of works by the Ensemble which began in 1995 with ‘ An Evening in Rivendell’, followed with ‘ A Night in Rivendell’ in 2000. The extant works saw fruition through the musical alliance of Caspar Reiff and Peter Hall. [More]