A 10-metre-high wall of King Kong-sized building blocks has gone up to create a backdrop for Peter Jackson’s latest NZ$200 million movie. Filming is due to start next month on Jackson’s remake of King Kong and work is two-thirds finished on a state-of-the-art $12 million sound stage in the Wellington suburb of Miramar. [More]
Category: Production
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When you’re heading off into the deepest, darkest and possibly most giant gorilla-infested jungle on Skull Island there are a few things you might want to pack. A camera, a big gun, someone who looks a bit like Fay Wray and — if you’re Peter Jackson — the screen’s most famous ballet dancer. [More]
In “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first movie in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, audiences had a brief glimpse of a shadowy figure climbing a distant wall. In “The Two Towers,” the trilogy’s second installment, that distant shadow becomes a vital presence. [More]
FANZ writes: I am a New Zealander and yesterday I was at the ‘Warehouse’ and i saw all the new ttt action figures. One of which was a huge Treebeard figure. It had a ‘try me’ feature and if you pulled on a branch it would speak (a very Gimli-ish voice) so just informing you guys that big spoilers are out there to find.
Loressar Erchamion writes: I just got my Nov/Dec issue of scr(i)pt, a screenwriters’ magazine available at Barnes and Noble. It features a 4-page interview with Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyen discussing The Two Towers. Very interesting from a screenwriter’s point of view, cruelly uninformative from a spoiler seeker’s point of view.
For the first page or two, they mostly talk about the work involved in writing the script, what it’s like to work on a project of this magnitude, etc. This is followed by something about how TTT gets more into the world of men.
The part that follows could count as a semi-spoiler as to the film’s opening, so I’ll give it verbatim here:
scr(i)pt: Will there be anything to help a novice find his/her way into The Two Towers, some recap of what has happened so far, or will we plunge right into it?
Philippa Boyens: Pretty much a big plunge, you might say – a rather large plunge! [Both laugh as if sharing a wicked, private joke.] – the deep breath before the plunge. Well, it’s a terrible pun; and you’ll understand it when you see it, but I think it’s one of the most amazing openings ever – pure Peter Jackson!
They then talk about intercutting the two halves of TTT, a bit about Ents and their place in the story (Boyens mentions the challenges brought to scriptwriting by the long-winded Ents!), and the moving of Shelob to RotK.
The interviewer asks about the dialogue between Frodo and Sam about “tales”. Walsh and Boyens are adamant about how much they love that passage, but don’t tell us if it’ll be in the film.
There is a question about looking at the movie in light of the events of September 11, which the interviewer acknowledges happened long after they began work on the screenplay. Both writers are hesitant to reply, but then offer some nice insight from the pages of Tolkien. Walsh quotes Eomer (“How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”), and Boyens quotes Frodo (“I wish none of this had happened”) as well as Gandalf’s response (“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for you to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”) On that note, the interview ends.