Revelations from a Peter Jackson Interview
"The Two Towers has, in a way, been the most difficult of the three to adapt. It has a much different tone from Fellowship, and that's ultimately a healthy thing. What we've ended up with, because we've done them sort of at the same time, is a film that's actually very distinct. It's a little bit darker and less fantasay-orientated, which is inevitable.
In The Two Towers, the story centres more on the world of men, which gives the story a more realistic, historical kind of feel." "We don't reach Mordor yet, so the dark scary stuff doesn't come until Return of the King. I personally think one of the scariest things in The Two Towers is the Frodo/Gollum/Sam relationship. We took a lead from Tolkien, but have gone a bit further into the area of the psychological thriller. There is no action with Frodo and Sam in this film; they're simply slogging their way to Mordor, but the complication is Gollum, whom we briefly saw in the first film. He joins them very early on and they become a trio. Thy psychology of who and what Gollum is, and the mind games he starts to play on them, is kind of interesting." "We also have a sequence which is not in the book, but I liked the idea of developing a sequence that Tolkien hadn't. We use creatures called Wargs, which are like giant crosses between wolves and hyenas. They have saddles and are like horses for orcs. They're vicious and do as much damage as the orcs themselves. The warg exist in the book, but Tolkien never used them in a particularly graphic way, so we've takien that a bit further. Orcs can fire their arrows and throw their spears and do damage, but the Wargs themselves can leap on the horses and take them down, which we see." The story takes us into the kingdom of Rohan, the kingdom of men. It's a Norse-based Icelandic culture. They live in thatched huts on this praire land and everything's based on wood. They're Cossack or Mongol types who ride on and worship horses. We wanted to cast very Nordic-looking people, such as Miranda Otto. We also meet Wormtongue, who's not so much part of the culture of Rohan. He's human, and over the course of time he has ingratiated himself into the kingdom, but he's ultimately a Saruman kind of spy." "Things really don't get any better in The Two Towers because we've got to have the struggle become more intense and harder to set up for The Return of the King, which will be the most fun of the three films. It will still have a certain amount of darkness, but it will be fun in the sense that after two movies, we will finally get to the climax. Return starts and just continues in this huge cacophony of climactic action." "One thing we decided with Two Towers was to assume that everyone who comes to see it has already seen Fellowship, and not to cater to the people who haven't. If you haven't seen Fellowship, you shouldn't really be coming to see The Two Towers. We pick it up the moment Fellowship leaves off and just crack into the action."
Back