In the UK to promote Happy Feet Two, Elijah Wood talks about the 3D conversion for Lord Of The Rings, his role in The Hobbit films, blooper reels, and Star Wars: Episode I…
Elijah Wood has good reason to praise 3D, seeing as his old pal Peter Jackson has taken the stereoscopic route in his The Hobbit films. On the publicity circuit for Happy Feet Two, we asked Wood what he’d make of the mooted 3D conversion for the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
“I think it would be cool to see. There’s talk of releasing a dimensionalised trilogy eventually. I’m okay with doing post-process 3D, as long as someone takes the time. What I’m upset about is when a movie doesn’t have the budget and the time to devote to it and they’re not fine-tuning the detail of that, because it can look really bad and cheap. But I know that they wouldn’t dimensionalise it unless it was a super meticulous process.
“I mean, Titanic’s coming out in 3D now, and Star Wars: Episode I, which means we have to wait three movies to get to the fucking good shit, it’s unbelievable, I’m like, we have to wait three years for that? You’re doing Episode I first? [frustrated squeal], what a bummer!”
After the extended Lord Of The Rings releases, is there anything left on Peter Jackson’s cutting room floor from the trilogy? “I think there will be a DVD edition in which there are deleted scenes. There are deleted scenes, I don’t know how many there are, it’s been a long time. A lot made it back into the cuts for those extended versions, but there are some scenes that never made it. There are also hours… there has to be at least a couple of hours of blooper reel stuff, because we were having a blast. As you can imagine, we shot for over a year and there were a lot of fuck-ups and jokes, so I keep telling Pete he’s got to cut together a nice hour-long blooper reel, because there are hours of it”
When asked how much he had to do on The Hobbit films, Wood gave little away, confirming only, “Very little, very little. It’s just a little cameo really, but it should only be a cameo, mainly because Frodo’s not alive at the time of The Hobbit.”
How did he get back into Frodo’s character for the cameo?
“Before we started, I watched Fellowship again, just to remember the way that he spoke. Outside of that it was revisiting something I’d spent the better part of four years playing, and it was just a joy. It felt like a giant family reunion in a way. The weirdest thing was being on set, looking down at my feet and it just feeling oddly normal, like, 'Here we are, doing another scene at Bag End, 10 years later’”.
More news and stories about The Hobbit can be found here.
Happy Feet Two arrives in the UK on Friday 2nd December.
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