This weekend at Tolcon—the first convention of the Northwest Tolkien Society, based in Seattle—I'm doing a talk titled, "The Spirit of Tolkien: Grilling Jackson, Boyens and Walsh." The talk is a discussion of interviews with New Line Cinema's holy trinity, the brain trust of the Rings films. It's truly enlightening to sit down and talk with these folks.

Last month, Hollywood Jesus ran the full text of an interview with Peter Jackson; this month, we follow up with Boyens and Walsh, who made for a very effective tag-team interview last December while in Los Angeles for the American Return of the King premiere. They're engaging, intelligent, articulate and expressive. And, as you'll see from the interview that follows, they give a pretty good account of themselves with regard to understanding Tolkien. They don't get everything "right," of course (who does?), and they could have done their homework a little more thoroughly—but if the movies have been successful at all (and, of course, they have) it's due in good measure to Boyens and Walsh. Jackson, naturally, had to delegate a lot of his responsibilities, and he wisely placed trust in these two ladies.

The questions in the interview are posed by press from a variety of publications, and Boyens' and Walsh's reponses are noted by their initials, and given verbatim. Where necessary, extraneous, unintelligible or profane remarks are indicated by bracketed ellipses, so: [...].

We understand from our last interviewee [Bernard Hill] that you allowed him to co-write the script. [Much laughter.] No, he was very generous about the fact that you did allow them to sit in and contribute a little bit toward dialogue the characters expressed, and I thought that was rather unique. That doesn't happen too often in movies, does it?

FW: Well...

Where the writer sits down with the actors?

FW: Well, we [...] went to the book as the template for making the film. And it was always the case that whenever Philippa and I would finish, you know, a revision on some pages that were due to be shot (and inevitably that was reasonably close to the moment when the film was shot—usually the night before) the actors would have an opinion about it. And they would often go to the book, and they would say, "Well, what about this line?" Or, "I always thought my character was this..." And we'd talk about it, and sometimes a line would be changed or sometimes it wouldn't...

Was it helpful to do that? Were they a big help, or—

PB: I think it was the other way around. Not to be too arrogant about it. But one of the things that most of the actors needed was to be brought into this world. Because, for a lot of them, they weren't all huge Tolkien fans, and that was part of the process, was—they'd come, get off the plane, and the first thing, it was like Tolkien 101. It was what we did... And one of the things I remember actually with Bernard was Fran and I in Queenstown doing this phone call with him because Peter was on set and it was something that Pete had loved for a long time but he hadn't had a chance to catch up with him. And we did the phone call, and he had a script that was in the process of being revised so his character didn't make sense. The storyline didn't make sense. So what we did, we had to take him from where we were going to go with it... So to that extent, I think that's where... It was great, it was a good process.

FW: We have enjoyed that process.

PB: Yeah. It's been great.

Just one more question along that line, and then I'll shut up. But do most actors have a good ear for dialogue? Can they come up with lines, or do they just desperately need a writer?

PB: It depends on the actor.

FW: [shakes her head] Always.

That's all right. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to out you.

PB: No, no, no. It's true though.

FW: Because you often—I don't really think they do, necessarily.

PB: No. It depends on the actor. There's a few that can probably do it. But in terms of the heightened language in Tolkien, that was so funny—you don't ad lib, in Tolkien. Nobody ad libbed. Ever, on these movies. You can't. It's just too heightened. And the number of times—how many times did we get rung, sometimes at seven o'clock in the morning? Or at six—

FW: Gimli ad libbed.

PB: Oh yeah. John Rhys-Davies would ad lib.

The "nervous system"?

PB: But that wasn't the heightened language. But you'd get rung literally for a line in the middle of the night.

The language was so—and I mean this as a complement—arch. [...]

PB: It was pretty heightened language. But when you tried modern... They all tried to modernize it, and it just didn't work.

And the fans wouldn't have liked it.

It's rather interesting to me that this is written by women. And yet I wonder how many Tolkien fans out there are really women. It seems to me that they're more male.

PB: No.

No?

PB: No, It's really interesting.

FW: And Pete? Man.

Yes, he's the director, too. But I always think of you two as the—

FW: We did running revisions through the time of the shoot, and actually the edit as well. So we did manage to get a lot of writing right down through the editorial process. Because, you know, you can clarify and fix things on off lines or voiceovers. But I don't know. There seem to be a lot of female Tolkien fans. They're—

PB: Which is great.

FW: I think there may be more now. Because of Orlando—

PB: And Elijah, and Viggo. [Much laughter and chatter.]

The women characters are so strong in so many different ways. So supporting, going into battle and so knowledgeable.

FW: And Shelob.

PB: Shelob is quite a powerful woman.

FW: Yes, we're fans of Shelob.

PB: She's misunderstood.

FW: She's misunderstood. She has a weight problem. [Much laughter and chatter again.]

PB: My favorite part is the hairy monster in the tunnel. That's the funny thing. We had great fun with that. And that's actually why Gollum—Sméagol—when he says to Gollum, "You know what we're doing—we're going to lead them up the windy stairs. Up up up the windy stairs." My favorite bit is when he says, "And then—into the... tunnel." And makes "tunnel" sound as if it's the rudest thing on earth.

In the production notes you make a comment that you believe that Tolkien was passionate about the goodness that resides in men. In his letters, he talks extensively about the fallenness of man, and his conviction of the fallenness of man. Did that ever come up in the early discussions about how to present the material, and the difference between the view of the fallenness of man and the goodness of man?

PB: Well, I think that's critical to good drama—you know, hubris is (and all of it is) what makes a great story. Certainly with a lot of the characters, yes. Absolutely. I think Saruman falls. I mean, a lot of the characters. And that's actually the way in which the Ring consciously works as a source of evil is to—

FW: Deny free will. And that seems to be the tenet underlying the story—is his Catholicism, which is sort of at the heart, I think—

PB: Absolutely.

FW:—of the things in this, hopefully, in the film and in the book. And in the end, I think if there's anything to be taken from the film, it's that—it's about faith. That there is—it's also about death, and deathlessness—it's about the knowledge that you will endure in some form. And—

PB: And you don't fall if you have faith. That's the other thing, I think, in this. There is no fall with faith.

Faith in what?

PB: In terms of holding—well, in terms of, say, some of the things in this film, and, I believe, in the books—in terms of holding true to yourself, and in terms of holding true to a sense of goodness and decency, in terms of holding true to your fellowship with your fellow man, all of those things. You know, seeking and striving for that sense of decency, I think, and goodness.

So, faith in man.

PB: But also understanding that we're flawed, you know, because that's what he said. You know, that a note of discord was struck in the creation of the world, and all that kind of stuff. We tried—you know, you can't make it overt within the story, such as it is, but it certainly informed what we were doing, and informed (to go back to the beginning of what we were discussing) what we talked about with the actors when they first got off the plane. It began to inform what they were doing, as well. So whether or not it's ever explicit, it's certainly underneath there.

My background is very Protestant, and I have a real hard time understanding the specific Catholic issues with Tolkien's world. Did you guys have some kind of a resource to draw on to explicate the Catholicism?

PB: I think it's faith, regardless of...

FW: I don't know to what extent he consciously sort of put it into the story. Just as he denied that it was ever an allegory for World War II and all that—although clearly his war experiences very much inform the books—equally so, his personal beliefs inform the books and his philosophies. And I think that—but not so that he's driving an agenda. I don't believe that. But there are certainly, you know, parallels that you can draw between Frodo's journey and that of, you know, the Christ story... you can, because it's about sacrifice, and it's about... I think at the end of the movie, and I feel it very strongly, that he transitions to another place. Which is—that's another way of looking at faith in the story—that he doesn't die—

It's almost like an ascension.

FW: Yes. It is. And that Gandalf is his guide (in that he's an angelic character). So I found it quite comforting, in a strange way, and I don't think it's necessarily, in that way, specifically Catholic. It's something that—

PB: It's the higher power, when you ask what is—that's what it is. That's what faith is. Ultimately a belief in a higher power, and another plane on which you can exist. And that spans a lot of belief systems, which Tolkien himself knew because he was drawing on a wider mythology, and his own love of that wider mythology. And he was seeking—what I love about it is it's still so English, it's adorably English—the comfort, like you say, it's comfort. It's about the fireside, and the hearth and the home, and the friendship and that—all those things, and decent thinking and goodness, that he found in the trenches in World War I: stoicism, and that's Sam.

In writing the story, you obviously drew on Tolkien. But what were the other sources...

PB: The mythology, in and of itself, is always interesting. Certainly one of the things I remember was, the Ring is really tricky because it's an inanimate object which you've got to give some form of character to. And some of the reading we did was on rings, and the use. And lots of different ways, shapes and forms of storytelling terms. And culturally, one of the things that I loved was that wedding rings were actually a bond, a signal of servitude. [Laughs.] Which was literally like, "You're mine. Bang." It was really interesting.

Do you have a favorite film of the three?

FW: Uh, yes. The third. Yes.

The third.

FW: Yes. Yes. This last one.

Any particular reason?

FW: Because... It's a curious thing we've been going through this year. We lost a young and dear friend, a young boy, to cancer, and watching him face his mortality, at seventeen, and watching him come to terms with the knowledge of his impending death, and how he and his family dealt with that. We were part of that as we finished this film, and I felt very strongly that, in the film, death—when Frodo crosses over—that it's not a negative thing. And I felt that for Cameron, too. Because he was so ravaged and ill, that it, you know, it freed him. And it released him. And I feel that in the film, too. I feel that something lifts from Frodo, when he turns and looks back at the hobbits...

He smiles. The smile.

FW: Yes. And I really liked that the film shows it in that way. Because often it's such a thing of fear, and dread, you know—that in films it's portrayed in that way, and yet there is another way to view it. And we saw it play out, you know, in our own lives with Cameron. And to see it in the film, too, I really liked that about the movie.

The speech that Gandalf gives to Pippin...

PB: That's exactly where that came from.

[Personal comments from the press corps follow Boyens' remark.]

I noticed that there's more emphasis on life after death, and the continuation of the soul after, in this film.

PB: It's definitely deliberately done. But what I loved was the way Ian McKellan managed to make you feel good about it.

FW: What an actor!

PB: He was just, like, and he says, "No, no it isn't." You think, "Oh, I could do that."

FW: It's true.

One of my favorite scenes is Gandalf's speech to Pippin about "This isn't the end..." That's a marvelous scene. And like you say, it was incredible acting. It was so well written. That was really nice...

[Here, the press asks for the exact wording of Gandalf's lines about the "far green country" and the "swift sunrise," taken explicitly from the closing paragraphs of Tolkien's The Return of the King. Boyens and Walsh graciously comply. The press has a great deal of difficulty understanding the Kiwi accent...]

Last year, Philippa, ya'll told us that you were struggling, and you could hear this on commentary track on Two Towers, with the "What are we fighting for?" [bit]. And then Fran makes an interesting comment. "I think in the end it's about our need to feel there are universal values of good, whether or not that's true in the real world. Who can say?" And then later ya'll say that this is not about a "tub-thumping notion of good versus evil." I was wondering—what is this tub-thumping notion of good versus evil, that ya'll insist isn't in the book?

FW: It's not about the type of thing that drives blind patriotism, or that drives jingoism—it's not about a national sense of right or wrong.

PB: It's not agenda-driven. It's absolutely, it's humanness—it's Tolkien's humanity. Just as the other great English writer, Shakespeare, is a humanist, so is Tolkien. He understands the complexities of humanity and embraces them, and understands that... I mean, Boromir is a classic example—

FW: I think it's become a part of the political jargon, good and evil, and that's unfortunate, actually.

PB: And you don't tub-thump, when you're a humanist, you understand that...

What does "tub-thump" mean?

PB: "This is good, and this is what you must do!!!"

Jeffrey Overstreet, at Looking Closer, offers a transcript from another interview with Boyens and Walsh, conducted on the same day.

Ian Smith was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of The Return of the King in New Zealand, where he took the photos of Philippa Boyens (and her children) which accompany this interview.