One of the things that exists in any large fandom is fan fiction and it seems like in some ways Tauriel is the “fictional character.” Is that in some ways a tribute to the fandom?
Philippa Boyens: Women are huge fans of these films. It’s wonderful. You know, right from The Lord of the Rings there was this immediate engagement of women. You know there’s this notion that it’s a genre for boys, you know, dungeons and dragons or something like that, but I’m living proof that that’s not true. I’ve always loved these stories. I think they spoke to me. The characters of The Hobbit especially speak to me (Frodo and Bilbo of course) and when you meet these young women, you do the red carpet and everything, things like that, and they talk to you, you understand that passion for the storytelling that they’ve received that is going to create a new generation of young writers, young female writers, and I think we’re starting to see that now coming through. The way that fantasy is being used and one of the things that women, I think especially enjoy or relate to is that professor Tolkien attempted to make these stories real; that they feel real, like a history. They read like a history. This exists and this was true. And Pete is, I think, a genius at sort of making these films feel real even though you have a giant fire breathing dragon.
Richard, you talked about the barrel sequence down the river, which is one of the highlights of the film, and none of us had any idea that there actually was some real danger there. Can you tell the crowd here what you all went through, and do you feel like it was worth it now that you’ve seen the finished product?
Richard Armitage: I think the most dangerous part of filming the barrel sequence was when we were in these little cutoff Flintstone-style barrels which were powered by our feet. But yeah, it came together in quite a few different places on the Pelorus river, which is an extremely fast flowing river.
Peter Jackson: And doesn’t Thorin say, “We’ve got to get out of these barrels because there isn’t any current, we’ve lost the current?”
Richard Armitage: Umm… yeah.
Peter Jackson: Yeah, no it was really dangerous though, yeah.
Richard Armitage: I ended up getting dragged under by that very current.
Peter Jackson: He did actually. That is true. You got dragged under after you got out of the barrels.
Richard Armitage: That’s true. But we went into a sound stage where Pete had built a kind of water course powered by two V8 engines which we were there for about two weeks, weren’t we? And it was like being at a theme park for two weeks and they were dumping tons of water on us and trying to get us to go under the water. I think Martin (Freeman) had the most difficult role in that because he wasn’t in a barrel and there was an underwater camera and he would swap out with the stunt guy and it got quite hair-raising, but I think it was worth it.
Peter Jackson: We had these big V8 water jet things that we built on a… like a circle… about as big as this room and yet we were worried because we thought how fast can we actually wind the engine up. We had stunt guys doing it around and around and testing it and everything else but you know these are actors, they’re a little bit fragile. But you know, by the end of the first day the guys were just yelling faster, faster! Faster, faster, faster! And we had it on max. We had the thing going maximum pretty quickly.
Evangeline Lilly: The reference to those underwater camera shots is very interesting to me because of course, I am just an audience member in most of the dwarves’ scene. I haven’t seen what they did. And the fact that there were underwater shots that I didn’t see is a testament to just how much footage we had and that Peter had to cut.
Peter Jackson: Just to talk about the barrels actually, one of the things that doesn’t really get referenced in the barrels is we also did another shoot on a different river in New Zealand. A river in the north island. And that was a shoot where… that’s a particular river… it’s like a gorge or a canyon. A rocky canyon that stretches about a mile and right at the head of the canyon is a big dam. And four times a day they open up the sluice gates and they just let this enormous torrent of water out and they let it out for ten minutes and then they close the gates again. And so we got a lot of the really kind of hair-raising barrel stuff in there.
It would be too dangerous to put a stunt guy down. I mean, we didn’t even dare putting anyone in the barrels. We sent the barrels down completely empty and we put the digital dwarves in later, but we got some great stuff. And it was just great because we could set up the cameras when it was dry in between the dumps and we set up about six cameras right down the length of the gorge and then we were there for about three days and every single time, you know four times a day on the dot these things would open for ten minutes and we had a team up the top throwing the barrels in at the top. Then we had guys who were just filming everything on the way down and we also had a team at the bottom recovering the barrels.
We lost three of them though. I mean to this day we still don’t know where three of barrels have gone.
Benedict, you and Martin play Sherlock and Watson on television, and now you are playing Smaug and Bilbo here. What’s your vision on what the third collaboration that you and Martin will do? A buddy cop comedy, a love story? What could you guys do that you haven’t done yet?
Benedict Cumberbatch: Romeo and Juliet. We like our Shakespeare.
Evangeline Lilly: Which one is Romeo and which one is Juliet?
Benedict Cumberbatch: Oh come on! Come on! You know Martin would look very pretty in that blond wig. Yeah, no. The weird thing about it is all that chemistry and then it’s just, it was very peculiar acting by proxy with him. And there’s no joke to come out of that.
There’s no way I can say what it’s like down on the set. It’s very, very brilliant and he’s a bit of an inspiration to be around. So that was the biggest con really of what was otherwise a great experience. I mean, hearing all of these stories of the live action, perils and you know the amount of work that all these people at this table put in. I did my job in about 8 days. You know, I feel like I’m the cheater at the table really. So, thank you very much. But you know…yeah, yeah, Martin and I will probably have some kind of an outing in the future.