[quote=""ed209""]This:
http://www.wellingtonrover.co.nz/
February 23rd 2010.
(Need a photo or two to prove it?)
It's extremely fun and
informative.
(Of course, the tour guide didn't use as appropriate term as I did, but the
point remains the same.)
I also learned much about the Helm's Deep battle filming, Minas Tirith's
Citadel, Gardens of Isengard, Aragorn washed ashore, etc, etc. Basically
stuff you wouldn't find even in bonus DVDs.
But you'll just have to trust my word, since you'd have to win a lottery to
go there and e xp erience it yourself.[/quote]
No need to get defensive; I had never heard anything except the official e xp lanation before, so I was just curious.
[quote=""Sedhal""]"At the last minute, Peter Jackson decided that he needed someone older than Townsend, who was only 29 at the time. There were also rumors that the two did not get along well on set. "
"Townsend never received compensation for his time on set, yet he was apparently happy to be moving on."
http://listverse.com/2010/06/04/top-10- ... dont-know/
Here's a good discussion on it:
http://www.council-of-elrond.com/forums ... -3781.html
I'm sure there are more definitive sources out there, but that's what I found in a quick google search.[/quote]
Interesting that one poster thought it was because Townsend was adamant about portraying Aragorn closer to how he was in the book. That's probably nothing more than idle speculation, though.
[quote=""MorgulMike""]But you know, it seems to me that to cast a 29 year old guy to play the part of an 87 year old Dunedain with a ton of e xp erience under his belt might not have been the best choice.[/quote]
That's pretty much what PJ said. So what were the makers of Queen of the Damned thinking when they cast him as the centuries-old Lestat? Of course, in the books, Lestat is emotionally not much more advanced than the 16-year old he was when he was turned, so age shouldn't be a problem there. However, Townsend had the distinct bad luck of following Tom Cruise in the role, and it was just impossible not to hark back to his performance.
But getting back to LOTR, one thing that almost no-one comments on is that PJ cast 18-year-old Elijah Wood to play 50-year-old Frodo! Of course, Frodo's age in the movie is never commented upon, so if you want, you can just assume him to be the age he appears. Likewise, the gap between Bilbo's departure from the Shire and Frodo's is never made e xp licit in the movie. In the book, it was 17 years. In the movie, it seems like a few weeks. However, if you take note of the few time references in the movie, such as Bilbo's reference to it being SR 1400 at the time of his party, and Aragorn telling Eowyn he's 87, the times all line up pretty well with the book, within a year anyway. So even though it seems like a few weeks before Frodo leaves the Shire, it had to be 16 or 17 years. On a similar note, Hobbits live longer than humans, so it seems reasonable that an 18-year-old human might not look much or any younger than a 33-year-old Hobbit...and once Frodo takes possesion of the Ring, he wouldn't visibly age within the timeframe of the movie.
Thinking of Mortensen's performance in general, it's hard to imagine anyone playing the part as written by the moviemakers better than Mortensen played it. As for the more forceful and determined book Aragorn, that role just had Daniel Day Lewis written all over it. I've commented on this before, but PJ likes to say he got his first choice for all of the cast, with the exception of Aragorn...because it's all too well documented that they started filming with a different Aragorn. However, the other first choices that they allegedly had and didn't get, are quite interesting. DDL as Aragorn (a heavy sigh for what might have been), Anthony Hopkins as Gandalf (no regrets there, and that one strains credulity anyway), and Sean Connery as Gandalf. Connery claims he was offered the part and turned it down because he couldn't figure out what it was about, and still couldn't figure it out even after seeing the finished movie.