Hobbit forming

As the lost hobbits Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) journey towards the forbidding Black Gates of Mordor pursued by the darksome creature Gollum, and the people of Rohan find themselves beseiged by the gathering armies of the twisted Saruman (Christopher Lee), the captured hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are left to fend for themselves in the mysterious Fargorn forest where they find an unexpected ally.

Welcome to The Two Towers, the central instalment in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Lord Of The Rings trilogy as envisaged by the New Zealand director Peter Jackson. With the new film due for worldwide release on December 18th, and expected to be as phenomenally huge as its forerunner The Fellowship of the Ring, Middle-Earth freaks the world over must feel as if they’ve finally ascended into geek-boy heaven.

Movie House recently caught up with Glaswegian actor Billy Boyd, who plays the much beloved hobbit Pippin. Best described as the Company of the Ring’s official imbecile and chief liability, Pippin was notable throughout The Fellowship for his cunning in consistently alerting Black Riders to the Ring’s precise location by way of lighting fires to make ‘nice crispy sandwiches for elevenses’.

TARA BRADY: Has LOTR utterly changed Billy Boyd’s existence?

BILLY BOYD: Yeah, to the extent that I have to travel around a lot now, and having your work seen by an international audience is such a huge thing, but day to day life hasn’t changed much. I still do the same things and have the same mates.

TB: So you’re not trapped in the whole sci-fi/fantasy conference circuit yet?

BB: No, but I did actually do one.in New York that I was invited to. To tell you the truth I’ve been too busy with the film to do any more, but I had a couple of weeks off so I did that one and it was great. It was really interesting meeting the people who were just seriously into the movie and that genre, and the question and answer thing was really deep, because you’re being asked questions by people who know more about the movie than you.

TB: Were you an avid fan of the book before he got involved with the movie?

BB: I only read them after I’d been cast. I had read The Hobbit when I was growing up. It was one of those books that I read together with my friends. We’d go into school the next day and be like, ‘Can you believe that happened?’ and I went on to read LOTR but at that age I was just really disappointed that it wasn’t all about Bilbo. I just wanted more Bilbo Baggins and when the book went on to Frodo I just lost interest completely and I didn’t get back to it until after I was cast.

TB: And how exactly did his casting come about? Did you read for Pippin specifically or just a hobbit?

BB: Actually I read for Merry or Pippin. I did a tape which was sent to Pete Jackson in New Zealand, and after he narrowed down to six in each location - London, L.A., New York, Sydney - it was just Pippin I was reading for and he directed me in a couple of test scenes and a couple of months later I got the call and just couldn’t believe it!

TB: Did you worry at all about the magnitude of taking on such a well-known character?

BB: Before I went, and again before The Fellowship came out, I did worry. People love Pippin, and love the Hobbits and have done for 50 years so I was thinking - Oh, my God, I’m going to play one of these guys and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life having people abusing me in the street, saying I spoiled Pippin for them. But then, when we were actually making it, it was like being in a strange bubble away from the rest of the world, and luckily however Pete Jackson did it, he managed to make a great movie while pleasing the Tolkien fans. And I love the way, he’s incorporated stuff from the book - like the way chapter headings like ‘Rhythm in the Dark’ or ‘Shortcut to Mushrooms’ are used as part of the dialogue.

TB: Do you view Pippin, as many do, as the resident Hobbit twit?

BB: Well, when I was reading the book I was still being considered for both Merry and Pippin, and I started to hope for Pippin, though granted he is a bit of a twit, but that’s mainly because of his inquisitive nature and naivete. There’s just something about an innocent that I think people relate to, and a lot of younger people seem to see the story through Pippin’s eyes because they can see that that’s how they’d be in something as huge as the quest that he’s on. It’s such a big thing, it’s probably easy to throw something down a well and bring the whole Orc army down on your head! It’s a bit like being in a room and shouting a secret out, just as the loud music comes to a halt. We’ve all done it.

TB: Did the process of making The Two Towers differ at all from making The Fellowship?

BB: Well, we made them all as the one movie except for the reshoots. Me and Dom (Monaghan, who plays Merry) had to do about three weeks last year to add little bits and little scenes, and I suppose we’ll do the same this year for the last one, The Return Of The King. Basically, as Pete puts the stuff together he decides he wants a line here to define the moment and back to New Zealand we go, and watching The Two Towers you can really see those moments where people change. Like with Pippin, he realises just how serious this whole business is and how he can help people in this movie.

TB: There are though, more special effects in this movie though. Did that make it more difficult for the actors?

BB: Well, it was different. The Two Towers is definitely the one film with the most special effects and CGI, and of course, we had a lot of scenes with Treebeard.

TB: Was the Treebeard character completely CGI?

BB: No, he was actually a giant eighteen foot animatronic model that they built, and it had moving arms that myself and Dom could sit in. and branches that it could use to pick up and look at us. Later on, they did add some CG on his face, just to make it more life-like. But the rest of the Ents are completely CG, so we had to spend a lot of time sitting in a giant robotic tree talking to green screens and a golf-ball.

TB: Oh, the glamour...

BB: Yeah, exactly. But you know, in The Fellowship and in The Return Of The King, when we were on top of a mountain being very tired in the film, we were nine guys on top of a mountain being very tired. So that made the acting easier, and green screen stuff might seem much tougher by comparison, but it’s like theatre really. You just use your imagination that bit more.

TB: The Two Towers section of LOTR is considerably darker in tone. Does the film keep with that?

BB: I think so, definitely, because the war starts in The Two Towers. Saruman gets his Uruk-hai army together and you have the huge Battle of Helm’s Deep, and it’s a real good versus evil thing because the people of Rohan that Saruman wants to destroy are a very simple, rural, peasant-like people that are very happy in their own lives, and to see this war come to them does make things very dark. And in the film, there are women and children involved and there’s the idea that Saruman just wishes to wipe mankind out. It’s ethnic cleansing, really.

TB: Was he disappointed that the film didn’t get the Academy Award for best film?

BB: I’d be lying if I said we weren’t disappointed. There was such a buzz around the movie at that time, but I thought about it after and decided that if we got Best Director, then surely the best director makes the best movie. Besides, if you look at what Pete Jackson’s done – no other director has ever done anything like it. He’s took forward movie-making, he’s invented new ways of shooting, he’s filmed three movies at once. At some point that will be recognised.

TB: What was the worst thing about being a Hobbit?

BB: Probably the feet. Once you put them on, they were kind of bouncy and you did feel like a Hobbit, but putting them on for an hour an half every morning did get tiring. You’d put them on like slippers and then they’d have to glue them in, and spray-paint them and put hair on them, and sometimes you’d just think – I could be having another hour in bed now.

TB: And do you ever play with your own action figure?

BB: Yeah, but I don’t think my nose is really that big.