The Desolation of Smaug - Notes from the Commentary
Ephraim Belnap
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug Extended Edition Notes
Commentary with Director/Writer/Producer Peter Jackson and Writer/Co-Producer Philippa Boyens
Prologue in Bree with Gandalf meeting Thorin for the first time was Peter’s idea. It’s directly lifted from the appendices. Guillermo Del Toro had a version of this scene when he was going to direct. They didn’t have it in originally, but when they went back for pick-ups after making it three movies they finally had a place for it
Some of their daughters cameo’ed in this scene, although they don’t specify who. Might have been their daughters or someone else in production’s daughters, they don’t say
Prologue let them recap goals again, and deepen Thorin’s motivations. Also let them re-introduce the Arkenstone as a plot device
Opening of DoS was the very last shot of pick-ups where the whole company (13+Gandalf+Bilbo) was together. The rest of the pick-ups they were split up in some way
The great Lawrence Makaore, who played Gothmog and the Witch-King in LOTR, plays Bolg, son of Azog, the head Orc pursuing in DoS here.
They got Reuel Tolkein - great-grandson of JRR - back for a cameo in the extended scene where they seal away the witch-king! He tosses the Morgul blade onto the body while everyone else settles it in. He also had a cameo in RoTK.
Kind of adjusted the plot so Gandalf finds out he HAS to leave them right when they’re about to go into Mirkwood, ‘cause in the book it’s actually everyone knowing Gandalf has always been planning to leave them right at the point where the journey gets the most dangerous, which doesn’t make him look real good
There’s an extended scene where Bilbo and Thorin see a white stag. A white stag is a symbol of royalty; foreshadowing Thranduil. But also Thorin is royalty, so it’s thematically related to him too
Peter is famously afraid of spiders and drew on that for the Shelob scenes. Philippa jokingly asks him why he keeps having spiders in his work if he’s so scared of them. Peter laughs it off as trying to make everyone scared of them, but his voice also gets NOTICEABLY higher after the first spider is introduced in a scary way lol
There’s a scene where the dwarves group up and pull the limbs off a spider and Philippa immediately says that was “a bit gratuitous” lol
Evangeline Lily, Tauriel’s actress, is apparently very athletic. They had a great stunt double on hand for her, but apparently most of her scenes were actually her.
Orlando Bloom is back and looks basically the same.
It’s hard to cast elves, but they found a great guy in Lee Pace as Thranduil
They note Thranduil is an isolationist, but - without saying it in so many words - isolationists are kind of stupid. They note that Legolas’s plot is about kind of going outside the nest for the first time, because he’s probably never been outside of their woods before, so that’s his thing
The barrel-riding sequence was a bit of a challenge. Had a great river in NZ that Peter had been familiar with since childhood. What makes it special is that it’s built below a dam, and what happens is four times a day, the dam opens up to let water out, so the flow increases. So what they did was when the dam was opening up, they’d throw the barrels in, and they had cameras filming them going down the river. And they’d let them go down the river and then pick them up down far enough. The barrels were empty, though. It wasn’t safe to have the real actors in the drink like that. But it gave them a lot of great footage to comp the actors into. The current was very powerful, and they didn’t actually find every barrel they threw down. Pete notes that there were three or four that they simply never found that are either down the river somewhere or destroyed.
The barrels were larger than regular barrels so the actors could fit into them and look like dwarfs in regular barrels. The river thus looks a little narrower than it is in real life because the dwarves and barrels are taking up more space than you think.
With the river footage taken, the actors were filmed on water sets and comped in. And a number of sequences were filmed entirely on set, like them fighting over the closed gate at the start.
The barrel-riding was the original end of the first film when it was going to be just two films. The last shot was going to be the shot of Bard the Bowman looming over them with his bow out and his face unseen. But then things worked out how they did and they put the ending earlier.
When the dwarves are hiding in barrels full of fish, most of the fish in the barrel is rubber, but the handful on top of them is real. So that was fun.
Ryan Gage, the actor who plays the Master of Laketown’s lackey Alfrid, was originally going to play someone else. But that character, who remains unnamed, was eliminated, but they liked him so much they ended up giving him another character to play.
They kind of naturally expanded the role of Bard and the townsfolk. They really wanted to establish Bard much earlier than in the book so he was an actual person instead of this sudden dragon-slaying device that emerges from nowhere
Bard’s two daughters are played by Jimmy Nesbitt’s two real-life daughters
They treated the secret door into Erebor as like the door into Moria. Like, dwarves just like their secret doors. And the Moria door becomes visible under moonlight, and the Erebor door becomes visible under a specific kind of light too.
In the very original script before they had it nailed down, entering the mountain was the last scene of the first film, but it just didn’t work and they had to roll it back to just after the barrels like I mentioned.
As they walk in, they see a carving of the Arkenstone and have a conversation about it. Philippa said they had to bring it up because it’s about to become important in this film and the next film.
At this point, Kili, Fili, Bofur (Nesbitt), and Ori are back in Laketown because Kili was shot with a poisoned arrow during the barrel sequence and is growing sick. He needs Elvish medicine, as they say. Pete and Philippa say that people complained about the Kili poisoning subplot, but that it also has defenders. Pete notes the irony that complaints might come from book fans, but also from people who haven’t read the book in a while and don’t actually remember what happened. Phillipa says yes, they expanded on the material, and it’s not in the book, but to be fair the majority of the audience probably haven’t read the book, and that is the audience around which Peter has always tailored these films. And so we just kind of have to deal with the fact that the films aren’t accurate. That said, they both implore the audience to NOT use this film for their book report. Just read the original.
In the extended edition, Gandalf finds Thrain, father of Thorin, in Dol Guldur, and they have a bit of dialogue and such. It messed up their rules for extended cuts a bit (it shouldn’t add things general audiences didn’t get to see), but they decided to just try it out. It’s an adaptation from the appendices - Gandalf finds Thrain as a prisoner of the Necromancer in Dol Guldur and gets the map to Erebor and the key to the secret door from him. Now, that happens BEFORE the quest, naturally, in the books. But they still wanted to do a version of that and thus had Gandalf discovering Thrain here. And instead, they had Thrain having had possession of one of the seven Dwarf-rings, and it having been taken from him here, so Gandalf is discovering the Necromancer ruling Dol Guldur is “Ring-collecting” and may not be just some random dude.
And here is where Gandalf’s staff gets destroyed, as he’s overwhelmed by the Necromancer (actually Sauron) as he tries to leave.
DRAGON
The gold, we see, is in massive piles. Peter likes to think the dwarves had it all neatly stacked, but then Smaug came in and just swung his tail casually and it all got knocked over
Philippa imagines Smaug has just been “brooding over the gold” for so many years and lying in it and soaking in it and doing so has imbued the gold with dragon sickness that makes you lust for the gold. Once again talks about “the obscenity of the wealth” we’re seeing. Pete notes that Smaug can’t SPEND the gold. It’s not like he can go down to the store and buy a sandwich with it. He just lusts over the shape and feel of it
We finally see Smaug’s face in focus, but then Bilbo puts the ring on and goes into Ringworld and he gets all fuzzy like everything else. Peter calls this a little teaser for the audience. Like, you get a good look, and now you can’t see him clearly again for a bit
They considered having Smaug communicate telepathically - just speaking into Bilbo’s mind and his mouth not moving. But they did tests of it and it just didn’t look right, so they went with physical speaking.
They knew this had to be a great achievement. Like a truly impressive talking dragon. They talk about Sean Connery in Dragonheart as a previous, impressive talking dragon, but knew it had been a while since that film and that they could take it to a next level with this one.
Benedict brought a lot of personality. For example, all the moving around the space we see Smaug doing came from Benedict over the course of recording his performance. He’s meant to be like a cat, but also he’s pacing, but also he’s pumping Bilbo for information. His movements are very meaningful and character-based. And the way Benedict played it, he also made Smaug into “a psychopath”. This kind of cold, crazy, malicious personality.
“That, my lad, was a dragon.” - Knew that was the trailer line
Smaug has a line where he says the hoard is his, and he “will not part with one piece of it, not one piece of it.” That line isn’t in literally in the books, but very from the books thematically
If you pay attention, you see Smaug has to do three intakes of breath before fire comes out. Like an engine revving
Peter adopted one of the pigs we see in Laketown, and his daughter looks after her lol.
Richard Armitage, Thorin's actor, didn’t like the “borrowed-from-Laketown” outfit he was wearing, and asked to lose it if he could, so when the dragon fight gets started, his overcoat gets burned immediately so he can take it off.
“If it shall end in fire, then we shall all burn together” was a line from reshoots. Also the line the Ed Sheeran song derives from.
Have a scene where Legolas faces off with Bolg and actually gets shook a little, gets a nosebleed from getting hit. Meant to establish Bolg’s threat as he and Legolas are gonna be like particular enemies in this film and the next. However, Peter jokes this may be the first time Legolas has ever seen his own blood when he bleeds from his nose a bit
Once they decided this was going to be three movies, they need a big climax for the end of this one, and came up with the attempted dragon-killing. In the books, the whole Smaug sequence came across as “the dwarves hiding while others suffer”, which “isn’t very heroic”. The idea of the dwarves trying to burn him with molten gold was the best thing Pete and co could come up with.
Weta Workshop and Weta Digital did great work and brainstorming sessions creating the sequences. They were putting it all together in roughly the same order as the characters in the story. Smaug accidentally ignited the forge, they start fooling around with stuff in the forge, some start distracting him, some start setting up things to drop on him, some keep heatings things up, etcetera. Basically planned and shot it 30 seconds at a time. Pete was shooting it like a month before the premiere. It was a very uncertain time. “A few months later and we’re still recovering from it. Everyone’s a bit shaky, still” - Pete.
Early on in this tricky process, they came up with the image of a golden dragon taking flight and thought that would be a great image for the film to wrap up on, and thus everything in the sequence is reverse-engineered around building to that moment. They also made sure to have dialogue from Smaug to establish that he was going to blame the humans for this and take it out on them. They note he’s the kind of sadistic jerk who will punish other people for someone else’s actions
Smaug is mesmerized by the molten gold statue because remember, he has dragon sickness too and is enthralled by gold
“The second film is the extra film. There’s a lot of material that was never in the original screenplay.” - Pete
CREDITS
Philippa’s very impressed by how Ed Sheeran’s song “I See Fire” and how he could come up with something “so perfect” so quickly.
Peter didn’t know who Ed Sheeran was, but his daughter Katie who was sixteen or so at the time DID know who he was, and said he was a big LoTR fan, and at the time, he was coming to Wellington for a show. Going off of Kate’s intel, they thought, “Well, why don’t we give him a tour of the Hobbit set?” And they did, and Ed loved it and they had a fun initial acquaintance. This was in March of 2013, and Desolation of Smaug came out in December 2013.
They had a problem when it came to the closing song. They grow the songs out of the way the film ends. “The song helps you through the cliffhanger.” But because the film’s end was so suddenly thrown together, they DIDN’T KNOW what the end mood was gonna be, and wouldn’t have it until shortly before the premiere! Who did they know that could write a great song in a short amount of time?! However, Katie at some point said, “don’t forget about Ed!” And that got Peter thinking like, “That could work.”
Ed had given them his email, so they emailed him. He was apparently on holiday in Spain at the time.
But he emailed back within one hour.
They said, “Well, if you’re going to do the song, then you have to come down to New Zealand and watch the film to get an idea of what to write.”
He said, “Yep. Coming now.”
The very quickest you can get from Spain to New Zealand is something like 28 hours. About 28 hours later, Ed Sheeran was walking through the door. And he wrote a very good song and they’re very happy with it
When it comes to the challenges of film production, Peter says,
“You can’t create fate, but you can create a lot of elements that give fate a chance.”
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