On Hobbits and Hairy Feet

Q. Hobbits are small furry-footed creatures. You're not that small and presumably you haven't got furry feet. How did they make you Frodo?

A.I had prosthetic feet and ears and a wig and that was it. And three-foot-six is sort of the standard size for hobbits, yeah.

Q. So how did that work? Did they dig ditches for you to stand in?

A.There were actually a lot of methods. They had different sized sets, so I could be on a set where things were in scale larger than me, and then the taller actors could go into a smaller set and be big there. They also had scale doubles for us.

Q. Members of the 'vertically challenged' community as it were?

A. They were fully proportioned but just small, and they would be us, the hobbits, in wide shots. There was also a lot of blue-screen work, plus we had a really old technique where you'd set up the camera at a certain angle, have someone in the foreground and someone in the background, and the angle is such so that they look side-by-side, one being smaller than the other. There was a lot of not being able to look at the other actor when filming this movie. It was bizarre, but something we got used to very quickly - although we always appreciated it when we got to work with the hobbits, because there was no issue of scale. It was just us and we could do our thing.

Q. The blue-screen stuff must be quite tricky too...

A. Yeah. It involved a lot of imagination but also, in terms of acting against things that don't exist, we had such a good idea of what we were supposed to be seeing, since we always saw the designs. So it didn't really take that much imagination. There's a scene with some orcs and a cave troll, the orcs were there but the cave troll wasn't. They had a foam cut-out of it, with a marker for its eyes and nose and mouth. It was actually more of a reference for the camera than it was for us, but it gave us an idea of the size.

Q. He's not really in this movie, but what about Gollum? You have a lot of scenes with him...

A. Gollum is going to be incredible. Gollum is sick. I actually saw a skin test for how his texture is going to be - you can see vein underneath and there are actual pores and a sliminess to him. The true test is to see whether you will be able to believe in that character with Sam and Frodo, because The Two Towers and Return Of The King mainly involve Sam, Frodo and Gollum together.

Q. Presumably you shot out of sequence?

A. Yeah, one day we would be in film one, the next in film two and sometimes within the same day, we would change films. But once we established where out characters were in each film, those changed became less difficult. You kind of got used to it.

Q. How did you react to landing the part?

A. I was overwhelmed with excitement. It's just unbelievable when someone calls you up and tells you you're playing Frodo. It was rewarding too, because I made my own audition tape- so I felt that the effort I made in trying to get the part was different from other times when I had got roles. I felt like I had really earned it.

Q. What kind of preparation did you do before filming started?

A. There were about two months of training first. It probably wasn't as difficult as the boot camp on, say, Saving Private Ryan but we had quite a hefty schedule. Everyday was planned out for us.

Q. So it was more like summer camp than a boot camp?

A. It kind of felt like that. We did sword fighting and had rowing classes, we had physical training, and dialect coaching. And just tons of sitting down with the directer and writers and talking about the characters and the story and the relationships - you know, really trying to get a grasp on what we were about to undergo. When you initially read the script, it's kind of over-whelming. Each of the roles are so massive because they stretch over such a wide story and a long period of time.

Q. With such a long shoot in New Zealand, there must have been times when things got a little tough...

A. I can remember when we were flooded out by a big storm and we actually got snowed off another set. We had to move from our locations, but all our other locations in that area were flooded too, so we were screwed. So we had to go to a covered set and shoot something else. We'd been shooting film one for three months and the covered set was from film three. It was a four-page dialogue scene with Sam and Gollum. That was extreme.

Q. Was security a big concern on set?

A. We had a lot of fans try and crash the set. We had a lot of breaches, which really raised some serious issues in terms of security, like photos being taken and items stolen. Security was a something we were always meant to be aware of. For example: we couldn't leave the set or surrounding area in costume, we had to make sure we had robes on and kept ourselves hidden.

Q. But there must have been plenty of lighter moments too?

A. We had a gag reel at the end of the film because so many ridiculous things happened. I remember Ian McKellen had this thing where he went to look at these birds, which he said were spies. He used to call them spies from Star Wars. There was tons of silly shit like that. It really relieved the tension.