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Interviewing
Sean Astin was a treat! Twas quite like I imagine an interview with Samwise
Gamgee himself would have gone. Sean was as excited, bubbly, and talkative
as a Hobbit could possibly get! It was truly a pleasure to sit down with Sean
and I hope you enjoy the interview half as much as I did.
Now, without further ado...may I present...Mr. Sean Astin!
How was it to build up to…it was all shot out of sequence, obviously...but there's just so much emotion that Samwise has to go through…arcing the way through to what the final end is…how is it to constantly have to…build right into that whenever you're shooting a scene out of sequence?
Well, the way you're characterizing it makes it seem like there were sudden…bursts to that…that wasn't really the experience for me. It was more of a marathon than to wind sprints...the hard part was keeping your mental acuity and your focus over five years, essentially…over a year and a half of principle photography, but then…getting back into it for the first pickups…and then back into it for the second pickups, and then back into it for the third pickups, and sort of…picking up the emotional threads, and then reconciling them with everything that's happened in terms of how the movies have been received, and all the publicity, and all the tours, and the way you've heard people talk about the character and all these kinds of things. I think the way that Peter designed the process afforded him the space and time to…kind of…mind the resources of every aspect of the film, but, in this regard, the kind of emotional reserves of the actors…and so, we would never…ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty takes…it didn't matter. The film was sort of the cheapest commodity, or resource, on the project, so if everybody had gone to the effort of swing-loading five different helicopters to bring stuff to the tops of mountains to be able to capture it…if it got dark, then you'd have to leave, but otherwise, you wanted to stay there until you got it right, so it was like these…this is how I described it in one of the other rooms...I always used to think of emotion…or crime…in a movie, as this sort of crossbar that was set...and the crossbar is truth, or emotional honesty, or something like that…or the depth of emotional discovery, or something, and that's there… and your job was to…based on the story, and the character, and the work of the filmmakers…to get over that bar, wherever it was set...it was the film-maker's bar, or the actor's bar...set it where you thought it was higher than you'd done before, but Peter just sort of took the bar and snapped it over his leg…you know what I mean…and we're back to the business about… peeling away the onion...or the orange, you know, and you're just peeling away layers…and layers…and layers…and…you had lots of time to see the emotional moment that you were gonna be experiencing coming toward you…they were setting up the lights, we'd rehearsed, we'd talk about it, you know it was on the schedule, but then, Peter was a little…unceremonial…about the way you'd start…he'd sort of…just…get about the business of doing it …“and then we'll walk in here and go there …then you burst into tears here…and then you break down and cry here ,” and we'd sort of talk about it and you'd sort of think like…well… on some movies ( speaks in a whisper ) “everybody on the set has to be quiet,” or the director will talk in hushed tones about it, or something like that…Peter was the same the whole way…it was just part of the work…and then you'd get there, and if you had any kind of…emotional baggage or artifice about how you were approaching the work…it would take a lot of energy to sustain it over the 18 months, so eventually that all kind of went away, and now you're just kind of laid bare…and then we'd do the take, and if it wasn't there…we weren't going anywhere, so it became a kind of...a couple of dynamics emerged…one is, if all this great talent and hard work and energy is going into the creation of the props, and the set, and the costumes, and the stores, and the rocks...I've never talked about this before…you'd see people…they'd put together polystyrene rocks, and people would be painting them, and squirting them, putting rocks around…if you got there early, you could see them pouring a dump truck full of actual shale that they pulled off of the topography that matched this particular set…and you look at all this work that's going into it, and it's all being done to service, like, this emotional moment. So what are you gonna do…dishonor or disrespect or disavow all the man hours and labor that's gone into creating the environment? They'd lynch ya…or they'd be disappointed in you, which'd be worse, so, you didn't want to be the weak link, so that was one thing, and then the other thing was just the kind of…emotional diminishing return…if you get to a place where, like…you've done so much you get this feeling like “ God, if I don't really go to the depths of my soul on this one , he couldn't do it again … I just don't have enough energy, so I'm gonna…” you're gonna go as deep as you can, and then, at certain points, when you've just kind of run that “sensitive” thing just raw and bloody, and you'd think, “ That's it… I'm numb now,” you keep going, and you go again…and again …and again…and you realize, like, you're stronger, and there's more in you than you could ever possibly imagine…and only 20% of it is left in the movie and it's powerful but it's like… there's another five hours of footage of scenes that we all love that, you know…some will make it in the extended DVD, but it'll take Peter a lifetime, if he wants to, to really, ya know…
Sean, you could make a real case that Sam is the real hero, or maybe even the real star of the film…how tough does that make it to single out a performance for Oscar time and all the nominations?
Uhhhm...(laughs) wow…
Have you even thought that far ahead yet?
Well, no, I mean, everybody talks about it… you can't avoid thinking about it but um
And they have said it's the film to beat this year…The United Brotherhood of “they”…..
They…the Oscar pundits….
(long pause) Basically people will have a response. The film…this is a thing, now, in film culture, in entertainment culture…that everybody is aware of…I hope that the talk about it doesn't sort of…interrupt…peoples' experience with it…that's kind of a fear I have. The way its' supposed to work, in the ideal version that's in my mind is that… people get about the business of doing their work, you know, plying their craft or their trade, or their technique, or whatever, and…if it touches people, or people are moved by it, then, they acknowledge that in some way, but I'm not convinced that...I mean, I'm an Academy voter, my dad's an Academy voter. Every year the Academy publishes books of all the eligible films, and maybe the most disciplined Academy voters really study the book carefully, but that's just the book of the titles of the films...who's really gonna watch all the films? Who's gonna look at all...you know…how do you hear about things? So Lord of the Rings, because of its success, because of the precedent that's been set, it's out there that it's gonna be looked at and analyzed and parsed and everything else, and each Academy voter will have to determine for themselves how much they want to be moved by the marketing of the films, and by the different editors of magazines who choose to focus on things, or the different shows that choose to focus on things, you know. There's kind of this weird popular…cultural…pop culture…you know, the fashion, and who's...it's…it's complicated…and it's this big, kind of…orgy…I'm not convinced that…as someone who loves being a voting member of the Academy…my dad and I love talking about film…talking about what we like, and why this should be honoured versus that…we enjoy that process. He goes to ball games with my brother, and he and I talk about movies, and I try to convince him what I think the best picture of the year is, and I try and learn from him, and he's always coming up with these kind of interesting, oblique, avant-garde, independent films and thinking, “Well, this ought to be recognized.” I'm like, “God how did you find that?” He's so interesting with where he comes up with stuff, and, uhmm…I mean, he's 73…when he dies...there might be this huge void in my landscape. I'm kind of populous…mainstream...I haven't honed the technique of looking for new and interesting things the way he has. As someone who loves the best of what that environment can be, I'm not convinced that that sort of acknowledgment or recognition for the film, even though I recognize that it has a kind of…impact on the bottom line of a film, that it can have a palpable impact or monumental impact on people's careers…all that has to be mulled over…it can't be avoided…it just can't be avoided…there's no way. I've flirted with the idea of saying, “I'm not gonna participate. I don't wanna think about it, I don't wanna answer those questions” but I…I think I have to, because…it's like the pink elephant in the living room. Having said all that, I'm not sure that that recognition is more important than a fan who does a drawing based on a picture from one of the photo companion guides and wants to give it to you at a convention…like that kind of acknowledgement…or somebody who writes a poem, or something like that…it should be just as meaningful as the acknowledgment from the Academy.
With all your screen time, you were pretty much shooting for most of the eighteen month schedule, right?
Oh yeah.
You've got a lot of other actors that are coming in and out, and you've talked about how exhausted you were at times...what's it like when you're exhausted and then you have a new guy come on the set who's full of energy?
Remember in Platoon, when Charlie Sheen gets off the helicopter in the beginning, and the old war-weary guys are getting on the helicopter? It's kind of like that…in the movie, not in the war. You see the new guy, and you're excited for their fresh energy, and you mourn when, after a very short period of time, their energy gets sapped because the process is incredibly demanding on everybody who steps into it, so it only takes twenty-four, thirty-six hours before you realize the weight of what's being done, that after a week, or two weeks, or three weeks, or whatever and they've got that sort of battle mode going… it's sort of disappointing, you know...there's been another…energy casualty. ( Laughter )
Sam, the whole movie, the whole cycle, I mean…there's a cycle, from beginning to end and there's an opening and a closing, and for you, it seems like it started with the dance with Rosie and it ends in a very beautiful way. How was that for you?
Well, the denouement, with Rosie, the wedding, it wasn't...we did a couple months ago.
Really…
Yeah…and I turned up, and I didn't know that we were doing it, and then I saw Sarah, and so I realized she must be doing something, and then got the pages and we stopped…there used to a thing that, you know, you'd read a script beforehand, and this was…their process was, you know…Peter and Fran's process was still kind of organic and ever-changing and everything else, and you stopped needing to know ahead of time what you were doing…you'd sort of need to know as you were doing it…it was kind of a zen exercise, so when we got there it was like “Oh, tomorrow you'll be doing a marriage scene with Rosie Cotton” and you instantly got that “Oh…they want to pay that off”...and then, when I'm putting on the wardrobe...it just felt appropriate.
And being a family guy…doing that part, and seeing little Elanor, the daughter…
(Obviously
smiling ) Yeaaaahh….
How was that? Was that fulfilling as well?
Which part? Seeing it?
Well, seeing it and the very last bit.
When I saw a version of the film in London a few months ago, I was crying so hard…
Was that the four-and-a-half hour version?
Yes. I didn't see the whole movie, but I saw, like, the last three reels, so a lot of what I saw was trimmed out to get the film down to its very concise three hours and fifteen minutes or whatever, so, just to have that moment in time preserved was so special...that's my favorite thing I think.
So that would be you most enjoyable moment, you think?
Well,
I don't know about…uhhhm…I felt…yeah…I think it's…yeah… (smiling again)
You know what I'm thinking, though…the real payoff for your character was when Frodo's writing in the book. If you look very closely at what he writes…
I know! I knoooowww!!!
It says you've become the mayor, which is…
I found that distracting because he's gone on in his narration beyond that…
Yeah
No, wait, no no no…it's actually…if you look at the book…in the right-hand part of the book, he's saying that it's the greatest thing he ever did, right?
Right…exactly…
Which he had said in the narration a couple minutes earlier, so, you're like, “Couldn't he have gotten the…(unable to decipher this…sorry!)
I still like the payoff about…
The mayor! Yeah, yeah…
Your part…
Yeah…does he actually say that…
It doesn't say it… it's in the book…it's in his handwriting…
Where?
When he's reading… (This becomes an intense discussion over what is written in the book at the end of the movie…I wasn't able to sort out every single comment here…apologies…Lady Arien)
…the part that's writing about him getting married…
…but there's a paragraph before it…
Mayor for a long time…
In my mind, I always…
You were the…
…going to be the last thing he wrote rather than earlier in the pages…maybe on the ninth viewing I'll have the presence of mind…
…Sam becomes the mayor...
…greatest thing he ever did...
No no no…the greatest thing he ever did was ask Rosie Cotton to marry him
You always have, like, a thousand different projects going on. What else do you have coming? Is Jeremiah gonna be back?
No
You're finished with whatever this sci-fi film was that you're about to do…
Done…after Dec. 17 th , when I finish my publicity for the movies, my life is wide open…I have no idea what I want to do. There's so many projects that I've developed and everything else, but…focus…and trying to figure out what to do and when and how, and…yeah…so…it's completely wide open.
The writing of the Laddy project still even…
There's a number of projects that I've told the people to get their funding in place and I'm available if they wanna work around my schedule, I'm happy to do it…writing the Laddy's one…there's like four or five that I'm quote/unquote “attached to”…whatever that means… and they take my name and whoever else's name and they try to raise the money based on-
One last question…there's a lot of talk of “this was held out,” “this is in the extended edition.” And Sam is very attached to his pans, and his gear…on the way to Mount Doom, you guys are in Orc gear…poof…you're in clothes…does he get to say goodbye to his pans, like in the book?
It's filmed, hopefully it'll be in the DVD...yeah…you know, the first time I saw the film, I was mourning the loss of all the connective tissue of all that stuff. The second time I saw it, I was really looking at it from Peter's perspective, trying to put myself in his shoes and figure why, ‘cause everything that's done is done for a reason, I was trying to understand the reasons for what he was doing. I able to enjoy it a lot more looking at it from his perspective rather than mourning the loss of all those things, but …no…there's so much stuff that's gone…
Thanks Sean!!
Want to listen to the complete audio interview? Go here: Sean Astin Part 1 (1.83MB MP3) & Sean Astin Part 2 (149 kb MP3)
Interviews conducted by Illuvatar and other members of The Printed Press, at the Los Angeles Press Junket on December 3rd, 2003. We have 14 of these interviews to release and we'll try and bring you a few a week over the next few weeks, so keep an eye, or two if you can spare them, on the main page new for more soon! :-)
Special thanks to New Line Cinema and all the Cast & Crew for taking the time to sit down with us and provide these interviews. And a very, very special thanks to all of the War of the Ring staff that pitched in their personal time to do the transcriptions!
In Fellowship,
Illuvatar ~ Webmaster - War of the Ring.net
Got a comment on what you've read? Then post a message below, if you have a question or want to discuss in more detail then head over to the WotR Community Forum.
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