In a recent interview with Flicks and Bits, Cate Blanchett talked about her disappointingly brief time on the set of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and how it essentially led her to “become a stalker” when rumors of The Hobbit began to surface!
“I had no expectation that there would be anything more after the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I thought that was sort of the end of the journey – and my time on that trilogy was all too brief. I was there for three or four weeks, even though they shot for such a long time, I was only there for that amount of time. So when I heard that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh (producer/screenwriter) and Philippa Boyens (screenwriter) were going to embark upon The Hobbit, I became a stalker, and I literally called my agent – and I don’t really bother my agent that much, but I called her pretty much everyday to say, “Is there any word yet? Is Galadriel going to be in it?” I kept getting the answer that Peter doesn’t know yet, because of course Galadriel doesn’t appear much in The Hobbit book, so I was hoping against hope. And then when I got word that, in fact, she was going to be in a small section of it I was over the moon. It was a little bit like returning to Summer camp, in that so many of the people that were a part of the first journey are a part of this journey. It’s an amazing thing to be able to return to something that begun 12 years ago.”
Flicks and Bits also talked to Hugo Weaving in the interview, who talked about what delving into the fantastical world of Middle Earth to tell stories about the human condition means to him:
We’re all dressed up and pretending, creating this world – and that’s the wonderful thing about it. That’s why you do it, you try to illuminate another reality, or illuminate another internal reality for a particular person or a group of people, create a whole new world. And in this sense it’s a really fantastical world, which has repercussions for who we are as people, even though they’re elves and dwarves and hobbits, there’s obvious parallels between the world which we inhabit and in which these characters inhabit. That’s a delight, it’s why we do it. For me this Middle-earth world is so interesting.