New Zealand a paradise for Rings star Liv Tyler

By HELEN BARLOW

The lush grandeur of New Zealand's landscape provided a perfect backdrop for Peter Jackson's film of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the actors who came into that world were overwhelmed by the country's natural beauty.

"It was really beautiful and in a way it was Middle-earth for us," says Liv Tyler, one of the movie's few female stars.

"Everywhere, even if we were sitting in our trailers with the doors open, there were huge people and little people and monsters, everything you could imagine, around us all of the time."

With her ethereal looks, Liv Tyler would seem sensibly cast as the 3000-year-old Elf princess, Arwen. But she also sounds like her - with a little prompting, Tyler happily drifts off into Elvish, the imaginary gutteral singsong tones she learned for the role.

"The first couple of lines I had to memorise were hard, and then it got easier and I really enjoyed it. I could do it quickly. One day I had to shoot three scenes, all in Elvish, and I'd have to take it in stages, because if I memorised it all at once I'd get confused.

"After we did it for a while it became more natural. The thing that makes Elvish hard is that there isn't anything to grab hold of in terms of the rhythms."

Of all the cast, Tyler spent the least time in New Zealand. While she was committed to the film for a year and a half, she also had pressing commitments elsewhere - to those she loves.

"I can't handle being on the other side of the world. I'm really a family-oriented person and I get homesick easily. I think I was homesick more than anyone. It was hard to come and go like that. Sometimes I'd go home for two months and come back for a week and then go home again. Whereas the boys were there the whole time and they really explored New Zealand in their free time."

In the story, Arwen is the object of Aragorn's desire, and this forceful mortal male is played with conviction by 42-year-old Viggo Mortensen.

"Viggo was amazing because he basically became Aragorn. It's funny for me to see him now because he's a lot more relaxed and doesn't have that facial hair. He's pretty cute."

So of course is Arwen who, true to Tyler's typical choice of roles, is also gutsy. She is destined to leave Middle-earth to sail ships from the Grey Havens to the Undying Lands in the West - so in essence she must choose between her love for her people and her love for Aragorn, a mortal man.

"Arwen adores him," says Tyler. "For me the love story is the main core of my part. In a girly kind of way, that was what brought me to the film, because it's a classic, gut-wrenching love story. If you read the appendix in the back of the book, it's just like, 'Oh, it's Romeo and Juliet'. It's as complicated as you can get."

There was some early internet controversy over rumours that Arwen was going to be transformed into a warrior princess.

"There was some fighting with her from the Miramax days," director Peter Jackson has admitted. "But in this version, she completely hews to the book. Well, she does ride a horse."

While Tyler is no coward, horses are quite another thing. Her upbringing in Maine and Manhattan, where she still lives, did not prepare her for the expert horse-riding required for the role of Arwen.

"Me and horses don't go so well together," she says. "I think horses are the most beautiful animals, and I love to touch them and kiss them on the nose and hang out with them and pat them and all that stuff, but I just don't like being on them that much.

"But I did it. I learned how to ride really well, cantered and everything." She was scared, nonetheless. "There's something about being on the top of an animal that's four times the size of you, and has four legs and can run, that I find kind of scary. It was amazing that some of the guys could ride bareback [like Viggo]."

Before making the film, Tyler had not read Tolkien's trilogy, but she accepted the role as soon as she had read it. To her credit, she usually chooses movies with an independent spirit and sense of adventure, and this she found in The Lord of the Rings.

"Although it's one of the biggest movies ever made, to me - and I've made a lot of movies - it felt like a small independent film, because of the nature of where we were and how dedicated people were.

"There weren't a lot of perks - we didn't have huge trailers and all those excess things. It was really kind of down and dirty in that way, and just the passion and everything that went on gave it that independent feel."

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Feature: Lord of the Rings