The script that shook Middle-earth's middle

By LINDA HERRICK

There's a shock revelation from The Two Towers scriptwriter Philippa Boyens. They've gone and changed the ending from the book ...

But before diehard devotees of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings start foaming with outrage, stop right there. The climax of The Two Towers, the middle stage of the trilogy's complex, hope-darkened drama, has been reworked -- to make a better film.

That's partly because the storylines in The Two Towers become split into three major strands: the fraught journey of Frodo, Sam and Gollum through Mordor; the union of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Rohan Kingdom allies against the gathering evil; and the travails of Merry and Pippin, last seen snatched by the Orcs.

The Two Towers, the book, features two major climactic events: the battle of Helm's Deep, and Frodo's crisis in Shelob's lair. Boyens says director Peter Jackson and co-writer Fran Walsh decided to end the movie with the battle. "We decided quite early on not to go to Shelob's lair," she explains, "and it was the right decision otherwise you'd be intercutting between two huge climaxes and they would have killed each other dramatically. However, if you are on an interior journey with Frodo, you keep it in that area, his battle with the ring."

Fear not, dear LOTR fanatics, for Frodo's encounter with "the bubbling misery" of Shelob will still come, in the third film, which sets the hobbits and Gollum in a direct line to Mt Doom.

Boyens says this middle story was the hardest one to tell because the action is so splintered.

"It would have been tempting -- if you were writing a normal screenplay -- to drop the third storyline of Merry and Pippin, but we didn't want to do that, we wanted to make it work. That was the

hardest thing -- a continual process of rewriting to make those three storylines speak to each other.

"You're dealing with a lot of wonderful characters which is a great gift but also really difficult because you're talking about 18 journeys of different characters we should all invest in and care about -- or loathe, as in the case of Saruman."

By the time Jackson took himself off the Oscar-nominated (for last year's Fellowship of the Ring) writing team to direct, "it came down to Fran and myself trying to stay on top of this huge

juggernaut by feeding it these scenes. It was pretty insane," giggles Boyens.

Writing the script involves far more than merely lifting lines from Tolkien's prose. "We do change the dialogue quite a bit, absolutely, we take a lot of liberties. That's the least of it: sometimes there's some beautiful language expressing a wonderful idea that is never going to hit the screen unless you change it.

"That often happens -- Fran and myself had moments we wanted to keep in the movie, bits and pieces we loved, and so did the actors. We found it's pretty hard to put undiluted Tolkien on the page and get it off the page into the film. You need

someone like Ian McKellen [Gandalf]. Fran and I used to write stuff for Ian and say, ÔLet's see you get that off the page!' Of course, he always did."

She believes The Two Towers is much more sinister than the first film, and

viewers will see terrible changes in Frodo, internal as well as physical.

"With Gollum, you are introducing another ringbearer into the equation -- he had that ring and so Frodo can see the future for himself, the corruption. "There's a sort of battle going on in Frodo to save Gollum because he needs to know he can save himself, that this ring won't destroy him.

"And you've got the incredible decency and strength of Sam. Their storyline in the second film is very much about holding on. And you've got to hold on for this incredible ending. We've used that: how do you keep going when it's all going wrong?

"How do you fit into the greater scheme of things when you are all sundered and separated? We used those very problems inherent in the story and made them part of the central themes.

"The journey and the conclusion you come to at the end of the second movie is that Frodo and Sam are not the same two little hobbits who set out from the Shire at the beginning of the first film. They have changed."

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