There and Back Again (36 page)

Fran and Philippa were justifiably proud at having figured out a moving, logical conclusion to the first film, and they wanted us to know how good they felt about it. I presume Peter also wanted us to understand that this was a critical transitional scene, one that would leave viewers eager to see the second movie, and as such it required intense focus on our part. I do know that that evening was among the highlights of the entire production for me, sitting in that restaurant, reading this beautifully rendered scene, and thinking,
See, we're all just colleagues after all; they really do care about me and want to spend time with me.
Such are the insecurities and neuroses of my sometimes feeble mind, and they were easily magnified on a production of this scale. Peter and Fran and Philippa were so busy and were being pulled in so many different directions that it wasn't unusual to go weeks on end without having a substantive conversation with them. In fairness, though, it wasn't Peter's job to be my friend or mentor, even if that's what I wanted. But I remember feeling like my value as an actor was perceived as important that night. There were so many times when I lost sight of what we were doing, when it felt like we all were just grinding it out—putting on the makeup, the ears and feet—and that we were somehow disconnected from the big picture. Now, though, Sam had a purpose—I had a purpose—and it was germane to the overall project.

This was one instance, however, when circumstances conspired to make filming the sequence a physical as well as emotional challenge. It was early in the morning, and I felt pretty good about the work ahead, maybe even a bit cocky, because I knew I'd have something important to do. Christine and Ali were with me in the dressing room, and I gave them both a quick kiss before heading out to film the scene. It wasn't a complicated shot. Elijah would sit in a canoe, some twenty feet off the shore, and shout to me an explanation for his departure, and for leaving me behind. I would respond by telling him that I understood, while simultaneously declaring my intention to follow. The fact that Sam doesn't know how to swim does not dissuade him in the least, and ultimately Frodo must paddle back and rescue his friend, sealing their bond for the duration of the journey: they will go together to Mordor, regardless of the consequences.

I had taken only a few heavy steps into the water, however, when I felt a searing pain in my foot, the kind of pain that instantly signals a severe injury. If you smack your funny bone or stub your toe, it hurts, but the pain passes almost instantly. This was different. It felt as though something had gone right through my foot. The shot called for me to walk into the water and swim—or flail—out of frame, but I stopped immediately, frozen in my tracks by the pain. It hurt pretty bad for about ten seconds, and then I turned and limped out of the water and stumbled back up the beach. I was surprised by how quickly everyone seemed to realize the gravity of the situation. Of course, the blood streaming down my prosthetic foot was an indication that something bad had happened. I'd been stabbed, as it turned out, probably by a branch or a shard of glass, although I can't be sure of that, since we never found the offending object. The likely scenario is that when the crew prepared the lake for this scene, they ran a rake along the bottom to smooth things out and make sure nothing was there. Unfortunately, they might have churned something up that had been buried. Also, I was putting such force into the way I was marching into the water, while wearing just my hobbit feet, that anything with a sharp tip was going to do some damage.

I discovered on this day that you can determine the severity of an injury by looking at the faces of the people around you. If it's really bad, they squint or scrunch up their faces, or even turn away in revulsion. That's the reaction my wound seemed to provoke. Not from everyone, mind you. Elijah walked over as one of the emergency medical technicians was cutting off my prosthetic foot, an act that dislodged a huge blood clot, which landed on the ground with a
splat!
This naturally disgusted most everyone in proximity, with the possible exception of Elijah, who simply said, “Cool!” and then began poking at the blood clot with a stick, an act that disgusted even Peter Jackson, whose background in splatter films ought to make him immune to such things.

“Come on, Elijah. Don't do that!” he admonished.

“No, that's okay,” I said. “He can play with my blood clot.”

Elijah just laughed. On some level, I think, I enjoyed the attention, especially once the pain began to subside. But it was a bit of a carnival atmosphere. The DVD crew was shooting close-ups, and everyone was gathering around, and it was becoming clear that while this wasn't a life-threatening injury or anything, it was going to be a major inconvenience.

“Oh, yes, it's bleeding quite freely now,” the medic said as he dressed the wound.

Freely …

Not a word you want to hear associated with your own blood. To me that meant,
Whoa, I'm losing a lot of blood.
But that's not what he meant. He was referring to the fact that it was a clean, empty wound, that dirt was going out with the blood, which was a good thing. Relatively speaking.

Everything happened pretty quickly after that. Ali and Christine showed up, and the three of us were flown by helicopter to a small hospital. Christine doesn't like helicopters, so she sat in the back. Ali was up front with me and the pilot. She was only four years old, so she naturally looked to me to see whether she should be afraid.

“Don't worry,” I said. “It'll be fun.”

Ali smiled. Meanwhile, in the back, as the chopper left the ground, Christine closed her eyes and turned a little green. The pilot, I had been told, once worked with Jacques Cousteau, flying in and out of some of the most remote locations in the world, so I figured he had to be pretty good. And he was. The flight was bumpy but uneventful.

Ali wanted to stay with me while the doctor treated my injury. As he pulled out a syringe filled with novocaine, I wondered if I had made a mistake.

“Oh, Daddy,” Ali said sympathetically, “that's a big needle!”

So it was. But I was determined to look like a tough guy for my daughter, so I swallowed hard and held my breath as the doctor inserted the needle.

There was a brief rush of pain, followed by numbness, and then it was a party. That night, of course, after the novocaine wore off, the pain returned, but some of the cast and crew got together for dinner, and I made a point of joining them, mainly because I didn't want to be regarded as a guy who was laid up. I wanted to be heroic like Sam!

The very next day I returned to work, although on a completely different scene in a completely different location (a few weeks would pass before we returned to the Mavora Lakes region to film the conclusion of the first film). At the end of the workday, Peter presented me with a Maori walking stick.

“This is from the crew,” he said with a smile. “They wanted to give it to you for coming back to work right away.”

I have to tell you, when Peter handed me that stick, I felt like the king of New Zealand. It was one of the best moments of the entire production. I let it roll around in my hands for a moment. Later, Gino Acevedo (supervisor of prosthetics for Weta) and I carved the date, place, and some Tolkien runes around the top of it. It would become the single most unique and memorable treasure I brought home. I looked in Peter's eyes when he handed me the walking stick, and even though his admiration wasn't for my prowess as a filmmaker, it was enormously meaningful. It was clear that he and the crew were grateful I didn't use my injury as an opportunity to get any star treatment. As a guy, Peter respected me. Maybe I wasn't as tough as Viggo (who merely asked for a dab of superglue when his tooth broke off), but I had weathered a little punishment with dignity.

“Thank you,” I said to Peter, and pretty much left it at that. For a change, I was practically speechless.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

You think it's easy to wrestle with a giant spider?

Trust me, it's not. One of the most exciting scenes in
The Return of the King
is Sam's battle with Shelob, the massive arachnid who guards Mordor and at one point captures and nearly kills Frodo. It's a thrilling and artful sequence, one that allows Sam's courage to percolate to the surface and effectively stamps him as the hero of the third film. He is an ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance, and he rises to the occasion in epic fashion, as so many of the great literary and cinematic heroes have done. That the scene works as well as it does is testament to Peter Jackson's vision and talent. When film critics repeatedly pointed out that Shelob was the most realistic and frightening giant spider ever depicted on film, it wasn't faint praise. A creation such as Shelob, in the wrong hands, might well have resulted in a messy, laughably implausible climax to a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve. In other words, if not done properly, it might have been a disaster.

My job, as I saw it, was to not screw it up. Seriously. Shelob was so good, and the action sequence so well constructed, that I had only to make sure that I followed the choreography and emoted properly and energetically. But it proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Throughout filming I'd been reasonably adept at playing make-believe, at visualizing the story's numerous computer-generated creatures; my imagination was good, and I could act opposite my imagination with relative ease. People would sometimes ask me, “Isn't it hard to look at a piece of tape or a tennis ball and envision the thing it represents?” Well, no, not when you have Alan Lee's and John Howe's illustrations as models. They helped seed my imagination.

Something happened with Shelob, though. The sequence took a great deal of time to film, and at one point, when the camera was supposed to cut to me, and I was supposed to deliver the strongest line of the scene—“Let him go, you filth!”—I had a moment of crisis. Suddenly, for some reason I still can't explain, I couldn't see the spider anymore. Shelob had disappeared. It was as if my imagination had dried up.

“What's wrong?” asked Peter, who directed the scene.

“I don't know. I can't see the spider.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean … it's gone. Shit!”

I started panicking, having an internal meltdown, which is kind of funny when you think about it. I'd held it together through all the bad moments, through all the dull and frustrating times when I wanted only a chance to show what I could do, and now, here I was, starring in the climactic action sequence of the whole trilogy—in a scene that was supposed to have the audience rising out of their seats and pumping their fists—melting into a puddle of anxiety.

The truth is, we had actually filmed the Shelob action sequence during principal photography, and most of it was handled by John Mahaffey. I had fought and killed Shelob years before. Now, during the pickup shooting for
The Return of the King,
I had lived with Sam for four years. I had seen the first two movies countless times and traveled around the world promoting the movies. Thousands of people had told me what they thought about my performance, and I'd read innumerable articles about every aspect of the films. In a sense, I had all of that wisdom and experience at my disposal when Peter brought me back to New Zealand to shoot, among other things, this climactic moment. I think I'd even seen a rough version of the sequences immediately preceding and following the Shelob cave stuff.

If you think about George Custer and Ulysses S. Grant, and what they knew and when they knew it, you can begin to appreciate my wee dilemma. I just couldn't quite drop into this moment—or it didn't feel “Sam-like.” I loved the cinematic heroism of it, and I certainly had wanted for years to get this kind of opportunity on screen. But I'd already gotten to do the boat scene with Elijah and the unfathomably special scene in the ruins of Osgilith with Frodo, where we talk about the great stories that really matter, and the fact that there is still good in the world worth fighting for. So, could I get a grip and do the relatively simple “hero shot”?

For a few long seconds, I really didn't know.

After a brief respite, a drink of water, a few words of encouragement, and a pat on the back, we tried again. And again. And again. Ultimately, I got it right, but it was hard. It took a lot of push-ups and screaming and emotional calisthenics. I did that a lot. I'd do arm curls, jumping jacks, anything to get the blood flowing, to trigger my throat and face before going in front of the camera. There's something about screaming that actually wakes you up and gets you ready for an action sequence. I developed a bit of a reputation among the other actors. They'd say, “Oh great, there goes Sean, warming up again.” Elijah ended up mildly embracing this technique, too, and not just to ridicule me. Action sequences are not as elemental as they might seem. Think about it. You sit around for seven hours and then they call you, and you have to walk in and get all excited and start screaming at the top of your lungs. How do you go from being exhausted to doing
that?
You run around the block, or you do sit-ups or push-ups. You do whatever works. At least I did. My preparatory histrionics became such a source of amusement that someone put together a gag reel of me barking, jumping up and down, screaming like a madman. It was a howl, I have to admit. The Brits would watch me and say, “Excuse me, mate, are you going to be doing that all day? Because it's a bit, well, you know, distracting.”

Even more difficult though, are the moments of quiet emotion, for there is an honesty and a rawness to those scenes that require more than just playing. You open your soul when you do work like that—or at least you should. There is a scene near the end of
The Return of the King
in which Sam cradles a weary and wounded Frodo on the side of a volcano, and tries to comfort him with a sweet and simple speech about the land they have left behind and all that it represents. In Sam's tearful words is a tribute to the simple things in life, the things worth fighting for, as well as a recognition of the likelihood that they may not survive their journey:
Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon and the orchards will be in blossom, and the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And eating the first of the strawberries with cream … Do you remember the taste of strawberries?