War Of The Rohirrim's Philippa Boyens Reveals Details About The Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum [Exclusive Interview]

Warner Bros.

It's safe to say Philippa Boyens knows her way around a J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation. After getting her start in the world of theater, the playwright made her screenwriting debut co-writing the script for Peter Jackson's beloved original "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, winning an Oscar for "The Return of the King." In addition to her work on films like "King Kong," "The Lovely Bones," "District 9," and "Mortal Engines," Boyens co-wrote and co-produced "The Hobbit" trilogy and will be mining Tolkien's writing yet again in the upcoming "The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum," which has Gollum actor Andy Serkis on board as a director.

But first, Boyens has explored Middle-earth in a new way by producing and cooking up the story for "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim," the first anime feature film set in this universe. /Film's review calls it "dazzling but inessential," and while I ultimately agree with that assessment, the "dazzling" elements offer plenty of reasons for longtime fans to marvel at what they're seeing. Ahead of the movie's release, I spoke with Boyens over Zoom about returning to Middle-earth, the film's most disturbing scene, falling in love with anime, the "War of the Rohirrim" scene she's most proud of, and I even learned a couple of things about "The Hunt for Gollum."

(I also spoke with two of the other writers, Arty Papageorgiou and Phoebe Gittins, as well as director Kenji Kamiyama, and you can hear those interviews, plus this conversation with Boyens, on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast.)

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. It also contains spoilers for "The War of the Rohirrim."

Warner Bros.

I was wondering what your relationship was to the Ralph Bakshi or the Rankin and Bass animated "Lord of the Rings" movies. Did those serve as any sort of inspiration at all for this project?

I saw them when I was young, of course, and I hadn't thought about them for a while, but I did — I didn't watch them again, but I did go and look at some of the imagery again because it's so beautiful. I forgot how beautiful some of that is. And I think you can kind of see a little bit of the echoes there with this film, certainly in terms of the use of light and shadow and some of those incredible atmospheric colorways that are used, especially in the Bakshi movie, I think. Yeah.

I read the appendix section where the skeleton of this story is laid out, and while it's mentioned that Helm has a daughter, she's such an incredibly minor character that she doesn't even have a name. So tell me how she came to be the central figure in this movie.

Because if you actually look at the tale organically, just as a screenwriter would, you understand a couple of things. One is she is actually at the heart of the conflict at the beginning of the story, almost like a pawn in this conflict that is happening. That immediately made her an interesting character to me.

And then if you look at the overarching scope of the story, a lot of characters fall along the way and do not make it to the end of the story. So who was going to make it to the end of the story? And why, and how, and at what cost? So that was also kind of telling us that, of all the characters in here, hers is a really interesting perspective because it's going to be a different perspective to the male perspective that's in there. I think in some ways that conflicts that we see amongst the men — while it's still incredibly tense and exciting, and the stakes keep getting upped and upped and upped — it's not like you haven't seen that before. But to see this world through the eyes of this young woman was particularly interesting, I thought. It was fresher.

Warner Bros.

There are obviously a lot of similarities in terms of the look of this movie to the original trilogy. The production design in particular seems very much ported over, almost. And I was wondering if there was something specific that you were excited to do here to differentiate "War of the Rohirrim" from other "Lord of the Rings" movies.

Yes, you're right, there's a familiarity to those environments. It's not like we haven't seen the Hornburg before, and Kamiyama, right from the word go, wanted to use the environments that had already been established. But if you really look at what he's done in this movie, it's such a fresh take on it.

After the death of Freca, there's that incredible moody shot of the rooftops of Edoras, and you can hear the rain and the mist and everything. It's so atmospheric. We never got to see Edoras in that way. That incredible shot he created of, as Wulf's walking down from the throne and the roof of the Hornburg is this burnt-out husk of what was once the Great Hall and the snow falling down through the roof. I mean, I thought, "Yeah, you've seen this world before, but you haven't seen it through the eyes of this particular director." And I think that's a gift.

I know that Peter and Fran worked on this as executive producers, but it must've felt very different from your previous collaborations with them because of the different roles and responsibilities that everybody had this time around. Can you tell me about that?

Yes and no. Yes, you're right. I think they were — Peter did want to step back. He did it deliberately because he strongly felt that Kamiyama didn't need him sitting on his shoulder. He felt like he as a director wouldn't have wanted that, and he didn't want to do that to another director. And I think he felt like he wanted Kamiyama to find his own way into the film and to bring his own vision to this world because that's the only way you're going to make a great movie. But they were always there. And I have to say, I was always running [laughs], we live next to each other, and I was always running across the lawn with certain questions and pestering them, pitching things, "What do you think? What do you think?" And Fran is just such a masterful storyteller. So she was always there kind of to bounce ideas off and stuff.

Was there a specific thing that you were excited to do in animation that maybe you couldn't accomplish when you worked on this world in live-action?

It's kind of hard to say yes to that because I think you can pretty much do anything now in live-action, given the state of CGI. But I think this is its own art form, in a weird way. You know what I mean? That's what's special about this film. It is an art form, and the way in which Kenji Kamiyama moves that camera, it's so beautiful. It's like a dance. I don't know how he does it, but he somehow takes these animated characters within this fantastical world and makes them feel real. In a way that's slightly different to the way in which Peter has approached Middle-earth as a piece of history and he was telling something that existed, Kamiyama has done the same thing, but because it's hand-drawn and because he's needing to move the characters in slightly different ways and intercut things in different ways, there's a kind of grittiness to it and its own beauty to it, I think, I feel. I've completely fallen in love with anime just through this process.

Warner Bros.

I'm going to drill down on a couple of scenes with you, and I'm going to hold this until after the movie comes out so we can talk about it in detail.

Sure.

I wanted to ask about the scene where Héra lures the elephant into the forest to its death, that confrontation between those creatures feels different than the human-on-human violence that happens in the rest of the movie, and it feels so disturbing as a result. So tell me about that scene.

Yes, that was a nod to anime. So as much as we were trying to remain faithful to Professor Tolkien's work, this is also an anime film. And [producer] Jason DeMarco, who, he was kind of the perfect partner in making this film because he's such a huge anime nerd and he's also a Tolkien nerd. And he said to me, he said, "Phil, we need a monster versus monster. We've just got to, it is a trope in anime." And so then it became a question of, well, how can we do both? Can we give the anime audience this, but also make it work within this world? And that's where the rabid mûmak came in.

The other scene that I wanted to ask you about was the decision specifically for Héra to choke Wulf with her shield in the final confrontation. He could have died in any number of ways. So why was that method important?

We set that up, that scene when Olwyn says to Héra, "I fought beside your father once, and I broke my shield in that battle. And he said to me, 'It's not broken. It's just broken in.'" So we know that Olwyn's shield has this notch in it. So yeah, there's layers in there. There's a kind of, dare I say, poetic justice in that she is a shieldmaiden and she is defending her people. And that you have some male characters at the beginning of this film saying, "I've long since thought it past time to retire that banner," meaning, "We don't need these shieldmaidens anymore. Their time's gone. It's well gone. Those were darker days. The men have got control of this now." That also felt slightly poetic. [laughs]

But it was also something — the way in which Kamiyama choreographed that fight and the way in which it happens, she has nothing. She has no weapon. She is disarmed until her defender throws her that shield. That's all she has. And this kind of, I don't know whether it's this kind of ... it's like that defiance that wells up inside of her and all that frustration wells up inside of her. And to do that and use the only thing she has to hand, felt right. A little bloodthirsty, but right.

I wanted to ask about the music, too. Did it require a lot of experimentation to find the right balance of using Howard Shore's existing themes with new music made specifically for this movie?

The great thing about Stephen Gallagher, who has done just such a beautiful job on the score for this film, is that he worked with Howard for a long time. He's worked with him. So he was incredibly familiar with that, not only the world of Middle-earth, but with the music of Middle-earth. But then what was great with Kamiyama working with him and also the great Mark Wiltshire, who is our music editor, is that they took that as the bones, like that's the ancestor of the music of this film. And because you've got to make it your own. And I think Héra's theme was one of the first themes that I heard Stephen come up with, and it just felt so right that I thought, "Yeah, this is going to work."

Warner Bros.

So I wanted to ask, I know you probably can't say very much if anything, about "The Hunt for Gollum," but I did wonder if you might be able to compare the tone of what you guys might be going for with that to the tone of an existing "Lord of the Rings" movie, if there's one that it aligns with maybe more than the others.

I think there's echo. There's definitely ... "Two Towers," it's not going to be "Two Towers," but the similarities, I think, is the bridging nature of the film. "Two Towers" was one of the harder films to write because it is doing that, bridging the beginning. It is the middle film. It has a quality of that to it. But one thing that we are determined to do — and a lot of this is going to have to do with Andy Serkis as a director — is we want this to be different and to feel fresh. To exist within the world that has been established, but also to be surprising. And I think what's interesting is we are finding a lot of threads of story that are surprising in there when you really go in there and examine it. Yeah.

That's awesome. I'm really looking forward to that.

We get to go to some places that we've never been before, which will be really, really, really cool.

Oh, that's intriguing. Okay. So just on a personal level, what was it like for you to be back in this world in an official capacity again? I mean, you've been on and off with "The Hobbit" movies and things like that, but it's been a little while. Now you're just fully back immersed in this world. What was that return like for you?

Well, I'm such a huge fan of the books. It's never a bad day for me to have to go back there and start rereading things. And I always find something new in there. So there's a familiarity to it as well. Listen, I hope I never, ever don't feel grateful that I get a chance to do what I'm doing, or take anything for granted.

So it felt familiar, but also exciting and surprising. I honestly knew so little about anime coming in, and there were so many times, especially in the beginning, the boards are very different with anime and I would literally be saying to Joseph and Kamiyama, "I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know." [laughs] So I had to trust them, and I'm so glad I did.

Warner Bros.

All right. I think I have one more minute with you. So the last question is, is there a scene or a moment that you worked on in this film that you're especially proud of?

Yes, there is, actually. A scene between Wulf and Héra in Isengard.

What stood out about that one?

It was one of the scenes that they went into really early on. And I felt like one, I could hear that [co-writer] Phoebe [Gittins] in particular had the ear for Tolkien's dialogue, which was a great relief. But also that it's this moment where it's this push-pull between the two of them, because you've established them as childhood friends and now this moment happens and you're kind of not sure which way it's going to go. I think if the Wulf that we meet at the end of the film was in that room at that time, he would've killed her. So the Wulf in this scene, there's still shreds of the young boy she once called friend there. Yeah, I love that scene. I love the way Kamiyama rendered it and shot it. It's beautiful. It looks so atmospheric.

"The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim" is in theaters now.