.:Liv Tyler/Arwen Undomiel:.

Fantasy Worlds No.2 February 2003

Interview by Ian Spelling

Typed by Éowyn

It may be Elvish intuition, pure confidence or perhaps merely high hopes, but Liv Tyler simply knew that The Fellowship of the Ring would capture the collective imagination of the world’s moviegoers. “When I watched the film, I was just so impressed with the level of the characters,” says Tyler of director Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings adventure. “It’s beautifully shot. The fight sequences are fantastic. It’s scary and great. And you really get with these characters.

“I noticed that when all my friends saw the movie, they each had someone different they related to, whom they felt like. Some of my friends were obsessed with Orlando Bloom and wanted to be like Legolas. And some of them wanted to be like Frodo [Elijah Wood] or Aragorn [Viggo Mortensen] or Arwen [Tyler] or the other characters. And I think that’s nice. That’s one of the things that’s so beautiful about the film: That you have your favorite character and you can go with them”

Tyler grouses just a bit when asked to address the issue that Arwen isn’t really a character readers of the novel can go anywhere with, as the immortal Elf hardly appears in The Two Towers, at least in the story as told by J.R.R. Tolkien. “Everyone keeps saying that she’s not in the books,” says Tyler. “People aren’t doing their homework. She’s not in the books, but she’s in the appendix, and that’s what [these films deal with]. The story that we’ve taken is from the appendix. We’ve taken it and spread it across the three movies. That’s exactly what it is.

“We’ve spread it all throughout the trilogy. [Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boynes] have even written scenes around direct lines and moments from the appendix. We’re taking liberties in that respect, but it’s from the story in the appendix. So in this film [The Two Towers], you really begin to see a big arc for Arwen. This is when she needs to make a choice: Wether to listen to her father [Hugo Waving as Elrond] and stay safe at home, or to go off and try to help her beloved Aragorn. And she must stick by whatever choice she makes. That’s what happens in this film for Arwen”.

Actually, a few Arwen-related developments occur in The Two Towers that are more than just extrapolations from the appendix. In fact, they were created long after production on the trilogy ended. That’s because Jackson brought much of his Rings cast and crew back to New Zealand for several weeks of what some people referred to as reshoots but what those close to the production prefer to term “additional principle photography.” Tyler’s material falls into the latter category.

“There weren’t really reshoots,” insists Tyler, who lensed, among other scenes, and Arwen-Elrond conversation with Weaving and several bits with Arwen-Aragorn exposition with Mortensen. “It’s weird, because we shot all three films at once, and in that time there were was some stuff that we knew we weren’t going to get to. There never was enough time and there wasn’t enough money, especially toward the end. Peter didn’t even get to shoot much of the third film’s end. It was [done as] second-unit stuff. We rushed through it. There wasn’t enough time to get into the detail of everything. But we always knew that we were going to come back.

“Peter likes to cut all the films and be a part of it, so it’s not like a machine where they’ve been finishing everything and Peter is [left out],” Tyler comments. “They’ve been taking each film, one at a time, and going into post-production all the way. And they’re still working on this one. We haven’t seen it yet. It’s not finished. They’re still writing music and digitally grading and doing all these things. We won’t even begin to look at the third film until next year. And once again, we’ll go to New Zealand and do new scenes, little moments and small things that need to be easily picked up.

“It was really easy, actually, to back into our characters,” Tyler remarks. “We all just slipped back into them. If anything, it was easier, because we’ve lived these characters for so long that we can just slip into them and feel really comfortable and make decisions for them and do all these things that we wouldn’t have gotten the chance to if we had just [shot] a film for a couple of months. You don’t really discover these things until you’re finished. And then you think, ‘Oh, damn!’ On this, I’ve had ideas all the time, and I would just call Fran or e-mail her and say, ‘What about this?’ And we’ll incorporate it or add the lines. Viggo does that all the time. It’s great. It’s really, really fun.”

Tyler says that, in general, portraying an Elf was enjoyable, but adds that it was also tremendously difficult. “It was so much pressure,” she explains. “It’s exciting, obviously, playing any character, but with these characters, it was like, ‘How do you play somebody who is 3,000 years old? How do you play somebody who is so wise and flawless in so many ways?’ It was just challenging and confusing, and originally, we were going in a different direction with the Elves.

“Early on, they had a certain walk, and they had an accent as if English wasn’t their first language. They spoke with capped Ls and Rs. We had to act that way in every scene and it was really hard. It sounded funny. And I knew we weren’t going to stick to that. That’s not what the Elves are about to me. It comes from within them. It’s not something that comes from the outside. It’s completely from within. It’s some kind of force that is just there. Once I discovered that, I just went with it. Arwen’s feelings are quite rebellious and irrational. She’s in love, which is very human, and I could feel to that and really enjoyed getting to play that, that feeling of just being lost in love.”

If the reports are true, Arwen isn’t the only female character lost in her love for Aragorn. In the film version of The Two Towers, Éowyn [ Miranda Otto] , the sister of Éomer [Karl Urban] and nice of King Théoden [Bernard Hill], falls for the charms of the future king. Tyler neither confirms or denies the gossip when queried as to Arwen feels jealoust to Éowyn. “No.” Tyler replies. “Arwen doesn’t really know much about Éowyn. She’s back at the family ranch.”

Additional shootings and ADR sessions aside, Tyler has pretty much stayed at the ranch since she completed the Rings trilogy. She has been hanging out at home in New York City with her fiancé, Royston Langston, bassist and singer for the rock group Spacehog. And while some of the Rings actors revealed that it took them awhile to re-acclimate to their lives after returning from New Zealand and focusing their respective characters for so long, Tyler said she had no such problem and doesn’t expect to in the future.

“I came back in full swing,” she says with a giggle and a shrug. “I was in and out of that world the whole time [working for a few weeks, then coming home]. I’ve been working since a kid, and I’m a person who can do many things at once. It’s not hard for me to come home, cooking, being with my fiancé, while doing business and acting on the set at the same time. I can do that. I can handle it. I was tired when I came home, but a lot of that had to do with the [first film’s] success [and the need to press internationally, attend premieres, etc.]. I did take a year off. I didn’t work. I read tons of scripts and worked at stuff at home. I was very busy, but I wasn’t necessarily working.”

And even though she has moved on to another project-she’s co-starring opposite Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in the Kevin Smith comedy Jersey Girl-Tyler points out that Arwen, in her mind, hasn’t gone the way of the Elves in Middle-Earth. “We are not done,” she says, referring to both The Two Towers and The Return of the King. “So we still have to live with our characters. I was just in London last month for 10 days doing all the ADR, all the voice work. We have to loop the whole movie, every single scene, because there were wind and smoke machines and all sorts of weird New Zealand airplanes flying overhead. We had to redo our voices for every scene, and I just did that. That’s a huge part of your performance, the voice. So it’s not over. We are still playing these characters.”

Tyler will surely be available again to chat when the Return of the King nears release (as she did regarding Fellowship in STARLOG #292). For the moment, she’s just eager to sit down, grab a bag of popcorn and watch The Two Towers lord over moviegoers. What’s she’s most excited to see? “Everything,” Liv Tyler replies as the conversation comes to an end. “I just want to see the whole thing. I can’t wait"