Liv Quotes
On other Actors/Actresses:
" I have never seen anybody in my whole life work as hard as Viggo Mortensen. The guy did not complain once. He never got a massage. He never took a day off. He just worked every second. Even on the days off, he'd go horseback riding or do something that was related."
"Women go nuts over Viggo, but he's the kind of guy who never looks at himself. On the set, we each had a station with a big mirror. His was covered by pictures of his son and a photo collage of the crew. There wasn't one little speck left for him to look. "
~ Peter never seem stressed making three movies at once which I found amazing because we were all stressed out and he wasn't. He was very calm and very in love with what he was doing. Very dedicated and completely committed ... I was floored, too, by the fact that we weren't ever bothered by the studio. There was so much space given and I suppose that Peter demanded that. I've worked on films before where I've watched the directors get really bombarded by producers and studios and it really stifles your ability to make the film that you want, and it's very imposing and it's sad to watch. That did not happen on this in any way. They gave Peter a lot of freedom.
" Miranda on being a newcomer, "No, we were completely welcomed in right from the start. On the first day I shot I arrived back at the hotel and there was a message on the phone saying, "Hi," I can't remember who it was that rang, it might have been Orlando or Dom or Billy, said "We're all going to dinner tonight at such and such, come along." And I was sort of welcomed straight in. I was at dinner with them about an hour and I felt like I had known them forever. One of my fondest memories I was sitting down on set today and I was nervous about what I had to do, and Ian McKellan came and sat beside me and grabbed my hand. He was just holding my hand like this beside me [grabs Urban's hand], didn't say anything. Liv Tyler, when I first arrived on set I thought, "That's Liv Tyler, she's pretty famous." I'm the sort of person that doesn't move forward to people and be like, "Hey, I'm your new best friend!" I'm not like that, give them their space, they're famous, they must be sick of people who want to get close to them all the time. But she came straight over to me, which is sort of quite un-actress type behavior and she gave me a huge hug and said, "I'm so glad you're here! There's another woman here now! It's all been men! We can do things together! We can paint nails!"
On her experiences:
"It was good, but hard. I brought my girlfriend with me to be my assistant, so I spent a lot of time at home with her, hanging out when I couldn't take the boys anymore. Orlando Bloom lived next door and he took me around because I was afraid to drive on the left-hand side of the road. We all had houses. It was great. We really got to know each other. Our makeup trailer became the center of things. It was given a really bad name that I cannot repeat. There were pranks, most of them also too dirty to tell.
"I was just there in June, and it was really great to see everybody again. I cried when I left. I get to see Fran [Walsh] and Peter [Jackson] and Philippa [Boyens] all the time, and I get to go back to New Zealand and work more. I'll go back next year [for additional Return of the King filming]. The next time will be the really sad time, when we won't ever be going back again to do pick-ups. That will be really sad.
"The impact of this movie is just overwhelming and I still can't quite believe I'm a part of it. I'm not going to lie, though; there were times when I got incredibly homesick. I'm very close to my family and friends, and here I was, living alone in a flimsy glass house on a cliff overlooking the sea. It would shake and rattle and make all sorts of weird noises. From getting really involved with the film, and reading the books, I started having nightmares. One night, I woke up and I had a fever. I heard tap, tap, tap on the bedroom door; it was actually the wind.
"I think that a lot of that was the friendships that we made with each other and the fact that we all needed each other. It was vital that we all had each other to survive and to be able to laugh. Everybody had a really good sense of humor, thank God. We'd be constantly making jokes and decorating the trailer with ridiculous things and being rude and that was our sort of little bubble of escape in our makeup trailer.
the forest, was quite challenging. There were no real set built around me."
"I love them all, all my costars. We would hang out mostly in the hair-and-makeup trailer, and after work at dinner. We would eat all the time and drink wine and laugh. I was always like, 'Let's go get dinner!' We all lived in houses, some of us in apartments. Orlando and I lived right around the corner from where Peter lives on this beautiful bay, up on these cliffs, and we had just the sea in front of us. You wake up to rainbows and dolphins. So, we had each other and work and some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen."
On Filming The Lord of the Rings:
" Recreating scenes in a sound stage, it wasn't so easy. I had to reproduce the same emotions and expressions as on a set. Creating and imagining the scenario in my head with the river, the sound of the water."
"Liv talks about Elvish, "A lot of that was so funny, because I would sort of see the scenes before I came down [to the set], and then I'd get there, and Viggo's favorite thing to do was to spring on me the night before that he'd had a long talk with [co-writers] Fran [Walsh] and Peter [Jackson], and he really wanted the whole scene to be in elvish, and I love to speak elvish, but I was just like, 'Argh!' I wanted to kill him, because it always seemed that I had more elvish to speak when we were doing the scenes than he did. I'm glad he did push that, because it's so great to hear, and it really adds a beautiful quality and depth to their relationship, and to the film in general."
" One of my most vivid memories is doing this horse chase in the beginning of film one. The Black Riders are chasing me think it's in the trailer. I was shooting a lot of stuff without anybody else there [just a blue screen so the special effects could be put in later]. I was so embarrassed, and I was having such a hard time imagining everything, and I was all crumbling inside. And when I was finished I went over to another stage and the boys were all doing something even more embarrassing [laughs]. There was some kind of explosion and they were all jumping. It put me at ease. It helped me get over myself and not be so uptight.
" They glued the Elf ears on, but they never got all the glue off. So, we would be picking glue out of our ears constantly. I went home to New York, and a week later, I still had all this sticky stuff. I was at a party, picking my ears and going, 'Ooh, sorry.'
