For Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, screenwriter Philippa Boyens, Jackson and Fran Walsh took on the task of translating three lengthy novels into three live-action films. With the anime movie. The Lord of the Rings: War of the RohirrimBoyens and his co-writers took on a radically different challenge: expanding two pages of summary into a two-hour animated film.
Polygon sat down with Boyens to talk about adapting the world of Middle-earth to another medium and what he learned about screenwriting, filmmaking, and JRR Tolkien himself in The Rohirrim War.
Boyens says he learned something important from a letter Tolkien wrote to his son, editor and archivist, Christopher Tolkien, which gave him a new appreciation for the professor. “I was talking about how some stories [in his Middle-earth legendarium] they are meant not to be counted, as if they were there to be explored. […] I think maybe he wasn't afraid of the idea of being able to leave some stories untold. And that other minds could fill them in (or excavate them, perhaps would be a better term) was interesting, especially the way he phrased it.”
This perspective is particularly relevant to The Rohirrim Warwhich is based on a story that Tolkien only vaguely described. The Rohirrim Wardirected by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) and produced by Sola Digital Arts for Warner Bros. Animation, takes place 250 years before Frodo and Ring Quest, and is about the Rohirrim, a horse-loving people heavily influenced by ancient Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian culture, themes near and dear to my heart. for Tolkien's Heart.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
For the film, Boyens and his co-writers adapted the story of King Rohirric Helm Hammerhand, which is found in a more general summary of the actual Middle-earth outlines that Tolkien wrote for the background of The return of the king. Rohirrim WarThe script makes Helm's unnamed daughter the protagonist, which certainly qualifies as “completing” or “excavating” Tolkien's writing.
The incident that led to Helm's downfall occurs when he rejects a rival lord's request to marry his son, Wulf, and Helm's daughter. But throughout the entire tragedy that follows, in which Wulf seeks revenge on Helm's lineage and the throne of Rohan, Tolkien never mentions Helm's daughter again. He never reveals whether she survived the fate that befell the rest of her family, and he doesn't even give her name. She simply disappears from the story once Helm refuses to marry her to Wulf.
To flesh out that daughter's story, Boyens and his collaborators looked to historical and literary sources with which they knew Tolkien would have been familiar, such as the historical Æthelflæd, daughter of Alfred the Great, first king of the Anglo-Saxons, who ruled the English. Kingdom of Mercia at the beginning of the 10th century.
“She is called the Lady of the Mercians,” said Boyens, “and of course that is very [Tolkien’s] neighborhood, so to speak. Then I couldn't help but think, Of course he would know about her.this daughter of Alfred the Great who defended her people.”
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
But Boyens cautioned that, in his experience, “although [Tokien] I based the Rohirrim somewhat on Anglo-Saxon culture and their own roots, I think there was another flavor to them that was, inherently and intrinsically, purely Rohirric. As much as we use some sources from some of the histories of Anglo-Saxon culture to develop the narrative, you always start to travel to Professor Tolkien's work and realize, No, this is a culture in itself, with its own traditions.. Although we are only dealing with a couple of pages in [The Return of the King] For history, per se, there is a lot of history of Rohirric culture that we could delve into and that he wrote about.”
Unlike its live-action predecessor films, Boyens Rohirrim War It doesn't have a powerful Ring Quest to follow. So its two-hour running time (swift, compared to the Lord of the Rings trilogy's three hours) spends a lot of time on its characters and themes of loyalty, betrayal, and revenge. In Boyens' opinion, that combination of epic action and personal focus was a perfect fit. Rohirrim WarThe anime style and Kamiyama's direction.
“There is a great tradition within anime, and also [when] “Obviously, you look at the great Japanese filmmakers, like Kurosawa, for example, where an epic nature is inherent to the storytelling,” Boyens said. “But there is also a way in which they can collapse and condense, almost in a claustrophobic way. The central conflict, even within the characters themselves, increasingly begins to inform the narrative. Something that stood out [to us] was, Did you know? This is the perfect story to tell in anime form.of all Tolkien's stories.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Boyens enjoyed adopting a slower pace during Rohirrim also. “The natural rhythm of the anime will be different and will rest at certain moments, especially in particular shots. The cut is different, but I like that. I feel like sometimes, especially in movies today, the way he attacks you is almost aggressive. The relentlessness of that cut may be a bit, I don't know. Yes, like I said, aggressive; I'm not even sure if that's a word. [laughs] If not, I just made it up. But, if you know what I mean, that ability to absorb something at a different pace, I really love it.”
Boyens doesn't think his thought process for writing a script has changed much from live-action to animation, at least not in the important ways, with one exception: “The difference with animation is that you really need to commit to those thoughts. [laughs] Because you can't shoot again!
The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is now available in theaters.