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The LOTR Movie Site
April 26, 2000

Jackson on Arwen
Andy B.

Since the Arwen controversy seems to be the penultimate one for Tolkien  purists, I find it hard to believe that no one has brought up the fact that  Jackson himself has adressed the issue, in his interview with Ain't it Cool News. There he explicitly said that Arwen will NOT be part of the fellowship.

And I quote: "Our philosophy is simple. We don't want to make any radical changes to the basic events or characters in the books. So Sam will NOT become a girl (another piece of rumour-mill bullshit that's been floating around for a year), or have a gay relationship with Frodo, or anything silly like that.

We will have to remove certain events or characters, but they will be clean lifts. As somebody pointed out earlier, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING will need the greatest pruning.

Any changes that we do make will be centered on developing characters or events in the spirit that Tolkien created them, but maybe taking them further than he did. For example, the Aragorn/Arwen romance is a lovely part of the story ... but if it was filmed exactly as Tolkien wrote it, they would have maybe 10 minutes screentime together over 6 hours of film. So we have to find a way to include Arwen in more of the story, to have a chance at creating a meaningful screen romance. However, we won't do anything radical like adding her to the Fellowship, as that would be departing too much from what we all know and love. It's a fine line that we walk."

PS: Whoever pointed out that I was wrong about the BBC including Boromir staring into Galadriel's mirror was quite right. Whoever noted that Tolkien's version indeed includes Bormor talking about Galadriel staring at him and seeming to offer certain things is also correct. I believe that that's probably what the Boromir/ring shot refers to in the preview.