"I think the simple 'rustic' love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero's) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the 'longing for Elves', and sheer beauty.
- J.R.R Tolkien in a letter dated 1951
Quotes about the film adaptions:
Suddenly there's this transformation when you walk out onto a location where there's the grass and the vegetables and the flowers and the trees and the butterflies and the bumblebees. And it's like: suddenly I am no longer wearing a costume, no longer do I have plastic feet and ears, I am Rosie. The butterflies symbolised the filming of the Lord of the Rings for me - the realness of it, and the ease of being a hobbit when you are dressed in your costume and you've got your wig on. And your feet and your ears.
- Sarah McLeod, at the Best of Both Worlds Convention
(On ending with 'well, I'm back') Part of that was to show that the story goes on, but also that we wanted to end the films exactly where the book ends, which is literally on the last line of the book. It’s a little bit of a conceit that we end up on the same page eventually.
- Philippa Boyens, interviewed by Ain't it cool news
Sam, the staunchest figure in the saga, goes home to a bosomy hobbitess, as he does in the novel, but Jackson, the man who can marshal warriors by the thousand, finds it hard to catch the rusticity - brisk, unsentimental, cider-sharp - of the original.
- Anthony Lane's review in the new yorker
(in response to the question 'Do you really need to see Samwise getting married?') Well, I think it was quite nice though because the way we’d set up Sam for his memories back to when he was sitting on the lava rock out side Mount Doom at the end, it made you feel that you had to pay that off. And you’ve got to remember also in the DVD on film one, there was a bit of extra footage put in regarding Sam and Rosie Cotton in the bar in Hobbiton. That whole sequence which was put back in, so that actually developed Sam’s character a little bit in relationship with Rosie Cotton. So we were trying to bring all those little bits back even in a small way. And I think it was really pretty good. It wasn’t a huge scene and it was nice to see that you’ve got just a bit of that nice stuff.
- Jamie Selkirk, interviewed by chud.com
Well, the wedding, we only did a couple of months ago. I turned up and I didn't know we were doing it and then I saw Sarah and I realized she must be doing something and then got the pages. It used to be that you got a script beforehand. Peter and Fran's process was so organic and ever-changing that you stopped needing to know ahead of time what you were doing. You just needed to know as you're doing it. It was kind of a zen exercise. So, when you get there and they're like, 'Oh, tomorrow you're doing a marriage scene with Rosie Cotton,' you instantly got, 'Oh, they're trying to pay that off.' Then you're putting on the wardrobe and it just felt appropriate. When I saw a version of the film in London a few months ago, I was crying so hard. I didn't see the whole movie, but I saw the last three reels, so a lot of what I saw was trimmed down to its newly concise 3 hours 15 minutes. Just to have that moment in time preserved was so special.
- Sean Astin, interviewed by chud.com
Costume designer Ngila Dickson describes Rosie as "gorgeous," and her costume features a lot of blue, which is unusual for the mostly green- and brown-clad Hobbits. Frodo is the only other Hobbit to go blue.
- From E! Online
I think the whole denouement works really well. The movie says goodbye, like, seven times. There's seven endings. It's almost tidal, you know, the way the movie ends. And then it ends again and comes out. Emotion builds and releases again. I think it's fitting of the magnitude of the journey for it not to just kind of end abruptly. I think that's kind of satisfying, that slow release of emotion throughout the end of the film.
(on his daughter's cameo as Elanor) I think she liked having a little piece of it for herself. She felt like she was supposed to do that, you know.
- Sean Astin, interviewed by nola.com
There was never any sense of not having the Gray Havens in the film, the final scene. But then there was the case of what other bits and pieces do you actually have? At the end of the day, I felt that we were wrapping out of a nine hour-long movie, I wanted it to be an ending for the three movies and not just an ending for this particular film. I also wanted to capture something of the melancholy spirit of the book, which we needed just a little bit. We needed to let it kind of flow to feel that you're wrapping out and creating that atmosphere. Everything has a domino effect when you cut scenes together and I think the Gray Havens works quite well, I think it's quite strong and I don't know whether it would have been strong if we had rushed to that very quickly or whether or not it's the fact that you've been allowed to come down into this much slower pace and it sort of creeps up on you, I'm not sure. I not really have any apologies to make about the ending and I know that the ending is quite long, it's basically 23 minutes after the ring is destroyed before the film actually finishes, I just felt that we justified doing that after nine or ten hours - whatever it is - of film.
- Peter Jackson, interviewed by chud.com
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