screens and transcript from the Reunited Apart: LotR edition
Sean Astin: The first time Elijah and I met Sean, we were in Queenstown and there was a big flood and they were building sets on the squash court to try and find some way to uh…
Peter Jackson: As soon as somebody gets remotely boring it just freezes.
Sean Astin: The point is we were playing a video game and Sean Bean's character was 006 and I shot 006 in the head on screen with a perfectly photo-real likeness of Sean and then Sean walked right by afterwards.
Peter Jackson: ... The best story about that flood was that everyone was driving from the top of the South Island to the bottom to shoot, and some people were flying and some people were driving and Orlando and Sean Bean were in a car with Bridget Bourke, our production coordinator, and we were checking in with them to see what they were about.
Peter Jackson: It's a very remote part of the country (...), but what happened is the car that Orlando and Sean were driving over a mountain and they come around a corner and it's got a huge slip, you know, that the hillside's falling down, 'cause it was a torrential storm. They had to turn around to head back and do this long detour, they go around the next corner and it... the landslide was in front of them. They thought they'd actually left the landslide behind them! Okay so they were now stuck between two landslides in the remotest part of New Zeland, by themselves. There's an old lady living by herself in the house, so she invites them in for a cup of tea and they end up staying with her for about three days. Is that right?
Orlando Bloom: It was sort of like that. Okay, what happened was we got to a gas station, they said well... we were stuck between two roadslides and they said well, we've got some lodges accomodation, like backpackers' accomodation… And the first thing, the frist thing Sean got was...
Orlando Bloom: OH NO, NO, WE GOT MONEY! WE CAN PAY. So we had this one room and I remember Sean had the bedroom, I slept on the couch with Bridget in the same room. And then the whole crazy thing about this story though for Sean is that he hates to fly. Like literally, we had to take a helicopter to get to work and I remember sitting next to Sean in this helicopter going up over the...
Orlando Bloom: ... we had to go up over the [inaudible] to get to Queenstown and his hand on my knee, I will never forget it. It was like white knuckle… it was like a drop of only white and nothing…
Peter Jackson: ... It was because of that, that when we within a week or so we had a scene that we all had to be helicoptered up to this lake and it was quite high in the mountains, and Sean just said...
Peter Jackson: Look, I can't do it. I'll come very, very early, I'll get on me gear or borrow me gear and I'll start to climb. Just on foot. We were flying up and I looked down and there's this vast, vast cliff, and on the mountain I could see Sean, like a human fly, climbing up.