'Rings' actor: 'It'll be the biggest film of all time'

By PAUL CANTIN - JAM! Showbiz

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

TORONTO -- Veteran actor John Rhys-Davies is taking a page from baseball legend Babe Ruth in predicting the commercial prospects of the upcoming film adaptation of "Lord Of The Rings."

Like Ruth, Rhys-Davies is calling his own shot, confidently declaring that the first installment of Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy will, metaphorically speaking, score the biggest home-run in motion picture history.

"'Lord Of The Rings' is going to be the most successful film of all time," Rhys-Davies declares in his booming baritone, while holding court with reporters in Toronto to promote the opening of the "Journey To Middle-Earth" exhibit of props and costumes from the movie.

"This is a phenomenal film," enthuses Rhys-Davies, who portrays the stout-hearted dwarf Gimli in the film, which opens Dec. 19.

"This is going to make Peter Jackson into that super-league of directors in the world. Everything about this film, in my experience, was superlative."

Rhys-Davies and his co-star, Dominic Monaghan (who plays the hobbit Meriadoc Brandybuck), were seated Tuesday afternoon in the dark wood splendour of Toronto's Casa Loma, which is hosting the exhibit from Oct. 31 to Nov. 11.

Monaghan exhibits a quiet intensity as he details the months of work that went into the making of the entire "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy. (All three parts were shot in Jackson's New Zealand simultaneously, but will be released between now and 2003).

But it is Rhys-Davies -- perhaps best known to movie audiences for his portrayal of Sallah opposite Harrison Ford in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" -- whose enthusiasm threatens to fill the vaulted ceilings of Casa Loma.

"I have seen nothing that makes me think it is anything less than the best film of the year and the biggest film of all time. It is a film that looks different to any other film I have seen," he continues.

"And I think it is a film that, 20 years from now when you look back at your top 10 list of films, there will be a place for 'Lord Of The Rings'."

Rhys-Davies' bluster is right in line with generations of Tolkien devotees, who are anxiously awaiting a film that does justice to a book that is not only a powerful work of imagination, but one that has captured the imagination of readers all over the world for close to 50 years.

"One of the most important tightropes you have to walk and you have to tell people is, this is an interpretation of the book and not the official Tolkien interpretation," Monaghan cautions.

"Peter is a great fan and has a great love, and he is trying to put that on camera. That is potentially the greatest difficulty you may come across. My main task was to make my character as believable and as close to the character as I could do."

For his part, Rhys-Davies believes the key to Jackson's success in translating the book to film is the ensemble of actors he pulled together.

"It is brilliantly cast. We went to a little read-through where I met my fellow actors for the first time. I didn't know who they were playing, but I could look around and go: 'Gosh, I know who he is playing! And he must be ...' I went right round the room and got it right," he says as Monaghan nods in confirmation.

Monaghan, whose credits are mostly in foreign TV productions, says he has had a longstanding love for Tolkien's books. As a boy, his parents would play audio tapes of "The Hobbit" on the car stereo during long family voyages from their home in Germany to England.

Later, a poster of Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf standing atop a mountain adorned his bedroom wall. At 14, his father (a teacher) presented him with a copy of "Lord Of The Rings" and challenged him to compete the trilogy in two years.

"Any younger than that, I would have missed the enormity and grandeur of the book," Monaghan says.

"I thought it had every single aspect of story-telling, from a boy's point of view, (that) I would be into as a kid. The games I would play would generally be swords and sorcery and magic."

Rhys-Davies now calls "Lord Of The Rings" a "magnificent fiction," but concedes that he was in university when the novels were first gaining a readership, and he was then reluctant to grant classic status to anything modern.

"You have to recognize that this book has been in every book shop in the reading world for 45 years," he says.

"Success of that magnitude does not come just by chance. It must be that it taps one of the root nerves of our sensibility."

And what is that sensibility that is common to so many millions of readers that have been drawn to "Lord Of The Rings"?

"We need to dream," Rhys-Davies says.

"In truth, most people need some sort of creative outlet. To have any sort of creativity, you have to have an imagination. One of the ways that the less obviously creative people express their imagination is by dreaming, by imagining things. 'Lord Of The Rings' is a great dream. A great yarn.

"At its core, like all good books, it sets out to ask the good questions: Who are we? What do we stand for? What will we become? What is the meaning of it all? In some ways, that sort of inquiry is completely unfashionable.

"I often think one of the reasons people are dismissive of George Lucas's "Star Wars" is because it boils down to, in the end, bad and good. Self-professedly smart people don't like that concept of good and evil in the universe. It makes us uncomfortable. We know our place in the universe and it is pretty much foremost, and there aren't abstract things out there.

"But, dammit, great literature is constantly coming back and saying, there is a right and a wrong. There is a good and an evil. How you respond defines what you become.


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