Absent from the first version of “Return of the King”, released in theaters in 2003, Christopher Lee boycotted the premiere of the film to express his dissatisfaction with Peter Jackson.
If you discovered The Lord of the Rings when it was released in theaters in the early 2000s and have never rewatched Peter Jackson’s trilogy since, the last time you saw Saruman was at the end of The Two turns. After being defeated by Treebeard and his army of Ents, the Wizard, trapped at the top of Orthanc, watched helplessly and panicked as his empire was destroyed.
Indeed, contrary to what we could read in the work of JRR Tolkien and what we subsequently saw in the long version of the saga, the real conclusion of Saruman was purely and simply absent from the editing cinema, and the Magician therefore did not appear at all in The Return of the King.
A decision that Peter Jackson had taken reluctantly so as not to hinder the narrative rhythm of his films, and which Christopher Lee, legendary interpreter of Saruman, had a lot of difficulty swallowing.
The latter, an absolute fan of Tolkien’s work who himself had the privilege of meeting the author in his youth, took his absence in the third part as an affront, and therefore boycotted the first part. -premiere of the film, according to Yahoo! Movies.
“They showed us the films in private, and when the third one came, I couldn’t believe my eyes, because I wasn’t in it”said Christopher Lee during a meeting at University College Dublin in 2011.
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“This scene is one of the most important in the entire trilogy, because we see Saruman, the great mortal enemy, the most evil of all, against the Community. (…) And she wasn’t in the movie. No one could understand it.”
As early as 2003, the New Zealand director explained the reasons for his choice on the site Ain’t It Cool News :
“The problem is that this scene was originally filmed for The Two Towers, as it is in the book. But since The Two Towers couldn’t support a conclusion 7 minutes after the Helm’s Deep, we thought it would be a good idea to save it for the start of Return of the King.”
However, when putting together the third part, the director realized that the confrontation with Saruman had a tendency to take the viewer back, to reintroduce a situation which had already been resolved in the previous film, instead of going from forward and focus on the final arc and the confrontation against Sauron.
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“We reluctantly decided to keep this footage for the DVD“, said Peter Jackson. “Our choice was based on the fact that for most people, Saruman had been defeated during the events of Helm’s Deep, and the attack of the Ents. We could now move forward and set up the narrative tension of The Return of the King, where the bad guy is Sauron.”
As all readers of The Lord of the Rings know, in Tolkien’s original work, Saruman’s conclusion was very different from the one we discovered in Peter Jackson’s long version. Between the pages of the book, the Magician was not killed at the top of his tower, but in the Shire, which he had previously tried to enslave alongside Grima.
Long after the fall of Sauron, the Hobbits returned to their native region to discover it in the hands of Saruman. After a final battle, it was Grima who ended up stabbing his master in the back (like in the film), before being shot down by a Hobbit’s arrow.
(Re)discover all the hidden details in “The Return of the King”…