Featured interview by John Hutchins, UGO contributing editor.

Everyone involved in The Lord of the Rings has seen their profile raised, but no one more than Viggo Mortensen, who plays the big human hero of the saga, Aragorn. Women want to be with him, and men want to be him, and that’s pretty much all you can ask for. In Return of the King, he’s more badass than ever. But he’s a nice guy in person, as we found out during this chat.

Question: There's been a big emphasis on Aragorn's physical presence, especially with swords. Did you ever find his physicality to get in the way of his psychological arc?

Viggo: No. I thought in some ways his physicality spoke for his loyalties and for his doubts and fears. I think that Peter (Jackson) assumed I could communicate without words a lot of times, as well as with. There are times with the editing of the movie he took out sections where I was speaking, and he did that with a lot of characters. In the extended versions of the first and second, a lot of that is returned, whether it be song or speeches or dialogue. Personally, I'm glad because there's a record of that and in terms of the fans, because much of that is connected with Tolkien and the book, it's nice for them to have that.

Question: What's the most important thing you've taken away from the experience?

Viggo: The friendships. Four years in, traveling constantly around the world together, that's not something you can fake.

Question: Aragorn seems to have come to terms with the idea of being king in the second film. In the third film, what for you were the big transitions he was still going through?

Viggo: Well, really starting in the first movie, when Gandolph the great falls to the Balrog, Aragorn goes from being a pathfinder or guide to the leadership role in the fellowship. In the second movie, he then has to say what his name is, stand his ground and increasingly inspire and be responsible for great numbers of people. In the third movie, it's entire armies, and he has to, in his example, lead. Nobody's going to commit suicide for someone who doesn't have a good heart and has proven his intentions are good. As importantly as anything in the third movie is the psychological journey. It reaches its climax in the Paths of the Dead. In the beginning of the extended version of the first movie you get that more, and certainly also from the book, when his adoptive father says to him "This is the thing you gotta do, you were born to do this, to take this power and lead people". Aragorn says he doesn't want that power, and it's not just out of modesty or arrogance, though there is that, but because he's afraid. He doesn't know if he can cut it, no matter how much leadership he's shown. That all leads up to the Paths of the Dead.

Question: You're prominent in the games, the new one especially. Do you play them?

Viggo: I've tried to with my sons; they can play them for hours. I don't really play videogames; life is short. I don't really watch TV either.

Question: How much of Aragorn's character do you see in yourself?

Viggo: I don't know. At my best, I try to see past my differences with other people and try to be somewhat compassionate. I'm not always as patient or tolerant as he is.

Next: The Peter Jackson interview

It takes some kind of wacky genius to somehow create a movie series based on one of the most famous book trilogies of all time and make it beloved by both the hard-core fans and the general public. Peter Jackson is just that kind of wacky genius, and he’s proving it for a third time in Return of the King.

Question: How surprised were you when the first movie did as well as it did?

Peter: I was relieved. I guess relief was more an emotion rather than surprise. You never know what you're making when you're making it. You never have a clue. What I try to do at the end of the day is make the movie for myself. Especially in this, it was kind of fraught with traps where, if we listened too much to what the Tolkien fans wanted or their opinions, I thought we would trip ourselves up. We regarded ourselves as Tolkien fans. We thought we would make it for Tolkien fans, but it's going to be us, not the huge number of fans out there in the world.

Question: How did you address the structural problems of adapting ROTK from the book?

Peter: Our structure in this film differed from the book quite a lot, because we had inherited a few sequences from The Two Towers, like the Shelob in the scene on Minas Morgul. That whole section with Frodo and Sam was in The Two Towers. At the very beginning, we did a 90-page treatment of the book, and then developed screenplays. It was always compounded by the fact we started working with Miramax, then we did two scripts for a part 1 and part 2. Then when New Line came on board and wanted three movies, we then had to rewrite everything again. We always felt Return of the King, for us, was the strongest film, simply on the basis it had a climax; it had an emotional payoff. Because it's the climax, it's the reason why you make a trilogy, because you want to get to the last chapter. It always felt the most comfortable of the scripts, and was more fun to shoot, too.

Question: Looking back now that shooting's finished, do you feel like there's anything that could've been better had you more time?

Peter: You can work on anything as much as you like, but the reality is that nothing's perfect. We've never had a script, or an edit, or a special effect, or a music cue that we've said "That's perfect, don't touch a thing". You get to a point where you run out of time. If we'd worked on it a bit longer, it would have been a bit better, but sooner or later you have to send it out into the world and hope that people like it.

Question: What is it that drove you to make this film?

Peter: Wanting to see the finished film. I don't have any agendas other than, I love movies. You get excited about the idea of a film, and what's behind the excitement is that one day this could be a finished movie that you could look at.

Question: Which version of the films do you consider the finished movie, theatrical or DVD?

Peter: With DVD, it's a new kind of thinking with filmmaking. The films that we've cut and released theatrically, I regard as being the best version of the movie for theatres. The motivation for the DVDs is to give the fans stuff that we couldn't include in the film. It's only grown out of the fact that we have so much footage. We didn't ever think we were doing extended cuts when we were shooting the movie. When we started to cut the films and realized there were all these scenes, we realized they were legitimate scenes and parts of the book that people would want to see, and expect to see. I, at the time, felt that I was sacrificing pacing and momentum in order for these scenes to go in, but I figured the theatrical version exists, and this is like a version for the real aficionados. Clearly the dynamics of DVDs are different. You can get up and have a cup of tea anytime you want, or watch it over two nights. I read reviews now where they say the extended DVD cuts are much better than the theatrical cuts. The unknown factor is, would the extended cuts have gone down so well if they were the theatrical releases, and you had people sitting in the cinema for three hours and forty minutes. I don't really regard them as being the definitive versions of the movie, but I'm happy when I see a review where someone says they like the DVD version more.

Question: What was the most stressful period of time making the films?

Peter: The stress was during post-production of Fellowship of the Ring. At the end of 2001, when we were preparing Fellowship, that was really where the pressure was on. New Line was starting to stress out and realize everything depended on this release. They were flying down to New Zealand to look at cuts, and wanted to prepare a screening for the Cannes film festival of 20 minutes of the film, which was a lot of pressure for us. It was a fantastic thing to do, and everybody talks about the fate of the studio riding on these films, but that year I really felt the fate of the studio riding on the release.

Question: Why do you think the Tolkien mythology is relevant to audiences today, as much as when Tolkien wrote it?

Peter: I think it's timeless, and relevant in the sense of global themes that Tolkien was passionate about. What I like about Tolkien was that he was wound up about quite a few things and put a lot of his opinions and beliefs into the book. He was ahead of his time in some cases. His love of the English countryside and his hatred of factories, and his hatred of chopping the forests down to fuel the engines of industry. That was something we know grew out of the sixties, and he wrote this book between 1939 and 1953. No one was caring about the forest particularly when he was. In some ways, political thinking has caught up to Tolkien.

Question: Is it true Naomi Watts will be Faye Raye in your King Kong remake?

Peter: It seems that way, yeah. We're just in the last stages. Universal are doing the deal with her agents, and I think it's about to close.

Question: Working on the three films, was there any aspect of your approach to the work that changed or got refined?

Peter: Our respect for Tolkien grew a lot. We went into it in the beginning with a sense of "We're gonna have to change a lot, we're gonna have to make this more like a movie, we're gonna be not too locked into the book". We had a sort of slightly cowboy attitude going in and the first drafts of the script reflected that. Reading it over and over we came to respect him more and more. There were a few things about Tolkien that annoyed us, for instance if you were writing an original screenplay, you wouldn't have as many characters. If you were writing Return of the King as an original screenplay, the battle of Minas Tirith would be a defeat instead of victory. That was tough. It's like this big battle where they win, and then you still have to swing the story around to Mordor and another battle outside the black gates. It would be much easier for us if Minas Tirith had been a total defeat. We changed a lot of things, obviously. I don't know what being faithful to the book really means anymore.

Question: Do you really want the Oscar this time?

Peter: These Oscar questions are terrible. You're dammed if you do and dammed if you don't. As a kid who grew up making movies, winning an Oscar is an absolute dream. It's possible these movies are as close as I'm ever going to come to an Oscar, I wouldn't imagine King Kong getting me as close to an Oscar as The Lord of the Rings. It would be really, really nice to win an Oscar, but we have a kind of fantasy stigma against us. I'm happy to try and disengage and not get emotionally invested, and let other people do the Oscar thing and see what happens.

Question: Do you think you'll get to do The Hobbit?

Peter: I don't know, it's a New Line issue with the rights, and they haven't spoken to me about it. I would assume however, that New Line would be motivated to make it.