Published on: 06 Dec 06:33

Question

Why does Gandalf say it would take four days to get through the mines of Moria when it took the fellowship roughly only a couple of hours to do it?

Einar's answer

The reason you think it was only two hours might be because Peter Jackson couldn't bother to insert a very short scene in his “Fellowship of the Ring" movie where everyone is bedding down to sleep and Pippin asks how many hours they've been down there.

Gandalf: “I should think about 30 hours, maybe a bit longer. We should be nearing the eastern halls tomorrow.”

See how easy that is? Without it, the Mines of Moria seem pretty small. The LOTR movies had characters teleporting between locations an awful lot. The Hobbits walked from Bucklebury Ferry to Bree in a hour or so, according to the film. And it seemed like they went from Bree to Rivendell in about three days.

My commentary

When I was a kid, I wondered about this kind of thing about a gazillion times. In more recent years, I’ve since learned a ton more about screenplays and dialogue … and discovered the places in any screenplay plot where “just one line” might increase or smooth over the viewers’ understanding of a given plot point number about seven hundred million billion.

Yup, at face value I wholeheartedly agree that making the apparently teeny-tiny little change would smooth and quicken that bit of the movie. But … it also adds weight and drag and clunkiness to the story as a whole. Only a tiny bit! But not quite zero either.

And these changes add up. My god do they add up.

Screenplay writers are in a perpetual tussle, attempting to cram a gazillion features and factoids into as short a script as possible. I’ve tried writing such things myself, and it’s a hell of a lot more difficult than it looks. If you don’t believe me, give it a try, you’ll be astonished.

99% of the time, that “just one line” will subtly throw off the balance of a dozen other things, plot, setting, theme, the nuances and interplays of a dozen characters and their interactions and arcs within that scene, the wider movie, all kinds of fascinating crap. I know, it sucks, and part of me would love to add it anyway. But start doing that and before you know it, the movie will double in length.

There’s one neat case study I encountered some years back, and that’s the example of any romantic relationship’s THE TALK: where are we going? Do we really love each other enough? Or at all? Is it too lopsided? What does each of us want and need and desire and cherish and shun? On and on and on.

An actual real-life conversation could take hours. It’ll have highs, it’ll have lows, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll argue, you’ll weep, you’ll smile, your heart will cramp with frustration and burst with affection and everything in between and you’ll both conclude your personal THE TALK utterly wrung dry.

A skilled, experienced screenplay writer, however, can hit every single emotional beat in … 10–20 lines of dialogue. And it won’t feel even slightly rushed.

Place this next to a transcript of an actual real THE TALK conversation. The real convo will be quite literally dozens of times longer. That’s the power and magic of a well-crafted screenplay’s dialogue: it’ll compress damn near any interaction you can possibly think of, and still retain the fundamentals.

Nuts, isn’t it? Pay close attention to a conversation’s structure and patterns the next time you watch a movie, any movie. You’ll see that the relevant details and emotional beats and a gazillion other things are compressed into the actors’ dialogue several dozen times more closely than regular everyday chitchat. Observe this more than a few times and you’ll realise just how much of our normal, causal talk is superfluous fluff.

EDIT: I’d also point out there are tons of reasons why a layperson might not realise this stuff. One reason is: when Quora answers like this and answerers like Einar go around claiming the director “couldn’t bother to” do X … then any witness with skill and savvy may decide “we can all see this person just wants to feel right, they don’t want to actually listen, or learn anything new, so I won’t bother to reach out and chat … hey, there’s another person over there with greater humility and thoughtfulness and savvy, awesome, I’ll chat with them instead, see ya!”

I’m not telling you shouldn’t write “couldn’t bother to”. You can if you like. Knock yourself out, man. Go nuts. But … when life’s cool cats shun you, and they will, don’t come crying to me. Wait, scratch that, please do, I’d actually genuinely appreciate gathering more author raw materials for characters lacking the guts to admit their mistakes.

(And to everyone else foolhardy enough to have read this far: yyyeah … I’ll put my hand up to my previous two paragraphs being a teensy bit bratty and hypocritical. I know. I know. If the OP, Einar, wishes to call me out on that, he is welcome to and I invite him to. But it’s fun, ain’t it?)

Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gandalf-say-it-woul...