The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is one of the most expensive television shows ever produced. Its first season cost a reported $465 million dollars to produce, counting the money it took to secure the rights to create the show from the Tolkien estate. You’d think with a budget like that, the monetary constraints on the production would have been few and far between.
Yet in a recent interview with NME, director J.A. Bayona revealed that a pair of scenes involving Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) were almost cut from the series because producers worried they’d be too expensive. Bayona directed the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, and both scenes in question are pretty important for Galadriel’s overall journey.
Producers almost cut one of the best scenes from The Rings of Power premiere
The first scene comes right at the end of the premiere episode, when Galadriel and a party of Elves are sailing for their ancestral home of Valinor. As the ship nears land, the clouds part to reveal a radiant light which washes over the ship. Realizing her chance to finish her hunt for Sauron on Middle-earth is slipping away, Galadriel leaps over the side into the ocean rather than continue on to Valinor.
According to Bayona, producers “tried to take it out” from the production schedule, believing the show “didn’t have the money.” Bayona had to talk them off the ledge to keep the scene in the series.
“It wasn’t that expensive,” he said. “I actually convinced them that we were going to be able to shoot that scene in the budget.”
Bayona’s persuasion clearly worked; not only did he sway producers to let him do the scene, but he didn’t go over-budget on it. The other scene that was almost cut from Bayona’s episodes was when the sea monster attacks the raft where Galadriel and Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) are stranded in the second episode. Once again, Bayona talked the producers down. “I did a lot of stuff that the producers didn’t believe we were going to be able to put in those episodes,” he said, “and we did it on budget and on schedule.”
Despite these examples of studio back-and-forth, Bayona sounds like he took it all in stride and had a good time to boot. “In general, I had a great experience in doing that [show]. It was a massive challenge. We had only nine months to do two hours of Lord Of The Rings fiction, you know. It had to match the expectations of the fans and the movies, but we only had nine months. You always want to give more than what you have. It’s a lot from a lot of people.”
I’ll just speak for myself here and say that those first two episodes of The Rings of Power are among my favorites of the series. It’s hard to imagine what they would have been like without those scenes, so I’m glad Bayona was able to have his way and film them.
