The Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the Ring is almost 20 years old. Despite it's age, it and the other Lord of the Rings movies have been an abundant harvesting ground for memes, including Boromir’s speech at the Council of Elrond. Now, Peter Jackson reveals a funny story behind this meme-able speech.
Lately, Peter Jackson and many other Lord of the Rings stars reunited on Josh Gad’s YouTube Channel to discuss the movie trilogy. During their talk, Peter Jackson highlighted how Sean Bean had almost no time to prepare for his famous speech and the trick he used to pull it off. Here’s what Peter Jackson said:
That entire speech that Sean had to deliver at the Council of Elrond was written the night before. It's long and we gave it to Sean the morning he arrived. What Sean did, which I thought was really clever, is he got a print-out of the speech taped to his knee. It was on his knee and when he did that scene, you'll see [Jackson mimes Bean looking down, pretending to be deep in thought]. If you watch the scene now, you'll see every time that Sean has to check his script.
Clearly, one does not simply memorize a whole speech on short notice. So, Sean Bean did the next best thing and cheated a little, putting the speech on his knee. Props to Sean Bean for making that scene work with so little time and for giving us one of the greatest memes of all time.
While memes are usually meant for laughs, other devoted fans have used the medium to explain entire story theories. For a long time, one Lord of the Rings complaint has been about how they could have just used Gandalf’s eagles to deliver the ring into Mount Doom. Since one cannot simply walk into Mordor, why couldn't they just fly? Or so the reasoning goes. But, one fan counter-memed with a theory that Gandalf initially had this in mind. This is just a taste of the memes we’ve seen.
Lord of the Rings, of course, isn’t the only meme-able movie playground for fans. Star Wars is about equal to the level of devotion fans have given when creating memes. From Admiral Ackbar’s “It’s a Trap!” to the countless Baby Yoda memes, these great memes can’t stop, won’t stop coming. Movies and memes just go together like peanut butter and jelly.
As for Peter Jackson, he has long since moved on to different movie projects. Still, fans are always eager to know if he’ll ever consider returning to The Lord of the Rings world and create more movies. The short answer is that it’s unlikely, but not off the table. There's always a chance he could be involved in some capacity. For instance, Amazon is producing their a Lord of the Rings prequel series and have reached out to Peter Jackson to see if he wants to be involved. Here’s hoping Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel can provide even more great meme fodder for fans to create.
