“We were shooting ‘Two Towers’ and it was introducing Gollum,” Jackson said. “A key thing with Gollum is that most people know he’s Sméagol and he’s Gollum, it’s like a split. But we hadn’t got a scene where you really got the idea of it…‘This guy is two people.’ So we knew that we needed it but we had no time to shoot it.”
Jackson was preoccupied with other elements of production at the time, so he convinced his co-writer and co-producer Fran Walsh to create the scene featuring the two halves of Gollum interacting with one another. Jackson told Colbert that not only did Walsh write the scene, but she went on to direct what would become his favorite moment in the trilogy as well.
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“Fran wrote a scene where Sam and Frodo are asleep, so they can be just lumps in the bed, we don’t even have to have Elijah [Wood] and Sean [Astin],” Jackson said. “We didn’t have anyone to direct it, so I said to Fran, ‘You wrote it, you should shoot it.’ So she went in for a day and she wrote and directed a scene which has become pretty famous now.”
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