Billy Boyd, who portrayed loyal hobbit Pippin in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, collaborated with Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens to write “The Last Goodbye,” the song that will play over the credits when The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens on December 17.

The official music video includes Boyd’s performance, mixed with scenes from Lord of the Rings and Hobbit, and lovely behind-the-scenes footage. Take a look.

Boyd told EW: “After seeing the film, I went to my room and I started to put down some ideas, and along with Fran and Philippa, we started to sculpt the song we thought the movie needed,” he says. “A lot of ideas took us to dead ends or we found the tone wasn’t just right. I think we discovered very quickly this wasn’t just a song to end The Battle of the Five Armies—it was a song to say goodbye to Middle-earth.”

The soundtrack for the final Hobbit film arrives on December 9, and can already be pre-ordered from iTunes and Amazon.

World premiere of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is quickly approaching. Actors attending have been revealed today by Be The Red Carpet, and what a lineup this is! As previously posted, the world premiere is happening in London, UK and Lee Pace is just one of the many celebrities who’ll be walking the red carpet on December 1st. Other guests are Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Evangeline Lily, Luke Evans, Benedict Cumberbatch, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Stephen Fry, Sylvester McCoy, Mikael Persbrandt, Ryan Gage, John Bell, Aidan Turner, Ken Stott, James Nesbitt, Adam Brown, Jed Brophy, Billy Boyd and Peter Jackson.

Another event Lee will be at was confirmed few days ago – Canada premiere on December 6 in Toronto.

Are you coming to any of these two?

The main trailer for the final movie is out. And it has a lot of Thranduil (portrayed by Lee Pace) in it!

The world premiere of The Battle of the Five Armies is happening on Monday, December 1, 2014 in London, UK. Will you be there?

Peter Jackson is continuing to amaze J.R.R. Tolkien fans. First official teaser trailer for The Battle of the Five Armies is now out.

The third part brings to an epic conclusion the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield and the Company of Dwarves. Having reclaimed their homeland from the Dragon Smaug, the Company has unwittingly unleashed a deadly force into the world. Enraged, Smaug rains his fiery wrath down upon the defenseless men, women and children of Lake-town.

Obsessed above all else with his reclaimed treasure, Thorin sacrifices friendship and honor to hoard it as Bilbo’s frantic attempts to make him see reason drive the Hobbit towards a desperate and dangerous choice. But there are even greater dangers ahead. Unseen by any but the Wizard Gandalf, the great enemy Sauron has sent forth legions of Orcs in a stealth attack upon the Lonely Mountain.

As darkness converges on their escalating conflict, the races of Dwarves, Elves and Men must decide – unite or be destroyed. Bilbo finds himself fighting for his life and the lives of his friends in the epic Battle of the Five Armies, as the future of Middle-earth hangs in the balance.

Comic Con is being held this week and The Hobbit cast seems to be having a blast there. Yesterday the cast answered fan questions and discussed the upcoming The Battle Of The Five Armies movie at their panel. In case you couldn’t be there, you can watch it all below.

There are also several new photos of Lee out.

Stay tuned for more.

Gallery links:
Appearances > 2014> Comic-Con San Diego 2014 panel – July 26, 2014
Appearances > 2014> Comic-Con San Diego 2014 press – July 26, 2014
Appearances > 2014> SiriusXM’s EW Radio Channel Broadcasts From SDCC 2014 – July 26, 2014

The upcoming Hobbit film has a new title, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

Peter Jackson gave an explanation for the change on his Facebook. He says calling the third film There and Back Again doesn’t make sense when you consider that’s how Tolkien referred to the entire story of Bilbo’s journey to the Lonely Mountain and back.

He also revealed that editing on The Battle of the Five Armies is nearly wrapped up, as is work on the extended cut of Desolation of Smaug, which will include an extra 25 minutes of footage.

Read his full post:

Inside Information…
Our journey to make The Hobbit Trilogy has been in some ways like Bilbo’s own, with hidden paths revealing their secrets to us as we’ve gone along. “There and Back Again” felt like the right name for the second of a two film telling of the quest to reclaim Erebor, when Bilbo’s arrival there, and departure, were both contained within the second film. But with three movies, it suddenly felt misplaced—after all, Bilbo has already arrived “there” in the “Desolation of Smaug”.
When we did the premiere trip late last year, I had a quiet conversation with the studio about the idea of revisiting the title. We decided to keep an open mind until a cut of the film was ready to look at. We reached that point last week, and after viewing the movie, we all agreed there is now one title that feels completely appropriate.
And so: “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” it is.
As Professor Tolkien intended, “There and Back Again” encompasses Bilbo’s entire adventure, so don’t be surprised if you see it used on a future box-set of all three movies.
Before then however, we have a film to finish, and much to share with you. It’s been a nice quiet time for us—Jabez and I happily editing away in a dark cave in Wellington—but those halcyon days are quickly coming to an end. It will soon be time to step into the light. Expect to see and hear much about The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in the coming months.
And there’s also The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Extended Cut, which we’re in the process of finishing, with over 25 mins of new scenes, all scored with original music composed by Howard Shore.
It’ll be a fun year!

Warner Bros., the studio behind the Hobbit films also confirmed the title change.

My apologizes for this short and unexpected hiatus. I’m working on fully updating the site.

As previously reported, new AMC drama about the dawn of the personal computer industry was screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival a week ago. Crave Online interviewed Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis about the upcoming show (set to premiere June 1, 2014).

CraveOnline: What are your roles in “Halt and Catch Fire” as they pertain to the PC industry?
Lee Pace: I’ll start about Joe MacMillan. Joe is someone who comes from IBM. There was this phrase that our advisor told me about, The Wild Ducks. The Wild Ducks are the ones who left IBM and tried to start something else. There were a lot of them. So that’s what Joe is. He’s someone who’s leaving the corporate structure because this technology is such an exciting, fun wave.

He’s looking down the road and seeing the potential of this technology. In the pilot I have a line that sticks out. “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” I just need to get people to build the computer that I want that I’m going to bring to the world. That’s why I get together with Gordon Clark and Cameron, so they can build my computer. So we’re making a computer. It’s really simple.

We’re just trying to make an awesome computer because in the world of tech, you’re either the most awesome or you’re out of business. Either you’ve got something that people want to spend your dollars on because everyone’s trying to fight for the same dollars.

So how do you get to be the guy who gets them? The show is very much about how now these phones in our pockets are such ubiquitous parts of our lives, and they’re great. They give us so much freedom and do the things that we need them to do but someone made that happen, lots of people working very hard together and fighting and collaborating to turn the mainframes into these.
Mackenzie Davis: I think Cameron represents a sort of intuitive next wave into the computer industry moving away from computers just being functional machines and starting to have a little bit more personality and anticipate the needs of the user.

I think a lot of her journey in the first season is about trying to apply herself and her ideology into this sort of nondescript box and trying to get it to interact with the world the way she knows it has the potential.

We think of computers as very technical. Do people realize how much drama there is in the industry that produces them?
Mackenzie Davis: They will now. It’s like any industry I would think.
Lee Pace: They will now. It’s an extraordinary thing, a computer, really. It’s electrons moving down those passages and somehow that equals information. As much as this show is a show about computers, because the people in the show care about computers so passionately, love computers, love computational thinking, love the programming of it, love the potential of it, it’s really a show about these people. They’re going into the wild west. That’s what they’re doing with this endeavor.

There’s a great innocence to the show that I really love. There’s an innocence to innovation in a way because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s going to happen to these people. They have high hopes to build this impossible machine but they don’t know if they’re going to succeed, and it takes an insane person to enter into that proposition. That’s Lewis and Clark trying to break into the west.
Mackenzie Davis: They’re unbelievable idealists. They’re going into this project thinking that they’re unleashing something purely beautiful into the world. It’s a very, in their minds, noble pursuit.

It’s going to take the public a lot longer to see the beauty of it, so is there a conflict between these creators and the public?
Mackenzie Davis: Yeah, I think that’s some of the struggle as a creator of a technology that’s really hard to access as a layman, is to try and create something that you’re so passionate about and are so moved by and have such an emotional connection with and try to infuse your personal experience of that machine into the machine so that it can then be transferred to your audience.

Just like “Mad Men” is about advertising but not entirely, and “Breaking Bad” was about drugs but so much more, is technology a launching point for “Halt and Catch Fire?”
Lee Pace: This season is about computers. We’re about making this one computer but it’s about innovation, which is one of the issues of our time. The computer is important to him but there’s a personal drive to be a significant man in this world. He’s looking towards the millennium, 2000, and the possibility of that future as his life’s work, bringing that about.

There were a bunch of guys at the time who were hustling to get into this incredible industry and the ones who succeeded are now very, very wealthy and have influenced our culture in a profound way. Joe wants to be among them. Joe sees the potential of the technology, and forging ahead with that is insane.

What we do with this company, this maneuver I pull with IBM, is insane.

Because it’s fictional, is there more license with that or limitation within the real history?
Lee Pace: The scripts that are coming in are pretty hot. I don’t feel that the writers feel [limited].”
Mackenzie Davis: I feel like the pilot episode is the tamest episode of the season. It’s just so sweet. We are monsters after this. Not really.

Do you get any cool props to play with on “Halt and Catch Fire?”
Mackenzie Davis: Yeah, the computers are amazing. It’s like a playground. That set’s amazing.

Do they work?
Mackenzie Davis: No. Some things do.
Lee Pace: No, because I tried to turn on the Osborne that they brought in and it didn’t work. Actually, I have this picture of my mother in ’83 sitting behind an Adam Osborne that my father bought and she thought it was a big waste of money and a fad. There she is, sitting in front of this. It was luggable basically, a portable computer, but it weighed 28 pounds. It had a big boob tube in the middle of it, two disk drives.

The one they brought on set, the quality of it is so poor. My mom’s got the programming book open next to it because that was when if you wanted your computer to do anything, you had to program it yourself. There was some software that you could buy but most of the time you’d have to input the code yourself. Yeah, there’s fun stuff around. I love it.
Mackenzie Davis: I feel like you’re always touching the individual things. You can interact with a lot of stuff.
Lee Pace: A cool car.

What kind of car does Joe MacMillan drive?
Lee Pace: Porsche 911.

What are the personality conflicts within the team?
Mackenzie Davis: I think at least for Cameron, she is somebody who does not take kindly to being told what to do but she’s working for a very old school corporation so obviously drama is going to come out of an anarchist existing in a corporate world.

She needs the corporate world because she has a great vision for something she wants to create and doesn’t have the funds or the material to do it by herself. She also does not tow the company line. She’s not taken under Joe’s wing as he’d like her to be.
Lee Pace: Really?
Mackenzie Davis: Yeah.
Lee Pace: It’s nothing but conflict. It’s actually nothing but conflict. What they’re so good about is that conflict pits us against each other. This endeavor is so shaky from the beginning. I’m pinning my hopes and dreams on Gordon Clark, this alcoholic who presented a losing computer two years ago, to make this happen. I plucked her out of the back row of a classroom because there’s something about her that I can’t make this computer without. I don’t know what it is but my instinct tells me that you’re what I need. I need courage to make this thing happen.

Were the early ‘80s a heyday for the anarchist movement?
Mackenzie Davis: It was a huge time for punks and the anarchist thing comes about from bucking social norms and the late ‘70s bleeding into the ‘80s. There was a huge punk scene in Dallas and Texas that was very distinct from the punk scene in New York, the punk scene in California in the ‘80s.

So yes and no. I think there’s always a very vocal, if unseen, anarchist movement. It just depends where you look and this show does look to that.
Lee Pace: I think Joe’s got a little bit of that too.
Mackenzie Davis: We want to write our own rules.
Lee Pace: He’s coming in to burn the house down. Innovation is about destroying what was not working, and that’s IBM, those rich white guys in suits who call the shots, is part of what Joe wants to dismantle. That’s why he’s chosen the Silicon Prairie. It’s isolated, there’s a lot of money out here in Texas.

There are a lot of smart, smart businessmen and that’s what Joe’s trying to take advantage of and it’s isolated. It’s not a part of Palo Alto, it’s not a part of the east coast tech world. It’s its own microcosm and I think that’s what Joe is taking advantage of. He knows Steve Jobs is over on the west coast working on something very, very cool and I want to beat him. I think we can. All it takes is a good idea and good execution. That’s all we have to do. We have to connect the dots.

For one Guardians of the Galaxy question, is your Ronan the Accuser based on any specific era of the comic books?
Lee Pace: It’s a character that has changed so much through the years and a character that the readers of the comic books love and love to watch him change. That’s the quality of Ronan I think we’re [going to see]. It’s a very cool character.

Did you have to do any additional shooting for The Hobbit: There and Back Again?Lee Pace: Not yet. Summer’s not over. Not yet, not yet. We did quite a bit last year so we shot a lot of very, very cool stuff.

Based on the original plan, it would have been finished as a two-parter by now. Are you excited another whole movie is still coming?
Lee Pace: Yeah, it’s such a special movie that people connect to. It’s such a great thing to be a part of and I’m very excited once this final piece falls in place of seeing all of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as one movie.

Does it connect up at the end?
Lee Pace: I’m not going to tell you that. [Laughs]

Source

New interview is out. Lee talks Thranduil’s appearance, his audition, favourite scene of The Hobbit trilogy to film and more. Thanks to this great tumblr user for translating the first two questions. The rest was translated from French using google translate, so my apologizes for any mistakes. I tried to make it understandable.

Fantasy lovers remember your wonderful performance in the film THE FALL and the cult series PUSHING DAISIES… It like the most when you play in the fantastic city, as you again in THE HOBBIT?
I do not know if you know, but Tarsem had made some Fall postproduction in your country, in Paris… On the Fantasy, I’ve always loved this genre which gives “carte blanche” to the imagination. It has been three years since I participated in the filming and postproduction of the Hobbit, and I must say it was a unique, truly extraordinary experience. Peter Jackson is one of the most exciting directors I’ve met. It can give you inspiration and make you excel. This is a bold extremely talented artist, constantly progressing and taking risks. And he knows how it should tell a story to successfully captivate people of all ages and all cultures around the world. I think we do not always realize the extraordinary achievement that is… As for me, I took a lot of pleasure to embody Thranduil, as it is a being who has many facets, and high intelligence. This is an elf with a very complex personality… It has a dark, sad nature … and it is very very very old! (laughs) I learned a lot playing Thranduil, who is also the first character elf written by Tolkien.

Peter Jackson said that your performance in The Fall was engraved in his memory. He even said that with this film, you had always been his first choice and only choice to play Thranduil… Does that mean you did not have to audition for the role?
No, no. Although this is extremely flattering and very nice from Peter, I still had to audition in New York. We read some scenes and talked about the character, especially with Philippa Boyens who knows everything of Tolkien’s work. I explained to him what were the specific details that I knew about this character. But what I missed this time, it was an overview of Thranduil and his motives. And that Philippa could describe me. We know that in the original novel, he never leaves his kingdom of Middle Earth to go west, to the Elven land of Valinor. He prefers to stay where it is and continue to enjoy his immortality in his huge palace – fortress.

What did you suggest for makeup, costume and accessories of your character?
This whole process was very collaborative. I naturally wanted Thranduil to have the appearance of a king. I loved the first dress that we have came up with, and you’ll see in the first scene of the second film. This is a golden tunic embroidered with gold ornamentation on which is placed a voluminous cape, almost as wide as the portrait of King Louis XIV, in which his fur-lined cloak takes up so much space. I told Ann Maskrey, our costume designer, I wanted to give him a very impressive appearance. Meaning it was necessary that one feels immediately that when he says something, people listen and obey immediately. Thranduil did not need to argue. He does not seek anyone’s approval. And if we resist it, then it’s a problem that is quickly resolved in his favor!

What are your favourite moments of your character in the film?
One that immediately comes to mind is the scene where I welcome Thorin and the dwarves in my fortified palace after the capture. This is a very hard, very tense confrontation between two kings. There is one side a king who reigns, and the other a deposed king from his throne and the land of his ancestors, who seeks to reclaim it. I loved working with Richard Armitage. It turns out that this is the first scene in Hobbit when I show, and I remember that I thought “What a great start!” (Laughs)

What were the most challenging aspects of working on THE HOBBIT?
The hardest thing is to achieve assimilate all the abounding information and nuances of this rich universe and to think long to play his character more precisely, most sincerely… We know that these films will be seen by tens of millions of people around the world, and we want to present their flawless performance, solid, which we have seen absolutely every aspect. This is what we must do to treat the public with the respect it deserves. We can not just leave such a project by saying that no one has perhaps done his job 120%, and it does not matter if you forgot to deal with some this thing started. In any case, I do not work like that! I wanted to know everything about Thranduil, and being directed by Peter Jackson, I was in good hands. Same for Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh. I was surrounded by sympathetic allies who helped me to embody this character the best they knew everything. You know, I think if THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the first episode of HOBBIT have been so successful is because the public has seen that it was not the “Popcorn” films, as we say the United States. These are fantastic stories, certainly, but with a real human depth, and find resonance in each viewer.

Have you kept any accessories or prostheses from your character at the end of filming?
I kept my prosthetic elf ears and put them in a book, a bit like flowers are dried.

What are the most unusual memories you have from the Hobbit ?
Oh, probably filming battle scenes, because if you knew how many times I fell off the artificial momentum that I had to pretend to ride, you’d call me unworthy to play King of the Elves! I am terrified of use will be made of these overwhelming images in the bonus film when it comes out on DVD and Blu Ray! I waved my sword over my head like a valiant warrior, and I lost balance and I fell. And straightening me through my crown was on my head… It was heartbreaking. (laughs)

The original version can be found in two parts – here and here.

Sarah Dunn photographed eight lead actors from The Hobbit for YOU mag. Lee Pace was one of them and here’s an exclusive shot shared on her facebook page.

Many of The Hobbit cast members flew to Belin, Germany two days to attend the European premiere. Lee was not there, but Evangeline Lilly talked about their relationship in her interview, when asked who’s the one person she couldn’t have gotten through without. “I think Lee Pace, who played King Thranduil of course. My king. He actually lived with me and my family for a littler while during shooting. He didn’t want to stay in his hotel so I was like “come live in our spare bedroom!” So he did,” she answered. “We were roomies for a while and we got really close. And I miss him. I wish he was here.”

You can watch the full interview below.