If you have quibbles or major beefs about how The Hobbit was adapted for Peter Jackson's movie trilogy, Philippa Boyens has answers.

The production has been surrounded in controversy, ever since it was announced that the 300-odd page novel by J.R.R. Tolkien would become not one film, but two. Then, in July, Jackson, Warner Brothers Pictures and MGM dropped the bomb that the adaptation would encompass three films. Many cried foul. Other cried greed.

"[Making The Hobbit a trilogy] was a creative choice, it wasn't a financial choice at all."Of course, not all the decisions fell on her shoulders: The screenplay for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is also credited to Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro (the original director of the film).

Boyens won an Academy Award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA), shared with Jackson and Walsh, for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; she won Oscar, BAFTA Award and WGA Award nominations for her work on the first film in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was also her screenwriting debut. Boyens also co-wrote the screenplay for The Two Towers. After Rings, she worked on the screenplays for King Kong and The Lovely Bones. Prior to screenwriting, Boyens worked in theater as a playwright, teacher, producer and editor. In 2000, she was named by Variety as one of the Ten Screenwriters to Watch.

I had the chance to talk to with Boyens, who was in New York City for a series of press interviews.

Gilsdorf: You co-wrote the script for The Lord of the Rings, and now The Hobbit. How long have you been living in Middle-earth, in one form or another?

Boyens: I worked about seven years on Lord of the Rings, and then this has been nearly four. It's a big chunk of time, but it's been, God, a privilege. I'm certainly not regretting it.

Gilsdorf: Can you tell me what was the biggest challenge adapting The Hobbit? Was it the difference in the tone, lighter and less dark compared to Lord of the Rings? Or was it the fact that the story is episodic in nature, and somewhat random in the encounters the Bilbo and the Company face, rather than having a longer and more epic scope?

"[The Hobbit] has got a lot of issues as a story in terms of a film adaptation."Boyens: It has got a lot of issues as a story in terms of a film adaptation. Something that's not film friendly, so to speak: You wouldn't even have 13 dwarves as a start.

It is episodic. That was a big challenge. You do tumble from one adventure to the next, not necessarily building on each other and not necessarily interconnected, either. [That can be] a little bit disastrous in terms of the film grinding to a halt.

But having to take that chance as a screenwriter when you're adapting a novel, and figure it out and to make it work, it does mean you take liberties. But mostly what I've found I have to say is that fans understand it, and they actually kind of appreciate it, and they approach the work not as this absolute definitive expression of Tolkien's work but as based on, an adaptation of.

Gilsdorf: Do you have a sense of what the less than forgiving fans, the more hardcore ones, might be upset about in your adaptation?

Boyens: I've met a few of them, and again, [as I said earlier] that is my experience. I think we're lucky, and I think they do understand it. I think they were a little bit tougher on Lord of the Rings, but I think a lot of the fans of Professor Tolkien have understood that the film, rather than taking anything away from the books, actually brought a lot more readers to the world. Which is fantastic. If this brings some kids to the book, fantastic too.

Gilsdorf: The problem with adapting The Hobbit strikes me as the opposite to The Lord of the Rings. In that trilogy, there were tough choices to omit characters and plot lines, like Tom Bombadil, for example. And while many agreed you made the right choices, there were complaints about what was cut. In The Hobbit, you're taking a shorter book and turning it into three movies, and had to find enough story to make it into three two-and-a-half hour films. Was it difficult finding enough material for three films?

Boyens: No, not really. Not in the end. It's a deceptive book, it's deceptively slight. Number one, Professor Tolkien didn't stop writing The Hobbit when he stopped writing The Hobbit, if you know what I mean. He kept writing it all his life, and he kept adding bits to it, and a lot of that can be found in the Lord of the Rings, not just in the appendices but also within the text of Lord of the Rings. There are some really interesting tidbits about Bilbo Baggins in the very front, in the prologue to Lord of the Rings, as well which we used, especially having to do with his encounter with Gollum.

"Professor Tolkien didn’t stop writing The Hobbit when he stopped writing The Hobbit."The truth is, this film, these films [The Hobbit trilogy] were always going to be seen against the backdrop of us having made The Lord of the Rings first. That's just the way is it. And that there were characters that were going to step into this story, that we'd already written, that were very full and complete characters such as Gandalf the Grey and Gollum, Elrond. We knew that this was going to happen, and that Bilbo himself existed, already, brilliantly brought to life by Ian Holm. I don't think it ever occurred to us to step back from that place.

But what we did need to do, though, was to make sure it was its own story, not just a retelling of Lord of the Rings, or an adjunct of Lord of the Rings, or a Lord of the Rings redux. That it had its own story, and that it had its own tone. In the end it's about the choices you make in the storytelling. You have to trust them. I think this story found its own level. We try to let stories do that. We chose not to lose sequences. We wanted to tell the whole of it because we felt like we just found a way to do that. There was a wholeness to it. Each part of this tale fit into the next. You can see this as Tolkien begins to understand this. In the book, the fact that they encounter trolls on the road, it doesn't mean anything, they shouldn't be encountering them. It start to fall into a greater whole. I think if you can do that, then you are serving the true nature of The Hobbit.

Gilsdorf: So here comes the devil's advocate question. Many have suggested that the reason behind stretching The Hobbit into two movies, and then three, was for purely commercial reasons. That it was falling in with the trend with the Twilight movies and the last Harry Potter movies, as a way for studios to collect one more ticket from audiences. How do you answer that?

>"There's always going to be naysayers."

Boyens: How do you answer that? It's so funny because, honestly, in many ways it would have been way easier to just finish with the films, do the two films, not tell any more of the story, and to go on and do another film. We'd happily go off and make another film with Warners.

We chose to make these films. ... [The studio] they wanted to know, first and foremost, not what the budget was, but what the story was. I swear to God it's that simple. And if anyone thinks there wasn't another set of films that we could make that would possibly make even more money than a third Tolkien movie, they're out of their minds.

This was a creative choice, it wasn't a financial choice at all. In fact, we are probably paying for it financially. We did it because we wanted to. We wanted to take that extra time and tell that tale, and so did the actors and so did the [crew]. And when you sit down with your creative collaborators, and say, should we do this, should we take this extra time to tel this tale? And the answer is yes, from everybody, we go, "OK, we're not crazy." The truth is, if we had gotten "No," we would have accepted no. Because we already had a way through with two films and a way to tell the tale in two films.

To those people who think this is daft, they don't understand the story, they don't understand how dark this story turns, how this story moves towards Lord of the Rings in a very profound way towards the end of the book. Even though it is a children's tale, it has quite a sad and dark ending in many ways, and we wanted to fulfill that. Telling the tale of a dragon destroying a city – in the book it's like a couple of pages, but can you imagine that on film and how to tell that properly?

So, in the end, there's always going to be naysayers. There's always going to be people who have imagined they understand how these things work and how storytelling works. But in the end, you have to accept that they don't. You have to trust yourself and that's what we did.

Gilsdorf: I noticed another change the film: The character arc of Bilbo seemed deeper, and the tone of comedy seemed less foregrounded than in the book. The darker themes seemed deeper. Also with Thorin, his story and quest seems darker, and more fleshed out, almost as important as Bilbo's quest. And Bilbo is made more heroic, more clever, than he appears in the book.

>"We just tell \[Bilbo\] being quick witted a little bit earlier."

Boyens: He's not quite so inept. I think we had to do that. We had to do that. [The existing Bilbo] would work probably as a piece of television, and it would be charming, but you'd get really sick of it really fast if you didn't have a character who was that driving the story. That was a pretty easy choice to make. And in the end, the truth is, he IS very quick witted. We just tell him being quick witted a little bit earlier.

And in terms of Thorin's story, you know, Professor Tolkien kept writing the story of the dwarves. The dwarves come from a couple of sources especially when you look at the Norse mythology. [How they are portrayed] has almost nothing to do with their size and everything to do with their race and their culture and who they are. I think if we'd underserved them, and made them just about dwarves from the fairly tales, we wouldn't have been serving up the deep richness of the characters. ... We knew where the story was going, so we wrote in a Thorin that earns those moments, and I think Richard Armitage is going to deliver.

Gilsdorf: What surprised you most, working on The Hobbit, and in your writing of the story?

Boyens: I think actually trusting the process that you don't have to introduce all the dwarves at once, that you trust the audience that they will get to know them and enjoy them in their own way. And that you trust the actors, too, to bring those characters to life. Not trying to overwrite them, overwrite with each having their own moments, but use them as a natural part of the storytelling,

Also the fact that, in the end, I think we managed to write a story where we have too few dwarves, not too many. To take back a mountain from the dragon, they really need an army. But they've only got themselves.