'Rings Of Power' Director Reveals Producers Wanted To Cut Out One Of The Show's Worst Scenes

J.A. Bayona, who directed early episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power revealed that producers for the show wanted to eliminate one of the worst scenes in the show’s first episode.

Bayona informed NME back in 2023 that producers wanted to cut the scene where Galadriel takes a boat to Valinor.

He said they “tried to take it out” because they “didn’t have the money.” However, he said he convinced them to keep the scene, “I actually convinced them that we were going to be able to shoot that scene in the budget.”

In the scene, which you can see below, Galadriel and a number of other Elves arrive at Valinor and begin hearing pleasant music and see a flock of birds begin to encircle them. The other Elves on the boat begin singing the pleasant music as Galadriel looks around puzzled.

The tone of the scene quickly changes as ominous music begins playing and the clouds begin to part and a bright light emerges from behind it. As the boat begins to approach the light, Galadriel begins to slowly back away from it.

When one of her fellow Elves encourages her to take his hand, Galadriel reaches her hand out, but never grasps her fellow Elf’s hand. She then remembers what her brother told her about how to determine whether the light is true or not, or which one she should follow, “Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness.”

At this point, Galadriel has her hand in the light, but she rejects it and then leaps off the boat and dives into the water with her brother’s sword as the boat enters into Valinor.

The scene is anathema to Tolkien’s lore in a number of ways, but probably the biggest one is that the scene can be interpreted as Galadriel rejecting the true light of Valinor and even potentially seeing it as darkness in order to stay in Middle-earth.

In fact, showrunner J.D. Payne discussed this scene with USA Today saying, “She has a difficult conversation with Elrond where she says, 'If I go to Valinor right now, it would be heaven. But it might not be heaven for me because I'm taking so much pain inside me, and I also don't really know if I've finished the mission that I'm in Middle-earth to do.’”

Ridiculously, he frames this as a “very selfless thing and huge sacrifice, but also very necessary.”

Imagine describing rejecting heaven as selfless rather than the selfish act that it is. To be clear, in Letter 131 to Milton Waldman Tolkien wrote of Valinor, “a kind of Paradise, the home of the Gods.”

In that same letter he even noted how Sauron deceived the Elves by promising them that they could make Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor and how this deception “was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise.

Furthermore, Tolkien also informed Waldman that once the world was made round, mortals no longer had access to Valinor, “Valinor (or Paradise) and even Eressëa are removed, remaining only in the memory of the earth. Men may sail now West, if they will, as far as they may, and come no nearer to Valinor or the Blessed Realm, but return only into the east and so back again; for the world is round, and finite, and a circle inescapable – save by death. Only the 'immortals', the lingering Elves, may still if they will, wearying of the circle of the world, take ship and find the 'straight way', and come to the ancient or True West, and be at peace.”

While cutting this scene would not have saved or even redeemed this show, at least this major subversive scene would not be in it.

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