Following their Q&A session with Chris Weitz, MTV have posted a piece on the altered ending of The Golden Compass, featuring some new quotes from New Line and the director. Chris Weitz says the change was made so that the film would end “in just the right kind of mood. The good guys win.” He went on, “Just kidding. It’s more, ‘What kind of exit line do we want for our heroine?’ We just wanted to find the right place to enter the second movie, and as we became more confident about the likelihood that there will be a second and a third movie going, we decided we wanted to end the first one in a way that led right into the second one. And probably only we would think it’d be any different.”

Changing the ending apparently necessitated other changes to the film, to make the story more cohesive. New scenes were added for the purposes of what Sam Elliott (Lee Scoresby) called “clarification.” The actor said, “These are really difficult books, I think, to adapt to the screen. I’ve done enough of these things that were adapted from really good literature that don’t always work verbatim, so I can appreciate the thought of this as a cliffhanger.”

Late additions also included the replacement of Nonso Anozie (voicing Iorek Byrnison) with Ian McKellen “We thought Ian McKellan would add more to the role,” producer Bob Shea said. “It elevated this visual-effects character into something powerful and exciting and dramatic and passionate. As with all big films, there’s always a lot of tuning up to do,” Shea said. “And typically, as we did with ‘Golden Compass,’ we budgeted for the possibility, the certainty even, that we’d make changes and reconceive certain things, to make it as good as it can possibly be. There have been changes all along, because sometimes things didn’t work out the way the director or the studio thought it could work out, so we make adjustments.” Chris Weitz added, “Fortunately we had a long enough production schedule so we could take a look at what we had and see how we can improve it.”

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