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Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh on the Witch-king's reaction to Gandalf in the Extended Edition audio commentary:
Boyens: ["In the book it works on a different level...]
Walsh: ["There's something disempowering about a character who arrives and threatens to do something and then flies away again...Having not actually - well, he broke Gandalf's staff, but - there was just this sense...it made him less frightening..and less potent as a character. It's like an event written to happen, but then didn't. And we really felt it in the pacing of the film."]
Peter Jackson adds: ["We just wanted to make it more exciting and cinematic."]
So the idea of Jackson and Co. is to make the Witch-king more menacing. Give them credit; they tried to add something to the very little screentime the Witch-king was granted.
If they would have filmed the confrontation as it happened in the book, then it would have been a nearly wasteful bit of scenes. As a film director, why would you have one or two scenes of a book rendition of WK vs. Gandalf, building up even more tension than what was actually filmed, and then ending it with the two going separate ways with no actual outcome? Well, that's essentially how it happened in the book, but it certainly wouldn't carry any merit to advancing plot in a movie!
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