SPENDING your birthday in a rowing boat in the middle of a freezing lake, waiting for the rain to stop so you can film a scene, isn't most people's idea of a good time.

But The Lord Of The Rings actor Elijah Wood, who turned 33 on his first day shooting new Dylan Thomas biopic Set Fire To The Stars, isn't one to complain.

"I wouldn't have had it any other way," insists the star, who plays US poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin in the movie.

"You often think you'd like to start with something easy, because you'll get comfortable and get to know everyone, but there's also the logic of, 'Let's start with something intense'. It proved to be a great way to break into the material."

Set Fire To The Stars follows Brinnin's struggle to look after his hellraising Welsh hero (played by Anglesey-born Celyn Jones) as he toured the US in the 1950s - an experience which later led Brinnin to pen a warts-and-all book, Dylan Thomas In America.

Director Andy Goddard, who also co-wrote the script with Jones, shot the film in black and white and recreated wintry New York in Swansea, where Thomas was born a century ago.

The city's Guildhall passed for Yale University, Georgian homes doubled for New York brownstones, and the retro Kardomah cafe, which the Under Milk Wood writer frequented, was turned into a 1950s diner. ("In between takes [in the town hall], people would be arguing about bins and renewing their driving licences," Jones says.

Not that Iowa-born Wood, who started acting as a child in films such as 1989's Back To The Future Part II and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm in 1997, had time to sample the local nightlife.

"We shot for 18 days, which is fast. But we were standing in central Swansea and saw quite a bit of it.

"It feels like there's ownership from Swansea with the film, both because Dylan is a son of Swansea to a degree, and a lot of the places we filmed in were places that he frequented. So his ghost was with us."

We see Brinnin try - and often fail - to get the charismatic but heavy-drinking poet to curb his hedonistic ways, at one point taking him to a boathouse to detox before a big appearance. Thomas made his fourth and final trip to New York in 1953, however, where he died at the age of 39 - a post-mortem gave the primary cause of death as pneumonia.

The film is described as a '"cautionary tale about meeting your heroes".

Having played hobbit Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy from 2001 to 2003, and reprised the role in the first Hobbit film in 2012, Wood has been on the receiving end of some hero-worship himself.

"It's lovely, but I hold it in perspective," he says of the attention. "I have a rela- tively healthy separation between what people think I am and the person I am."