Peter Jackson talked with ScifiWire about “The Hobbit” at San Diego’s Comic-Con 2009. Below are some sound bytes from the interview.
Jackson on hiring Guillermo del Toro to direct the two-part “The Hobbit” movie and why he chose not to direct it himself:
“Guillermo’s there not because I’m a mentor of him, but I just thought he would do a terrific job with that film,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t the type of movie I [wanted] to give to a young, novice filmmaker and have them sort of godfather it through. I wanted someone who … was established, who I could trust with it. … With The Hobbit, I really don’t want to … be too involved in looking over the shoulder of the director.”
“Because with the Lord of the Rings movies I did make, those were the very best films that I could make, given the circumstances and everything else. … I poured my heart and soul into those films, and I just thought that I’d given everything I could to The Lord of the Rings, and now, with The Hobbit, I’d have to go there again, and now I’d be competing against myself. And how did I shoot Hobbiton the first time around? And how did I shoot Gandalf coming through the door? Now I’d have to look back at what I did the first time and do something different. Or not. And suddenly I could just imagine myself having this rather weird year or two where I was relating to my own work in a way in which I didn’t feel comfortable. So I thought that the best thing-and honestly the best thing for the project and the fans of Tolkien and everything else-was to find another filmmaker who would do a really great job, and let them shoot Gandalf coming in the door, and let’s all enjoy what they do with it and give somebody else a chance to do something fresh and original with it.”
Where is “The Hobbit” in production right now? Jackson continues:
“… We’re about three weeks, … from turning over the first script for the first Hobbit movie to the studio. The process that we’ve been through so far is we wrote-and when I say “we,” it’s the four of us, it’s Guillermo, Philippa, Fran and myself-we wrote an extensive treatment of the two films, which we pitched to the studio on a long conference call, and that was, I guess, about three or four months ago. And that was good, that went well, and they liked the idea. Because no one was really [in disagreement about] “Should it be one film? Should it be two films?”
Well, obviously, we could squeeze The Hobbit into one movie, but even, like, a three-hour movie, you’d be amazed at how much of that story you’d have to lose. It’s weird. I mean, the book … is what the book is, and we just worked through a process
of including all the events that we’d like to see in a film, and it was clear [that] it wasn’t going to fit. Plus, the fact that we want to embellish a few things and put a little bit of extra … narrative in for Gandalf and what he’s doing in Dol Guldur and the Necromancer and various sort of side … stories that are happening. And so we decided really that the two movies we were doing should be The Hobbit part one and part two.”
And what about casting? Jackson dispels the rumors:
“And we haven’t done any casting yet. I mean, that’s the truth. There’s all these rumors about people, but we haven’t offered a single role to any actor yet, because everything’s a process, and we haven’t got a green light, and we haven’t got a budget. And when you make an offer to an actor, one of the things that you have to obviously expect is they’re going to ask to see a script, so we have to wait until we have a script. The other thing that you also need when you offer the role to an actor is you need dates. You need to be able to tell them when you want to start work and when they’re going to finish work and how long they’re going to work for. Because, obviously, an actor’s deal is very much tied to the commitment of work. And so it’s not until we deliver the script that we can break the script down, that we can get a budget, and then once we’ve got a budget we have to get a green light, which we haven’t got.”
“… There are some, yeah, which I wouldn’t [want to say]. Obviously, there, … the thing that we want to do is, any characters that were seen in The Lord of the Rings, we obviously want the actors that originated the characters to come back and play them again. So that obviously goes without saying.”
“And in terms of new characters, in some regards we are talking about people as ideas, but … obviously it would be wrong of me to talk about that here, because we should talk to the actors themselves first before we talk about it over the ‘net.”
[Source] Scifi
