Writer/Director Guillermo del Toro has done a pretty good job of keeping a lid on anything to do with “The Hobbit”. He is still in pre-production for “The Hobbit” and doesn’t begin shooting his back-to-back films until late spring 2010. However, he did recently speak with the folks over at Total Film and gave up some details on his work schedule, his relationship with Peter Jackson, and the task of designing Smaug.

“I was calmly laying out the next decade of my life when The Hobbit appeared,” he laughs. “I was preparing all these things and all of a sudden The Hobbit shows up and takes over my life.”

“It took almost a year to design. Which for me is very, very long because normally I take about a third of that time to design movies like Hellboy. And if you actually take into account we have three or four times the number of artists… [chuckles]. We produced hundreds, literally hundreds, of drawings; dozens and dozens of maquettes; dozens of material tests. It’s epic. And we are still going to be designing into production”

“Many, many months ago Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and I sat down to discuss the structure with 3in by 5in cards and we laid out the two movies. We were meeting on a daily basis at 9am and we would go at it for hours, into the afternoon. Then in the afternoon I would go to check on design”

“Then at one point we split into two teams: I did one pass at things and they did a pass at things; it’s pretty much the way I’m used to co-writing. But I must say what was great and what made a big difference was the amount of great ideas that I felt were generated in a day – it was staggering.”

“We could have written three or four versions of The Hobbit [laughs].”

“I think one of the designs I’m the proudest of is Smaug. Obviously he took the longest. It’s actually still active: we’re finishing his colour palette and a little bit of the texture. But the bulk of the design took about a year, solid. It’s because of the unique features of the dragon”

“Early in production I came up with a very strong idea that would separate Smaug from every other dragon ever made. The problem was implementing that idea. But I think we’ve nailed it”

[Source] TotalFilm