Peter Jackson talks ‘Hobbit: BotFA’ and all Middle-earth with TheOneRing.net

QUICK TAKES: HOW IS THE HOBBIT PRODUCTION DIFFERENT FROM RINGS?

“From the first day that shooting, the postproduction begins. So it’s important that that pipeline is as smooth and efficient as possible which is why I juggle my days doing music reviews with Howard [Shore], Weta [Digital] reviews with Eric [Saindon] and editing and doing selects with Jabez [Olssen] here. It’s like I’m in postproduction as at the same time as I’m in production and that’s kind of how you have to do it really.

“We tended not to do that on The Lord of the Rings films, with Lord of the Rings films we had a year of postproduction for each film, so we literally had an entire 12 months without shooting apart from pickups that we would shoot occasionally. Whereas this movie, a lot of that postproduction has had to happen while we’re shooting the film so that we’ve got the jump on it because we’ve only got half the length of time once we wrap.”

QUICK TAKES: AND HOW ARE THEY THE SAME?

Talking to the cast and crew, there are a lot of folks still around from the work on Rings. There is still that feeling of camaraderie. Did Jackson find that accurate?

“Yeah, sure. You’re in a pretty intense work environment where people have to perform to their maximum abilities every day for a year-and-a-half of shooting so you can’t help but end up feeling like you’re a bunch of troops on a campaign together. You do get a camaraderie, different to when you’re doing an 8 or 10 week shoot. It’s a very different feel. It is like you become a family, a really, really big family.”

QUICK TAKES: ANDY SERKIS

“Andy has been a close friend and colleague since The Lord of the Rings days and through King Kong and through Tintin, so he’s someone that he and I have a very good sort of short-hand way of dealing with each other now.

“The thing with Andy that really appealed to me as using him as a second unit director is he’s not tentative or conservative, that’s the word I want, conservative. He’s a sort of balls-to-the wall type guy who will really deliver 110% and I kind of like the idea that that energy is part of the second unit. Plus Andy knows the world, he knows Tolkien, he knows the story. He’s also got a relationship with a lot of the other actors and you know the second unit does get to use actors a lot.”

QUICK TAKES: TECHNOLOGY

(We talked about technology extensively, enough to do a story on it.)

“This world, we’re trying to make this world look real. We’re trying to make you feel like you’re in it. Every creature we do, Gollum, you know Trolls, Balrogs, we’re trying to make everything feel organic and real and the way I direct movies with moving the camera around I try to immerse you in the film.

“There’s two sort of experiences you have in a cinema: you can sit in the seat and you’re disconnected from the film and you’re an audience member and you’re kind of there as an observer of the movie. This has to do with script and music and direction and acting and whatever it is, the movie kind of draws you in and you literally, emotionally you’re elevated out of your seat and you become part of the film experience and those are the really cool movies. Those are the experiences you remember.

“In the cinema and any technology that can make people leave their cinema seat and kind of drift into the world of the film whether it’s 48 frames, 3-D, super big screens, three-dimensional sound, anything that can do that is great, great by me because I don’t like the artificial barrier. I want people to pass through it — become part of the movie.”

QUICK TAKES: THE END OF ALL THINGS

“There is a little bit of sadness. I’m actually liking, I’m enjoying shooting this movie so much that I am feeling a bit sad. I wouldn’t say that I want to shoot Middle-earth movies for the rest of my life, but…certainly there aren’t any more films in the offhand because the Silmarillion is still very much sitting within the Tolkien estate.”

NOTE: Big thanks to the editors, transcriber, publicity folks at WB and Wingnut and especially to Peter Jackson for halting a multi-million dollar project to talk with TheOneRing.net. Maybe someday we will bring you the Extended Edition of this interview.
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