Peter Jackson admits he ‘botched’ The Hobbit trilogy
“I had no idea what I was doing…” The Lord of the Rings director recounts the difficult filming of The Hobbit.
Released at the end of 2014 in cinemas, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will return this evening on TMC.
In 2015, when it was released on DVD and Blu-ray, The Guardian found within the bonuses the mea culpa of Peter Jackson. Faced with criticism, the director admitted having “sloppy” the trilogy, explaining that unlike the filming of the Lord of the Ringshe was not “deep in”. And he didn’t know at all what to do with it The Battle of the Five Armies.
He recounted in particular that the departure of Guillermo Del Toro of the project in 2010 (because of the bankruptcy of MGM) had rushed things.
“Guillermo Del Toro having left, I had to come in and take matters into my own hands but I couldn’t go back in time, recover a year and a half of pre-production to make my film, very different from what he had plannedsays Jackson. It was impossible, and since it was impossible I started shooting the film when it wasn’t well prepared.”
What would Guillermo Del Toro’s The Hobbit have looked like?
“You go on set and you botch the job, you have these extremely complicated scenes, no storyboards and you find yourself improvising…he continues. I spent the filming of Hobbit to feel that I was not fully into it… From a script point of view, Fran (Walsh), Philippa (Boyens) and I were not able to write the scripts satisfactorily. So we were under pressure when it came time to shoot.”
No storyboards, an unfinished script, accelerated production… All this led Peter Jackson to ask for a two-month break in 2012 to be able to rethink his film when it was time to shoot The Battle of the Five Armies.
“I went to the producers, I told them that I had no idea what I was doing, because I had no storyboards or a battle plan… The deadline allowed me to clear my head, to find inspiration for battle, and to put things in place for good.”
Finally, the release of The Battle of the Five Armies was pushed back five months, from July 2014 to December 2014.
The Hobbit: why the long version is essential
On arrival, as we explain to you herewe find that the trilogy of Hobbit in long version is essential for any fan of Lord of the Ringseven if the three films are qualitatively inferior to those of the first trilogy, whatever some purists say.
If all the films created with pain and without preparation resembled those of Hobbit, “the world would be more filled with joy”. With a total budget of $745 million and final receipts of $2.9 billion, the trilogy ultimately raked in a nice big pile of gold.
