PJ and GDT talk about the Hobbit
Interview from this week's Empire, scans shamelessly stolen from TORn boards and parts the whole thing transcribed by yours truly right here at ohnotheydidnt under the cut. Feel free to repost etc.
Source: some Ringer's scanner.
This should now contain everything from the article, except for the texts under the pictures which mostly just repeat things.
--------------------------------------------------
The Two Towers- Empire Magazine June 2009
Peter Jackson. Guillermo del Toro. For the first time, Empire gathers The Hobbit's producer and director together to talk scripts, secrets, Sauron and, er, swimwear...
Words Chris Hewitt Portraits Grant Maiden
Given that one is about to embark on the biggest challenge of his career, and the other is on scripting and producing duties working with Spielberg on the Tintin films, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson appear surprisingly relaxed. On this day in late March in Wellington, New Zealand, sat at the other end of a Skype connection, the pair consider Empire's query as to whether they're still working on the script of their adaptation of The Hobbit.
"Not really. We've been on a beach, relaxing in our bikinis," says Jackson.
"I've got a Borat bathing suit," points out del Toro.
"They think we're working on the script," adds Jackson.
They're joking, of course, but the hard work is yet to begin. Their take on J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, in which the young(er) Bilbo sets off adventuring with Gandalf the GRey and 13 dwarves to raid a dragon's hoard - finding a certain Ring along the way - is still a year off from going before cameras. But that certainly doesn't mean del Toro and Jackson have nothing to talk about...
Empire: Where are you with the script at the moment?
Del Toro: We've been working six, seven hours every day for the last few months, at Peter's house. I raid the pantry!
Jackson: Philippa (Boyens), who co-writes with us, lives next door. She walks across the lawn, looking bleary-eyed, at about 8.30am. Fran (Walsh, Jackson's wife and co-writer) gets herself up, I'm up and Guillermo arrives, then we get going. We usually work through the morning until about 3pm. Either at that point he has to go off to me meetings with Weta, or I fall asleep.
Del Toro: Sometimes both things happen.
Jackson: I just finished six weeks of getting up at five in the morning to go on iChat with Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles while he was doing Tintin on motion capture. But we're done with Tintin now. We're also done, significantly, with the main story outline and the treatment phase of the two Hobbit films. Warner Bros and New Line are in New Zealand now...
Del Toro: Today.
Jackson: Yeah, we presented the pitch to them yesterday morning. We were both nervous as hell, looking like these two naughty schoolboys. We ran through, in great detail, the two films.
Del Toro: Beat by beat.
Jackson: Beat by beat. They were very happy and basically they said to start work on the scripts. We've strictly been doing treatments and story outlines, breakdowns and structural work. So now we've got the okay from the studio to start writing the screenplays, which we'll be doing as of tomorrow, I guess. We've got people standing by to start casting very soon because we're going to start overlapping.
Del Toro: But we haven't just been doing story. When Peter falls asleep, every day I go to Weta where we've been doing research and development of creatures. We have several sculptures Peter and I arm-wrestled for, to see who keeps the maquettes. And other than that, the design team - John Howe and Alan Lee - have been here intermittently. Now they're going to be here very soon - for a long, long time. Mike Mignola is coming, Wayne Barlowe is coming. So we're going to be full force on the design team with about six or seven new artists, starting in a few weeks from now.
Empire: You mentioned casting...
Jackson: Now that the treatments have been confirmed, what that does give us is a pretty accurate cast list. We now know what characters are in which film, and armed with that, we can start some casting. We're going to do location recces because again, the treatments give us info we need for what sort of locations we're looking for. We're going to have that underway shortly. We're basically on target to start shooting March next year.
Empire: Have you decided which actors will return?
Jackson: (To del Toro) I know that you've met with Ian McKellen and I've spoken with him, and obviously he's up for doing it. And Andy (Serkis) I've worked with on Tintin and he's up for it. But nothing's happened. No agents have been spoken to yet. But that will happen soon.
Empire: Have you decided what the second movie will be?
Del Toro: We've decided to have the Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur. Specifically, the two movies will comprise the book.
Jackson: We expanded out the universe a lot more, so that we were't just staying with Bilbo and the dwarves on their journey, as the book pretty much does. We started to expand some of what's happening to Gandalf outside of that journey...
Del Toro: A bit of the backstory...
Jackson: We do cover some of the events earlier, like Thráin, (dwarf king) Thorin's father, and we're sort of fleshing out the Hobbit and expanding it sideways, up and down. We just decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie. The essential brief was to do The Hobbit and it allows us to make the Hobbit in a little more of the style, if you like, of the trilogy, too.
Del Toro: To make a movie of the Hobbit that didn't go over three hours.
Jackson: You would be rushing along...
Del Toro: You would be losing iconic moments. The animated version avoids Beorn, who is a great character, and some people always feel that you should lose the Spiders (of Mirkwood), or this or that. We wanted to keep every iconic moment that was in the book and give it some weight.
Jackson: We've done a lot of things we hope Professor Tolkien would have approved of. We've taken events from the Hobbit and integrated them a little bit more into some of the broader themes that show up in The Lord Of The Rings. But we haven't made The Hobbit any less of a fun, young, fairy-tale adventure mix.
Del Toro: As in the book, the story starts at a more innocent point in Bilbo's life. He goes through darker, stronger stuff in the second part and at the end of the journey he has seen the darker side of the world. I think the whole point of it is his journey, not only to a place, but back again, an how that transforms him. That will stay.
Jackson: The really interesting thing is the fact that Bilbo does get his hands on the Ring (taken during a confrontation with Gollum). In The Hobbit itself, the Ring hasn't really got enough time to become a potent force - nonetheless, it's still part of the internal journey of the character. But on the other side of the Bilbo story is how others come to see him - and how he has to earn respect from the dwarves.
Empire: How are you going to handle the dwarves, many of whom aren't fleshed out in the book?
Del Toro: There is a very specific function that Gimli had in the trilogy. And technically and expressively, the dwarves in The Hobbit serve another. They have to become valiant, brave, sometimes funny - and yes, all of those were in Gimli, but there are moments in which the dwarves have to be tragic, or they have to be incredibly moving. Those dwarves, physically and dramatically, will work like three-dimensional characters that will as soon make you laugh as they will make you fear for their lives, or they will move you. Hopefully to tears, in some instances...
Jackson: We're going to choose five or six, pretty similar to the ones that Tolkien spends a bit more time on in the book, and develop some quite interesting relationships between them and Bilbo. We don't want them to be just Thorin plus 12 comedic sidekicks.
Empire: And how are you dealing with some of The Hobbit's less cinematic moments? The introduction of Bard the Bowman, for example, comes late in the book. Are you working to introduce him earlier?
Jackson: We are doing stuff like that. It's not exactly as you describe, but we are trying to make the book a little less random. There is a little bit of deus ex machina in the kind of event that happen, because Professor Tolkien willed them to happen at that moment. There's not a lot of logic behind some of it. That's what you're dealing with a little bit with The Hobbit, the slightly younger...
Del Toro: ... fairy-tale world...
Jackson: that it was aimed at. The cinema versions of these stories will be reasonable consistent. We try to smooth everything out and structure the films in such a way that nothing is random and nothing comes out of the blue in such a convenient way as it does two or three times during the novel.
Del Toro: Except when, if the idiosyncrasy in the book is a very iconic moment, then we'll do our best to preserve it. We can make that fairy-tale logic work as is.
Empire: Another problem is that Bilbo is largely unconscious during the Battle of Five Armies.
Del Toro: That's one the idiosyncrasies that, from the get-go, I said, "That's one of the ones that we need to keep!" It's so unexpected. I think we're taking small tonal variations that are very beautiful. For example, unlike in the trilogy, where monsters were not often articulate, in The Hobbit, it's part of the book that trolls have very lengthy conversations. There are other idiosyncrasies that would not find themselves at home tonally in the trilogy. But we are moving the notches a little bit.
Jackson: We're developing a lot more character and personality in the villain side of the story, too. We are having to deal with Sauron a little bit more specifically in this; how exactly he manifests himself and what form he's in, and how that is ultimately going to lead into what he becomes in the trilogy - and what he has been in the ancient past. That is something we are absolutely dealing with, much more so than what's in the book. You have to. People will be expecting it. It's before Lord of the Rings, so we're going to learn a bit more about X, Y and Z... We're trying to make sure that we're delivering what they expect, but in a way that's kind of surprising.
Del Toro: The books are so tonally different. The trilogy is this massive, epic, geopolitical cosmology. And the beauty of The Hobbit is that, ultimately, the point of view is a smaller adventure in a very rich world.
Jackson: I forgot to mention that, before we even wrote a single word, when Guillermo first showed up in New Zealand, the very first thing we did was...
Del Toro: I was arrested.
Jackson: Yeah, but we bailed you out. The second thing we did after we got you out on bail was we got 35mm prints of the three Lord of the Rings films, the extended cuts, and we screened them. It was actually the first time that I'd seen them since the day they were released. It was a fun thing to do. I felt overwhelmed, actually, just watching them again because they were just so dense and large and complex.
Del Toro: (Laughs) The first thing I said when we came out was, "Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into?"
Jackson: I know I can be very helpful as a producer because I know more than Guillermo does, and what he's about to go through. And I'm glad he doesn't know. If he did, he wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. He'd be running to the airport!
Del Toro: (Laughs) With a knife in my hands!
Jackson: Do I'm glad he doesn't have a clue!
Empire: So Guillermo... do you have an idea of what you've let yourself in for now?
Del Toro: I think that I have an inkling.
Jackson: (Shaking his head firmly) No.
Del Toro: (Laughs) But the beauty of this is that when Pete called me [in 2007], he and I had not spoken in a couple of years. And out of the blue, I get the call during Christmas. Essentially, the conversation was brief. He said, "We're thinking of you for The Hobbit, what do you think?" I said, "I'll do it." He said, "It's about three years of your life." "I'll do it." "Do you want to talk it over with your family?" "No, I'll do it. I want to do it."
Jackson: I'll be there trying to help. The one thing is, I do know what you'll be going through, wearing your shoes. I'll be looking after your back as much as I can.
Empire: Peter, has watching Guillermo go through this process made you sometimes wish you'd decided to direct these movies?
Jackson: Well, there are moments when I do get a pang of jealousy.
Del Toro: With the maquettes!
Jackson: Although I tell you what, I'm actually enjoying a lot of what I'm doing on this particular project. And I'm committed to trying to have these two films that Guillermo's going to make be better movies than the three movies I made. If it was me making these two, I'd feel that I'd be like, "What did I do last time? How am I going to beat that? Is this going to be different enough?" That, to me, was sort of unsatisfying, and whenever I imagine that, that's the reason I'm not directing these films.
Empire: Can you talk about the visual approach? Will it blend in with the trilogy?
Del Toro: You don't make it a point. I think if you make it a point, you'll be making the biggest mistake of your life.
Jackson: What I think everybody has to get right in their minds is that we're creating a Middle-earth that's pretty much the same as the trilogy's Middle-earth. Hobbiton is going to look like the same place. Hobbits are going to look the same. But it's another guy going in with his own filmmaking style. That's why I think this could be a better idea for him to direct these films than me. Let's all see what somebody else does with Middle-earth. Let's go in there with another director and another set of lenses and another cameraman, and see what they do with it. I think that's exciting. He's not pretending to be me. People have got to get that into their heads.
Empire: Have you thought about shooting The Hobbit in 3-D?
Del Toro: (Mishearing) CG?
Jackson: No, three dimensions. The funny glasses.
Del Toro: The funny glasses! We haven't had a serious discussion about it yet. It would be premature to say anything either way.
Jackson: I've got a very open mind about The Hobbit in 3-D. I'm never going to force a director to shoot with the technology when they don't necessarily want to. But also, there's something about it being shot on 35mm that makes it feel like these movies, these five movies, are going to look as if they belong...
Del Toro: Together.
Jackson: To suddenly be digital and 3-D for two of them and not the other three is a slightly odd thing. So I'm not spending much energy trying to talk him into anything. Personally, I'm planning on doing 3-D movies - the next live-action film that I make, I definitely want to do in 3-D.
Del Toro: I'm very curious. I love that format. I must say, we have talked a little bit about what to do with it, that it's not just a gimmick. It's too early to say, but if, expressively, it works for the movie, and I feel it needs it, I wouldn't be against the idea.
chris@empiremagazine.com
The first part of The Hobbit is out in December 2011. The second part is out in December 2012
Shore's back too
The Rings composer in back in Middle-earth for the Hobbit - and much more...
Empire: You've been reworking the scores for an orchestra to play live with the movies, most recently The Fellowship Of The Ring at the Royal Albert Hall. What was the origin of that idea?
As I was editing the complete recordings I did over the last three years, I realised I'd not heard this piece played in concert. I had the idea of doing it to a projection of the film since I'd done it before, with Naked Lunch. I then assembled the score and worked with conductor Ludwig Wicki.
Empire: It must be a tricky feat to pull off...
I know from Ludwig that the tricky part is the synchronisation. There's no audio guide for the conductor other thatn the sound of the film, and he does it with visual references with incredible precision. It's an interesting relationship; it's like a heightened reality. Music never sounds better that seen with the imagery from the film. And live music is exciting - you can feel the energy of 220 musicians playing while you're watching this incredible film. It's the best of both worlds.
Empire: Have you started work on The Hobbit?
We've thought about making that film for a long time so it's been in our consciousness. I like to do a lot of reading and research just to mentally put myself into Middle-earth so I can create new music from a sincere part of my being. It's just such a wonderful world to be in, Middle-earth.
Empire: So does this feel like new territory for you?
It will be new territory for Guillermo. I recently met with him in New York. He's a wonderful director. He and Peter have brought in many of the original creators of the Lord of the Rinfs for the Hobbit. The road goes ever on...
Dan Jolin
The Two Towers and the Return of the King will screen at the Royal Albert Hall with The London Philharmonic in 2010.
------------------------------------------------------
That's about it, I guess, typos and all. Bolded parts chosen by me. There's also bits about Howard Shore going back to Middle-earth and Del Toro's Borat bathing suit, but you'll have to zoom in to read those without my help LOL. It's over midnight here and I have to translate some of these ~iconic moments~ for my fellow Finnish fans before I catch some sleep.
These two sound like a really great team, don't they? I have no doubt these movies will be breathtaking and record-breaking just like the LOTR trilogy was.
Source: some Ringer's scanner.
This should now contain everything from the article, except for the texts under the pictures which mostly just repeat things.
--------------------------------------------------
The Two Towers- Empire Magazine June 2009
Peter Jackson. Guillermo del Toro. For the first time, Empire gathers The Hobbit's producer and director together to talk scripts, secrets, Sauron and, er, swimwear...
Words Chris Hewitt Portraits Grant Maiden
Given that one is about to embark on the biggest challenge of his career, and the other is on scripting and producing duties working with Spielberg on the Tintin films, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson appear surprisingly relaxed. On this day in late March in Wellington, New Zealand, sat at the other end of a Skype connection, the pair consider Empire's query as to whether they're still working on the script of their adaptation of The Hobbit.
"Not really. We've been on a beach, relaxing in our bikinis," says Jackson.
"I've got a Borat bathing suit," points out del Toro.
"They think we're working on the script," adds Jackson.
They're joking, of course, but the hard work is yet to begin. Their take on J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, in which the young(er) Bilbo sets off adventuring with Gandalf the GRey and 13 dwarves to raid a dragon's hoard - finding a certain Ring along the way - is still a year off from going before cameras. But that certainly doesn't mean del Toro and Jackson have nothing to talk about...
Empire: Where are you with the script at the moment?
Del Toro: We've been working six, seven hours every day for the last few months, at Peter's house. I raid the pantry!
Jackson: Philippa (Boyens), who co-writes with us, lives next door. She walks across the lawn, looking bleary-eyed, at about 8.30am. Fran (Walsh, Jackson's wife and co-writer) gets herself up, I'm up and Guillermo arrives, then we get going. We usually work through the morning until about 3pm. Either at that point he has to go off to me meetings with Weta, or I fall asleep.
Del Toro: Sometimes both things happen.
Jackson: I just finished six weeks of getting up at five in the morning to go on iChat with Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles while he was doing Tintin on motion capture. But we're done with Tintin now. We're also done, significantly, with the main story outline and the treatment phase of the two Hobbit films. Warner Bros and New Line are in New Zealand now...
Del Toro: Today.
Jackson: Yeah, we presented the pitch to them yesterday morning. We were both nervous as hell, looking like these two naughty schoolboys. We ran through, in great detail, the two films.
Del Toro: Beat by beat.
Jackson: Beat by beat. They were very happy and basically they said to start work on the scripts. We've strictly been doing treatments and story outlines, breakdowns and structural work. So now we've got the okay from the studio to start writing the screenplays, which we'll be doing as of tomorrow, I guess. We've got people standing by to start casting very soon because we're going to start overlapping.
Del Toro: But we haven't just been doing story. When Peter falls asleep, every day I go to Weta where we've been doing research and development of creatures. We have several sculptures Peter and I arm-wrestled for, to see who keeps the maquettes. And other than that, the design team - John Howe and Alan Lee - have been here intermittently. Now they're going to be here very soon - for a long, long time. Mike Mignola is coming, Wayne Barlowe is coming. So we're going to be full force on the design team with about six or seven new artists, starting in a few weeks from now.
Empire: You mentioned casting...
Jackson: Now that the treatments have been confirmed, what that does give us is a pretty accurate cast list. We now know what characters are in which film, and armed with that, we can start some casting. We're going to do location recces because again, the treatments give us info we need for what sort of locations we're looking for. We're going to have that underway shortly. We're basically on target to start shooting March next year.
Empire: Have you decided which actors will return?
Jackson: (To del Toro) I know that you've met with Ian McKellen and I've spoken with him, and obviously he's up for doing it. And Andy (Serkis) I've worked with on Tintin and he's up for it. But nothing's happened. No agents have been spoken to yet. But that will happen soon.
Empire: Have you decided what the second movie will be?
Del Toro: We've decided to have the Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur. Specifically, the two movies will comprise the book.
Jackson: We expanded out the universe a lot more, so that we were't just staying with Bilbo and the dwarves on their journey, as the book pretty much does. We started to expand some of what's happening to Gandalf outside of that journey...
Del Toro: A bit of the backstory...
Jackson: We do cover some of the events earlier, like Thráin, (dwarf king) Thorin's father, and we're sort of fleshing out the Hobbit and expanding it sideways, up and down. We just decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie. The essential brief was to do The Hobbit and it allows us to make the Hobbit in a little more of the style, if you like, of the trilogy, too.
Del Toro: To make a movie of the Hobbit that didn't go over three hours.
Jackson: You would be rushing along...
Del Toro: You would be losing iconic moments. The animated version avoids Beorn, who is a great character, and some people always feel that you should lose the Spiders (of Mirkwood), or this or that. We wanted to keep every iconic moment that was in the book and give it some weight.
Jackson: We've done a lot of things we hope Professor Tolkien would have approved of. We've taken events from the Hobbit and integrated them a little bit more into some of the broader themes that show up in The Lord Of The Rings. But we haven't made The Hobbit any less of a fun, young, fairy-tale adventure mix.
Del Toro: As in the book, the story starts at a more innocent point in Bilbo's life. He goes through darker, stronger stuff in the second part and at the end of the journey he has seen the darker side of the world. I think the whole point of it is his journey, not only to a place, but back again, an how that transforms him. That will stay.
Jackson: The really interesting thing is the fact that Bilbo does get his hands on the Ring (taken during a confrontation with Gollum). In The Hobbit itself, the Ring hasn't really got enough time to become a potent force - nonetheless, it's still part of the internal journey of the character. But on the other side of the Bilbo story is how others come to see him - and how he has to earn respect from the dwarves.
Empire: How are you going to handle the dwarves, many of whom aren't fleshed out in the book?
Del Toro: There is a very specific function that Gimli had in the trilogy. And technically and expressively, the dwarves in The Hobbit serve another. They have to become valiant, brave, sometimes funny - and yes, all of those were in Gimli, but there are moments in which the dwarves have to be tragic, or they have to be incredibly moving. Those dwarves, physically and dramatically, will work like three-dimensional characters that will as soon make you laugh as they will make you fear for their lives, or they will move you. Hopefully to tears, in some instances...
Jackson: We're going to choose five or six, pretty similar to the ones that Tolkien spends a bit more time on in the book, and develop some quite interesting relationships between them and Bilbo. We don't want them to be just Thorin plus 12 comedic sidekicks.
Empire: And how are you dealing with some of The Hobbit's less cinematic moments? The introduction of Bard the Bowman, for example, comes late in the book. Are you working to introduce him earlier?
Jackson: We are doing stuff like that. It's not exactly as you describe, but we are trying to make the book a little less random. There is a little bit of deus ex machina in the kind of event that happen, because Professor Tolkien willed them to happen at that moment. There's not a lot of logic behind some of it. That's what you're dealing with a little bit with The Hobbit, the slightly younger...
Del Toro: ... fairy-tale world...
Jackson: that it was aimed at. The cinema versions of these stories will be reasonable consistent. We try to smooth everything out and structure the films in such a way that nothing is random and nothing comes out of the blue in such a convenient way as it does two or three times during the novel.
Del Toro: Except when, if the idiosyncrasy in the book is a very iconic moment, then we'll do our best to preserve it. We can make that fairy-tale logic work as is.
Empire: Another problem is that Bilbo is largely unconscious during the Battle of Five Armies.
Del Toro: That's one the idiosyncrasies that, from the get-go, I said, "That's one of the ones that we need to keep!" It's so unexpected. I think we're taking small tonal variations that are very beautiful. For example, unlike in the trilogy, where monsters were not often articulate, in The Hobbit, it's part of the book that trolls have very lengthy conversations. There are other idiosyncrasies that would not find themselves at home tonally in the trilogy. But we are moving the notches a little bit.
Jackson: We're developing a lot more character and personality in the villain side of the story, too. We are having to deal with Sauron a little bit more specifically in this; how exactly he manifests himself and what form he's in, and how that is ultimately going to lead into what he becomes in the trilogy - and what he has been in the ancient past. That is something we are absolutely dealing with, much more so than what's in the book. You have to. People will be expecting it. It's before Lord of the Rings, so we're going to learn a bit more about X, Y and Z... We're trying to make sure that we're delivering what they expect, but in a way that's kind of surprising.
Del Toro: The books are so tonally different. The trilogy is this massive, epic, geopolitical cosmology. And the beauty of The Hobbit is that, ultimately, the point of view is a smaller adventure in a very rich world.
Jackson: I forgot to mention that, before we even wrote a single word, when Guillermo first showed up in New Zealand, the very first thing we did was...
Del Toro: I was arrested.
Jackson: Yeah, but we bailed you out. The second thing we did after we got you out on bail was we got 35mm prints of the three Lord of the Rings films, the extended cuts, and we screened them. It was actually the first time that I'd seen them since the day they were released. It was a fun thing to do. I felt overwhelmed, actually, just watching them again because they were just so dense and large and complex.
Del Toro: (Laughs) The first thing I said when we came out was, "Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into?"
Jackson: I know I can be very helpful as a producer because I know more than Guillermo does, and what he's about to go through. And I'm glad he doesn't know. If he did, he wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. He'd be running to the airport!
Del Toro: (Laughs) With a knife in my hands!
Jackson: Do I'm glad he doesn't have a clue!
Empire: So Guillermo... do you have an idea of what you've let yourself in for now?
Del Toro: I think that I have an inkling.
Jackson: (Shaking his head firmly) No.
Del Toro: (Laughs) But the beauty of this is that when Pete called me [in 2007], he and I had not spoken in a couple of years. And out of the blue, I get the call during Christmas. Essentially, the conversation was brief. He said, "We're thinking of you for The Hobbit, what do you think?" I said, "I'll do it." He said, "It's about three years of your life." "I'll do it." "Do you want to talk it over with your family?" "No, I'll do it. I want to do it."
Jackson: I'll be there trying to help. The one thing is, I do know what you'll be going through, wearing your shoes. I'll be looking after your back as much as I can.
Empire: Peter, has watching Guillermo go through this process made you sometimes wish you'd decided to direct these movies?
Jackson: Well, there are moments when I do get a pang of jealousy.
Del Toro: With the maquettes!
Jackson: Although I tell you what, I'm actually enjoying a lot of what I'm doing on this particular project. And I'm committed to trying to have these two films that Guillermo's going to make be better movies than the three movies I made. If it was me making these two, I'd feel that I'd be like, "What did I do last time? How am I going to beat that? Is this going to be different enough?" That, to me, was sort of unsatisfying, and whenever I imagine that, that's the reason I'm not directing these films.
Empire: Can you talk about the visual approach? Will it blend in with the trilogy?
Del Toro: You don't make it a point. I think if you make it a point, you'll be making the biggest mistake of your life.
Jackson: What I think everybody has to get right in their minds is that we're creating a Middle-earth that's pretty much the same as the trilogy's Middle-earth. Hobbiton is going to look like the same place. Hobbits are going to look the same. But it's another guy going in with his own filmmaking style. That's why I think this could be a better idea for him to direct these films than me. Let's all see what somebody else does with Middle-earth. Let's go in there with another director and another set of lenses and another cameraman, and see what they do with it. I think that's exciting. He's not pretending to be me. People have got to get that into their heads.
Empire: Have you thought about shooting The Hobbit in 3-D?
Del Toro: (Mishearing) CG?
Jackson: No, three dimensions. The funny glasses.
Del Toro: The funny glasses! We haven't had a serious discussion about it yet. It would be premature to say anything either way.
Jackson: I've got a very open mind about The Hobbit in 3-D. I'm never going to force a director to shoot with the technology when they don't necessarily want to. But also, there's something about it being shot on 35mm that makes it feel like these movies, these five movies, are going to look as if they belong...
Del Toro: Together.
Jackson: To suddenly be digital and 3-D for two of them and not the other three is a slightly odd thing. So I'm not spending much energy trying to talk him into anything. Personally, I'm planning on doing 3-D movies - the next live-action film that I make, I definitely want to do in 3-D.
Del Toro: I'm very curious. I love that format. I must say, we have talked a little bit about what to do with it, that it's not just a gimmick. It's too early to say, but if, expressively, it works for the movie, and I feel it needs it, I wouldn't be against the idea.
chris@empiremagazine.com
The first part of The Hobbit is out in December 2011. The second part is out in December 2012
Shore's back too
The Rings composer in back in Middle-earth for the Hobbit - and much more...
Empire: You've been reworking the scores for an orchestra to play live with the movies, most recently The Fellowship Of The Ring at the Royal Albert Hall. What was the origin of that idea?
As I was editing the complete recordings I did over the last three years, I realised I'd not heard this piece played in concert. I had the idea of doing it to a projection of the film since I'd done it before, with Naked Lunch. I then assembled the score and worked with conductor Ludwig Wicki.
Empire: It must be a tricky feat to pull off...
I know from Ludwig that the tricky part is the synchronisation. There's no audio guide for the conductor other thatn the sound of the film, and he does it with visual references with incredible precision. It's an interesting relationship; it's like a heightened reality. Music never sounds better that seen with the imagery from the film. And live music is exciting - you can feel the energy of 220 musicians playing while you're watching this incredible film. It's the best of both worlds.
Empire: Have you started work on The Hobbit?
We've thought about making that film for a long time so it's been in our consciousness. I like to do a lot of reading and research just to mentally put myself into Middle-earth so I can create new music from a sincere part of my being. It's just such a wonderful world to be in, Middle-earth.
Empire: So does this feel like new territory for you?
It will be new territory for Guillermo. I recently met with him in New York. He's a wonderful director. He and Peter have brought in many of the original creators of the Lord of the Rinfs for the Hobbit. The road goes ever on...
Dan Jolin
The Two Towers and the Return of the King will screen at the Royal Albert Hall with The London Philharmonic in 2010.
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That's about it, I guess, typos and all. Bolded parts chosen by me. There's also bits about Howard Shore going back to Middle-earth and Del Toro's Borat bathing suit, but you'll have to zoom in to read those without my help LOL. It's over midnight here and I have to translate some of these ~iconic moments~ for my fellow Finnish fans before I catch some sleep.
These two sound like a really great team, don't they? I have no doubt these movies will be breathtaking and record-breaking just like the LOTR trilogy was.