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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - Entertainment & Sports - Peter Jackson talks about his many upcoming projects... including ''The Hobbit''? |
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Doppelganger 8DS                   Since: 11-17-05 From: 65 00 20 00 65 00 1F 00 65 00 2F 00 Last post: 6293 days Last view: 6293 days |
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| Action Jackson
The ''Lord of the Rings'' impresario talks about his many upcoming projects... including ''The Hobbit''? by Steve Daly Just as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg morphed into moguls in the late 1970s, New Zealand native Peter Jackson is following the same career path. He's acting as a guiding light on multiple movies he won't actually direct, in hopes of expanding his Wellington-based movie studio into a Down Under powerhouse. Entertainment Weekly has already reported on the news that Jackson might helm a new version of The Hobbit; here's an extended Q&A that fills out the details on everything he's currently up to. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You and your life partner, Fran Walsh, who's also one of your chief collaborators (along with screenwriter Philippa Boyens), disappeared for a while after King Kong opened. PETER JACKSON: We came out of Kong having finished close to 10 years of a relatively stressful lifestyle. Any film is stressful, but Lord of the Rings and Kong were especially big, difficult movies. We wanted to wind things down a little bit. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Are you and Fran capable of vacationing? PETER JACKSON: We're compulsive filmmakers in the sense that once you start doing it, the next idea comes along and you get excited and can't stop yourself. But that's one of the reasons we're producing a number of things now rather than directing. Producing is fun and it's not as all-consuming. It allows us to enjoy the projects without getting beaten up by them quite so badly. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did you get to travel or unwind at all after Kong? PETER JACKSON: Back in May, we did a sort of location trip for The Dam Busters [a new version of the 1954 film about English pilots destroying key German targets in WWII]. The story has been an interest of mine ever since I saw the movie as a kid. We flew to England and visited some Royal Air Force bases and spoke to some of the old pilots. Then we went to Germany and visited the dams they attacked, which are still there. They're repaired now, obviously. We also went to Pennsylvania to have a look around the potential area that The Lovely Bones would take place in, around Norristown. It's great to work on [the script of] a movie and then go visit places the movie takes place in, because you feel like you're stepping into the film, to some degree. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You said a few years back that you had no idea how anyone could make a film out of Lovely Bones, and that's what made you want to tackle it as a director. What solutions have you, Fran, and Philippa come up with in terms of your approach to the script? PETER JACKSON: It's still happening. We've just finished what you could describe as a draft, although it's taken us all year to write. We've banged at the doors of the book, and some doors have opened and some doors haven't. We've circled around it, doing outlines and treatments for various bits. For a while, we didn't have it all joined together. It's been a great process, and a process that's only been possible because we've had the luxury of time. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Is that a conscious strategy, to slow things down a bit in your life? PETER JACKSON: We're not imposing any deadlines on ourselves with all these projects. They'll take as long as they need to until we're happy with them. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You dealt very seriously with two young girls involved in a murder in Heavenly Creatures, and handled the afterlife comedically in The Frighteners. What will the tone be like in Lovely Bones, which involves a 14-year-old girl being murdered, then looking down from heaven? PETER JACKSON: The act of brutality in the book is shocking, but it's brief and momentary. It's obviously not something we're going to dwell on or make explicit. That's just the catalyst. What's great about the book is that so much of it is the reaction, the aftermath. Susie, the victim, doesn't have self-pity. It certainly wouldn't make for an entertaining movie if she felt sorry for herself. This girl has been murdered, but she looks back on it with a degree of irony. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So will some of it actually be funny? PETER JACKSON: I don't think that because you die and move on to somewhere else that you lose your sense of humor. I'm sure humor continues, and that's part of the spirit of the book. It's not a comedy or a black comedy, but it certainly has ironic, humorous observations about death. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Is Dakota Fanning an actress you'd consider to play Susie? PETER JACKSON: We're fans of hers, but we haven't given a great deal of thought to casting. Partly that's because we have to wait until we know the exact [shooting] schedule of the movie. When you're dealing with that age group — kids who are 12, 13, 14 — they grow up so quickly. Dakota is terrific — boy, she can act. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's switch gears to The Hobbit. If you signed on to direct it, you'd be working with New Line again, as well as MGM, yet you're still in the process of suing New Line over profit issues on Lord of the Rings. Doesn't that affect your relationship with New Line overall? PETER JACKSON: No no no, I'd love to make another film for New Line. And certainly The Hobbit isn't involved in the lawsuit. Bilbo Baggins doesn't work for the accounting department of New Line, and I certainly don't hold him to blame for any of our disputes. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did you actually do any preproduction for a potential Hobbit film during LOTR, or would you have to start nearly from scratch? PETER JACKSON: There would be a reasonable amount [still] to do. There are a couple of locations in The Hobbit that are shared with Lord of the Rings. Hobbiton and Bilbo Baggins' house obviously appear, and Rivendell, where the elves were in Fellowship of the Ring, also plays a part. We've still kept the miniatures of Rivendell in storage, and the set of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins' house, has also been saved. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The larger version of the Bag End set — the one big enough to make Elijah Wood look hobbit-size — is on your own property now, isn't it? PETER JACKSON: Oh yeah, it's great. It's the guest house. I guess if we needed it for the movie, we could just go and film in it and it'd be fine. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Are your wheels turning about how you might approach adapting The Hobbit even though the prospect has only just come up? PETER JACKSON: Reading about it on the Net, what interested me is the fact that [MGM is] talking about doing two Hobbit movies, which I thought was a much smarter idea than one. Not just for obvious financial reasons for the studios, but from a storytelling point of view, because one of the drawbacks of The Hobbit is it's relatively lightweight compared to LOTR. I mean, LOTR has this epic, rather complex quality to it, and The Hobbit, which was written some 10 or 12 years earlier by Tolkien as a children's book, is much more juvenile and simplistic. If they're seriously thinking about doing two, it makes it more interesting, because it allows you to expand The Hobbit. There's a lot of sections in which a character like Gandalf disappears for a while. From memory — I mean, I haven't read it for a while now — but I think he references going off to meet with the White Council, who are actually characters like Galadriel and Saruman and people that we see in Lord of the Rings. He mysteriously vanishes for a while and then comes back, but we don't really know what goes on. There's clearly lots of interesting politics happening concurrently with [Bilbo's] story, and doing two movies would allow you to explore a lot of those dark areas. You could make it feel more epic and more politically complicated. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Given how many other projects you've got cooking, how realistic is it for MGM to say they'd love to have you on board — especially since they haven't even actually asked you yet? PETER JACKSON: Dunno. That's what's kind of weird. Nobody's ever spoken to us about The Hobbit, so we've gotten on with things. We've made Kong. We've been buying the rights to different books. And we've been buying the rights with our own money. We haven't had a studio buy them for us, so we've obviously got an investment in that. Plus the fact that, artistically, they're all projects that really interest us. I don't know, it's weird. I mean, the longer [MGM and New Line] leave talking to us, the harder it's going to get to figure out how to do it. We'd obviously try to figure out a way, I guess, but, y'know, there's not much you can do with the sound of silence. The thing with being a filmmaker is that you have to get excited and fall in love with the projects you're working on. Otherwise, you shouldn't be doing them. So we've spent the last three years becoming very invested in the projects that we have on our slate now. We're not invested in The Hobbit in that way because we haven't been given the opportunity. So I don't know, really. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You're in talks to have Weta, your effects company, work on James Cameron's Avatar, a sci-fi epic about an estranged veteran set on another planet. Is it a 3-D movie? PETER JACKSON: As I understand it, it'll be 3-D. Jim is a huge 3-D fan, as am I. I think the new digital 3-D is superb. The depth of field is really nice. And I'm a strong believer in the future of 3-D, in a way that goes way beyond what we've seen today. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: And what's up with Temeraire? What's the appeal of that series of books to you? PETER JACKSON: Dragons are fun! I also think fantasy always works better if you can put a lot of reality into it. Even through LOTR, that's what we tried to do. We tried to make that world feel as historical as possible. This project is great, because it's set during the Napoleonic wars. So we can mine all the great possibilities, the politics and the characters and the visuals of that period. The fantasy is just the icing on the cake. I love doing something that's historical, but you kick it 10 degrees sideways and add a fanastical element. It's a sort of alternate-historical story: What would the Napoleonic wars have been like if there was an air force of dragons? Great stuff. There was an actual British army and navy, but here you've also got the Royal Flying Corps, who fly the dragons. The books are full of strong characters, and there's great conflict because the aviators, the guys that ride on the dragons and control them, are looked down upon. There's this whole class system that goes on. If you're the son of a gent, you go in the navy, but it's much lower-class people that end up being in aviation. The characters in Temeraire have much more to think about than just battles and dragons. All that dressing, that emotional stuff, is what I really like in these stories. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Plus it'd be a great warm-up to figuring out how to do Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit. Do you think MGM or New Line will now actually call you with a concrete plan or offer? PETER JACKSON: I don't know. I'm not that concerned about it, because if they couldn't wait for us and somebody else was going to make The Hobbit, I'd still queue up and see it. Obviously, once a studio decides to make a movie, they're not necessarily going to wait around for a particular director to become free. So I guess I'm either going to get involved making it or I get to go and enjoy the film when it's released. We'll see. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What if you just signed on as an executive producer? PETER JACKSON: Well, that's a possibility. That actually hadn't occurred to me. See, you're thinking of things I haven't even thought of. |
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Kiwisauce Red Goomba   Since: 09-23-06 Last post: 6296 days Last view: 6295 days |
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| That's pretty cool that they're making a new "The Hobbit" movie. The only "The Hobbit" movies I've seen have all been animations. It would fit nicely into a LOTR movie collection. | |||
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Thoughtless [Danielle] Thoughtless is my secret lover [Danielle] *flutters eyelashes* [Thoughtless] SECRET IS OUT I miss my two pussies :( (Part II)  Since: 11-17-05 From: PR Last post: 6294 days Last view: 6293 days |
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| The Hobbit needs to be made. I lean toward it being broken into two movies. But if it can be done in one go, then even better.
There is a bit of material to work with and I would love to see Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies done right and not rushed. |
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