The Hobbit started out as a promising project. Guillermo del Toro was going to direct it, Peter Jackson was around to produce, Weta was going to do the special effects. It was all so exciting. And then del Toro left the project and Jackson stepped in to direct, turning it into a new trilogy. That’s the exact moment it all fell apart, according to Peter Jackson and other folks involved with the movie.
In a new behind-the-scenes featurette posted on YouTube, likely ripped off of the Blu Ray, we get a whole bunch of the crew from the movies talking about how it was a chaotic trilogy of movies to make. When Jackson took over, they were barreling toward a release date and didn’t have time to re-organize the movie. They had to start all over again, but they didn’t have enough time to do so. The scripts weren’t ready, the previz wasn’t ready, the storyboards weren’t ready.
Jackson says it himself, he was just making it up as he went along. This makes a ton of sense, because lots of The Hobbit feels like someone just smashing things together. In the latter two movies, almost nothing works. They just didn’t have the time to come up with big practical sets, so time to throw down all those CG backgrounds. They couldn’t hire and train thousands of extras like they did last time, so just copy and paste CGI extras.
This is a damn shame. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened had Jackson and his crew actually had time to make his Hobbit movies. I would have to guess that they’d be similar in tone to the latter two movies, the first movie’s lighter tone feels like something Guillermo del Toro would do.
Either way, this is how important pre-production is on a movie. Your creatives need time to work out how the movie will work, they need time to create a script they’re happy with, previz they can shoot, storyboards that make sense and much, much more. [via Reddit]
