Peter Jackson Took his Time to Answer our ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ Question

I was invited to attend ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ press conference inside the Beverly Hilton Hotel a couple of weeks ago (the sequel hits theaters December 13).

Peter Jackson and part of his the mega cast gave us, lucky reporters, a set of very entertaining and interesting answers. The director seemed particularly interested in the subject I brought up: How the decision of making a trilogy instead of just two films affected this chapter?

Good morning. Mr. Jackson, about making three movies instead of two. Did that allow you to make the second chapter so much action-packed and what character benefited the most from that decision?

Peter Jackson: It’s an interesting question. I don’t think any character really benefited from that decision. [Evangeline Lilly points at herself and silently gesticulates “Me. Me!” behind Jackson’s back] It was like we, I mean, we didn’t really change a lot. We made that decision after we had shot… we made the decision to…I mean after we had shot most of the film, I mean it was a decision based on what we had shot and we just thought you know what we’re going to have to somehow cut a lot of this stuff out and we can reshape it and then we did some more shooting.

We did ten weeks of shooting this year as well – pickup shooting for the second and third film. Look, what it does is it allows you to let the characters drive the story because in a novel, you know, the writer of the novel is the … you’re often the person who writes the story, who kind of takes you on the journey and Tolkien’s voice is obviously fantastic at doing that. You feel like he’s right beside you telling you a bedtime story, but in the movie, you don’t want me on screen talking about what’s happening, so in a film, you know, the discipline on the film is you have to have the story told through the dialogue of the characters, through the actions.

Benedict Cumberbatch: I do want you on screen telling a story.

Jackson: We’ll just do that privately Benedict back in your hotel room. Don’t worry. I’ll read you a bedtime story. But you know you want your narrative of the film to be told through either the dialog that your characters are saying or the actions that they do. That’s really why we ended up wanting to give it the sort of the depth and the characters and explore some of the character depth that we had done on The Lord of the Rings. I was also acutely aware that, you know, there is going to be ultimately when the cycle of releasing a movie each year is done, you know, you’re going to end up with six films – the Unexpected Journey being the beginning and The Return of the King being the end and I did want to have a unity – I didn’t want to make The Hobbit feel anymore simple. We just wanted it to feel like it was the same filmmakers.

Evangeline Lilly: And in the end, Peter, and Fran and Phil brilliantly I hope I can give this away – brilliantly tied the last Hobbit film to the first Lord of the Rings film through the one character who could do that which is Legolas.

Jackson: Well, that’s a good point because people always ask about Evangeline’s character Tauriel and why we felt the need to create her. You know in The Hobbit novel, they are captured by the elves and they escape in the barrels and it’s a memorable part of the book but you — actually the elf king is not even named — he doesn’t have a name and it was only later on that Tolkien decided he should be Thranduil and then he also decided that he had a son when Lord of the Rings was written, you know, 18, 19 years later, he created the character of the son of the king.

So, you know, you’ve got material there, but you can’t — I mean you can’t have a scene in a film that’s a memorable scene and not have just one person as the elf. I mean, we wanted like, you know, three elven characters who were all different. I mean, that’s the thing too is to create characters that have conflict with each other and they have different agendas.

Thranduil, Legolas and Tauriel are all on different flight paths which makes for much more interesting ability for Philippa, Fran, and I to sort of write the narratives through their eyes. So that was it, yeah. Sorry, I rambled.

“From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson comes “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” the second in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The three films tell a continuous story set in Middle-earth 60 years before “The Lord of the Rings,” which Jackson and his filmmaking team brought to the big screen in the blockbuster trilogy that culminated with the Oscar®-winning “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” continues the adventure of the title character Bilbo Baggins as he journeys with the Wizard Gandalf and thirteen Dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield, on an epic quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain and the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor.”

‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ is in 3D and 2D in select theaters and IMAX on December 13.