The “impossible” movie Peter Jackson admits he “winged”
It’s fair to say that throughout his career, Peter Jackson has delivered some of the most impressive cinematic productions in contemporary film history. His commitment to authentic historical storytelling is proven ten times over in the likes of They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles: Get Back, while fictional movies like King Kong also simmers with high production value.
One cannot talk of Jackson, of course, without mentioning his legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy of the early 2000s. The iconic film adaptation of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien possesses some of the most breathtaking feats of movie production ever conjured, proving the fearless quality Jackson himself has as a cinematic voyeur.
However, by the time Jackson came to make the first film in his The Hobbit trilogy, the pre-production had not gone down how he would have liked. Initially, Jackson was only set to write and produce a two-part version of Tolkien’s novel, and Guillermo del Toro was set to be the director.
After two years in production, though, del Toro left The Hobbit because of financial issues at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Later that year, Jackson was announced to be stepping into the director role, with the New Zealand filmmaker planning to shoot each of the movies back-to-back, just as he had with The Lord of the Rings.
Given del Toro’s departure, Jackson felt rushed when it came to making The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and once told The Guardian that he “winged” the entire ordeal. “Because Guillermo del Toro had to leave and I jumped in and took over, we didn’t wind the clock back a year and a half and give me a year and a half prep to design the movie, which was different to what he was doing,” he said.
The result was that the making of the film felt “impossible” to Jackson, but rather than back down from the challenge, he “just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all.” The Hobbit, like The Lord of the Rings, was an incredibly difficult shoot with complicated scenes, and since Jackson had no storyboard to work off, he had to make things up as he went along.
The director admitted that he “spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it”. The scripts from Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens were also said to be lacking in terms of their actual completion, which led to a “very high-pressure situation.” In that light, it’s something of a miracle that the first The Hobbit movie got made at all.
The Desolation of Smaug came the following year with The Battle of the Five Armies, originally set to arrive just a short while later. However, eventually, Jackson took the decision to push back the final movie in the trilogy by five months, which would allow him to really consider how to finish off the adaptation in style.
“What that delay gives you is time for the director to clear his head and have some quiet time for inspiration to come about the battle and start to really put something together,” Jackson noted. He had reportedly told the producers of the movie that he didn’t “know what the hell” he was doing, and thankfully, they understood his predicament and gave him the time he needed to finish the job properly.
