General Hobbit Movie Info (AVOID IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS)

[Elentári]

Hobbit star Persbrandt sentenced in cocaine case

Persbrandt denies buying the drugs or making contact with the taxi driver in question (see January 9th report mentioned in the link) but police have recorded a drug dealer talking about what the film star had bought.

This could potentially affect pick ups/ADR, but since Persbrandt is appealing, then Jackson can probably work round it...

[Elentári]

Great interview with Richard Taylor at HobbitCon...discussing his preference for prosthetics, working with GDT and expectations for the Bo5A.

http://youtu.be/1xlq1UBue-Q

[Voronwë the Faithful]

What does the interview ask at the end there, regarding the BoFA, something about "there will be ... ?"

[Elentári]

"and will there be boars in it, wild boars?"

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Ah, yes, that makes sense. Thanks, Elen!

[Passdagas the Brown]

Richard Taylor is such a wonderfully enthusiastic and nice guy.

[Smaug's voice]

He is.
So much more than the ones in GoT.

[Passdagas the Brown]

The Game of Thrones showrunners are such wonderfully enthusiastic and nice guys.

[Elentári]

Another "Making of the Hobbit Trilogy" videos from IGN...this time

Conquering the Uncanny Valley


ETA: also available on YT http://youtu.be/1LwchUqbuMQ

[Elentári]

Never afraid to say what he really thinks, Viggo Mortensen interview in The Telegraph: Peter Jackson sacrificed subtlety for CGI

As his new film, The Two Faces of January, is released, The Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen looks back on the 'mess' of Middle Earth

Aragorn was a life-changing role for him – the one that made him world-famous, and a bankable star. But he was cast very late, replacing original choice Stuart Townsend, who was fired by an unsatisfied Peter Jackson a day before filming started. Mortensen’s 26-year-old son Henry – from his ex-wife, the American punk rock singer Exene Cervenka – who was a Tolkien fan, egged him on to do it, and even took a couple of uncredited roles on the shoot, turning up as an Orc in The Return of the King. But it took some persuasion. Now, 14 years on, Mortensen has enough distance from the series to admit that the process of making it was more or less complete chaos.

“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”

Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.

“I guess Peter became like Ridley Scott – this one-man industry now, with all these people depending on him,” Mortensen adds. “But you can make a choice, I think. I asked Ridley when I worked with him (on 1997’s GI Jane), 'Why don’t you do another film like The Duellists [Scott’s 1977 debut, from a Joseph Conrad short story]?’ And Peter, I was sure he would do another intimately scaled film like Heavenly Creatures, maybe with this project about New Zealanders in the First World War he wanted to make. But then he did King Kong. And then he did The Lovely Bones – and I thought that would be his smaller movie. But the problem is, he did it on a $90 million budget. That should have been a $15 million movie. The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him. And he’s happy, I think…”

[axordil]

I don't think there's any doubt PJ has always had a kid-in-the-candy store attitude toward filmmaking. He's a geek with, as Orson Welles once described it, the biggest electric train set a boy ever had: a movie studio.

Which makes something like Heavenly Creatures or even Forgotten Silver all the more remarkable.

[Beutlin]

As his new film, The Two Faces of January, is released, The Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen looks back on the 'mess' of Middle Earth.

That sentence is somewhat misleading. Mortensen does not call the films “a mess” in general, nor does he label any of the finished films as such. What he calls a mess are the unfinished versions of TTT and ROTK.

And I agree with Mortensen that “The Fellowship of the Ring” is the best film of the trilogy. And even I, who will fistfight any man who criticizes the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy in my presence, have to admit that “The Return of the King” lacked any subtlety)

And might I say, the comments on "The Telegraph" article are hilarious. On the one hand you have people who call Mortensen a traitor, someone who bites the hand that feeds him. On the other hand you get comments that congratulate Mortensen on calling LOTR garbage. "All he did was say he prefered the first movie over the bigger-scaled later two." Everything else is "Hineininterpretation".

[Voronwë the Faithful]

None of this is big news. Viggo was making comments like this as early as 2004, when everyone else was pimping ROTK for the big Oscar haul.

[Passdagas the Brown]

He speaks sense!

[Elentári]

As his new film, The Two Faces of January, is released, The Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen looks back on the 'mess' of Middle Earth.

That sentence is somewhat misleading. Mortensen does not call the films “a mess” in general, nor does he label any of the finished films as such. What he calls a mess are the unfinished versions of TTT and ROTK.

Quite...that sentence, of course, was the Telegraph's sub-heading, misleading as it is.

None of this is big news. Viggo was making comments like this as early as 2004, when everyone else was pimping ROTK for the big Oscar haul.

Exactly, although to read the outraged comments on another well-known fansite, you'd think he was suddenly a turncoat who has only started slating the movies along with the other "haters" I knew I had seen at least once article from a few years ago where Viggo had made the same sort of comments, and I managed to track it down....

http://www.totalfilm.com/news/viggo-mor ... the-hobbit

Viggo Mortensen talks The Hobbit
"It'll probably be as bewildering as the other three."
BY Chris Hicks Feb 3rd 2009 17:17PMFILED UNDER: Movie news

Lord Of The Rings star Viggo Mortensen has spoken to totalfilm.com about The Hobbit, addressing speculation as to whether he’ll reprise his role as Aragorn.

“I’d rather finish the job myself than have another actor do it,” says Mortensen. “I’m interested in principle, but I’d want to see it done in the right spirit of Tolkien.”

Viggo gave a nod of approval to new director Guillermo del Toro, saying, “He’s strongminded, intelligent and probably just as stubborn [as Jackson].

"I don’t know if it’ll be as big a circus [as the Trilogy] in terms of several people writing changes at the last minute.

“Maybe it’ll be more streamlined and efficient, but to some degree it’ll probably be as bewildering a set-up as the other three.”

Mortensen also claims the original trilogy became more led by effects as the series progressed.

“The Fellowship Of The Ring for me was the one most faithful to Tolkien. The one that had the most to do with any kind of subtlety in terms of performance and storytelling.

“Starting with the second one it became more of a blockbuster special effects thing. That’s not to say as that type of movie they weren’t the best.

"You can’t argue with the films’ success, but had it been me, I would have focused less on the effects and more on the characterisations.

“I’d have allowed the secondary characters to speak more and not be so focused on the heroes. There was more balance in the way that all the races of Middle-earth were presented in the first one. It was more about the relationships… That’s just my personal taste.”

[Beutlin]

Thank you for posting that second interview, Elentári.

A far better article which does not merely serve as click bait.

Reading that interview made me think: Who knows, given Mortensen's wide-ranging artistic endeavors, maybe he is up for the job as a director for the inevitable (yet far-distant) remake? If Clint Eastwood can shoot movies in his 80s, maybe Aragorn can too.

[Dave_LF]

Quite...that sentence, of course, was the Telegraph's sub-heading, misleading as it is.

They would do something like that?!

At least it wasn't the Daily Mail, or we'd be dealing with "the MESS of Middle Earth."

[Smaug's voice]

Nothing related to BoFA but this was posted by a Reporter from MiddleEarthNews:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2 ... _producer/

Also, we all know that you're a part of the hobbit crew. Which do you like more: Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones?

del Toro: I think that I have rarely been as transported in a movie theater as I was when I saw the Fellowship of the Ring unfold on the screen. I consider Peter Jackson one of the most gifted directors ever to tackle the fantasy genre. I believe that Game of Thrones, however, operates at a different level within arguably, the same genre. Game of Thrones has a social and sexual complexity that makes it a very different cutting-edge post-Vietnam Era fantasy story that deals with not only an impending enemy, or the purity of evil, but the relative evil that lurks within the hearts of all mankind. Therefore, tonally, I think that the works of Tolkien provides a completely different experience to Game of Thrones, but they are both masterworks of world creation.

I thought there was a sort of cold war now between del Toro and the rest of the Hobbit crew...

[Alatar]

Seems like a fair comment on DelToro's part. I don't think there's any need to read anything into it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't see anything in that comment at all that relates specifically to the Hobbit adaptation.