We were lucky enough to hang out with Director Peter Jackson, Screenwriter Phillipa Boyens, and the stars of The Hobbit (Andy Serkis, Sir Ian McKellan, Martin Freeman, and Richard Armitage) after their victorious conquering of Comic-Con 2012. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, opening December 14, 2012 takes place 60-some years earlier than the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy that Jackson brought to the world nearly 10 years ago.
Check the teaser trailer and see if you don’t get goosebumps:
The film promises to bring fans back to a familiar faces and Jackson’s epic visual style. The last 10 years have seen some huge advances in the art of filmmaking, something not lost on Director Peter Jackson, who has shot The Hobbit in 3D and 48 frames per second. “48 frames a second is way better for 3D I’ll tell you now … 48 fps takes away the artifacts that we’re used to seeing in cinema and I think that’s what people are going to have to get used to. I find you get used to it pretty quickly when you sit and watch. We’re used to strobing, we’re used to seeing a panning shot which is like a series of still frames that shudders its way along. You don’t get that at 48 frames. Yet it doesn’t impede our ability to color time, to put a creative grade on the movie. Everything is the same as it normally is. The fact that you don’t have so much motion blur makes also makes it feel quite sharp.”
Sir Ian McKellan cuts to the chase: “I think people who say, “Oh, we don’t need 3D, we’re used to 2D.” Bollocks. 3D is life. We’re in 3D now. The brilliance about Peter’s 3D is it doesn’t come out at you. You go into it. You enter the globe. You look around a corner. You’re even deeper in until you find a way out.”
McKellan on Returning to Gandalf
“People shouldn’t expect to see a different sort of Gandalf. As for being 60 years younger because the story takes place sixty years before, when you’re 7000 years old, 60 years doesn’t make much difference. When you go back and do this movie, it’s not just the people here. It’s all the people behind the camera and they were the same. I thinke very head of department was as we’d left them on Lord of the Rings so it was back with old friends. In fact The new side of it was the actors, all the dwarves for example and this particular Bilbo. Everyone fit in very well.”
Ready for a Lord of the Rings Marathon?
Peter Jackson: “To be quite honest I want to make a series of movies that run together so if any crazy lunatic wants to watch them all in a row, there will be a consistency of tone. I don’t want to make a purely children’s story followed by The Lord of the Rings, so we are providing a balance. A lot of the comedy and the charm and the fairy tale quality of The Hobbit comes from the characters. You are dealing with Bilbo Baggins who is a little more reluctant possibly to go on the adventure than Frodo was. Your’e dealing with dwarves who have a personality and camaraderie all on their own, so there’s a lot of humor and a light touch to be gained from those characters but there’s still some serious things involved. Hopefully The Hobbits films will comfortably straddle both worlds.”
We’ll have more on our chat with the filmmakers and talent later this summer. Add to your WATCHList to track The Hobbit!
