Peter Jackson Admits To Winging It On Hobbit Trilogy

Recounting the 21-hour days during crunch time, Jackson also touched upon the tentative nature of the script, in what quickly became a high pressure situation.

“You’ve got nothing to go on, no storyboards, no prereels, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes and you’re just making it up there and then on the spot”.

“As a result of it being impossible, I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepared at all”. So I was pretty surprised when Jackson took over from Guillermo del Toro to make the Hobbit trilogy, and the first film turned out to be such a boring mess.

The six-minute video shows pictures of him sitting alone on the set looking deep in thought and exhausted.

“If I was a director that hadn’t had that 25 years of experience doing this in the past, it would have just been nearly impossible”, Jackson says.

Filming on the key battle seen in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies began in 2012 with no real direction, with Andy Serkis saying the crew was simply “banking” footage of elves and orcs fighting. Jackson explains he “winged it” right up until the film’s climactic battle but was eventually forced to concede that production would have to be called to a halt while he worked out how to shoot it.

Warner Bros. may have attracted the ire of ardent supporters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings franchise when it opted to split the author’s prequel novel The Hobbit across three separate films.

“I couldn’t wing that, really, I did need to know what the hell I was doing and have a plan”, said the award-winning director. But, it seems Jackson had no choice with the studio not allowing them to delay production any longer.

While Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy scored close to $3bn worldwide, it was not a critical hit on the scale of its predecessor. The only issue that’s not discussed is the decision to stretch the series from two movies to three, when probably one tight film would have sufficed.

“What that delay, what any delay gives you, is it gives a director time to clear his head and have a few quiet time to sit and wait for those bits of inspiration to come about the battle you’ve got coming up and start to really put something together”, Jackson says.