Peter Jackson "Winged It" While Filming The Hobbit Trilogy (Updated)

The Hobbit trilogy director Peter Jackson admitted that due to a lack of prep time, he had to kind of make it up as he went while filming The Hobbit trilogy (video below). The main cause was Guillermo del Toro having the leave late in pre-production forcing many of the designs for the film being restarted from scratch while also trying to meet a hard start deadline for filming. As a result everyone in the cast, including Jackson, would have to take each day as it came without the advance (nearly 3 year) prep they had for The Lord of the Ring trilogy. I assume this new info is part of The Appendices that came with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Extended Edition and as another site mentioned, the honestly is rare and refreshing. While some sites have glommed onto this confession to explain why The Hobbit wasn't that good, to me the problem was there simply wasn't enough source material for three films. Without the stretching I suspect most would have found the films to be a perfect companion to LOTR. If anything the confession is a sign of just how fantastic Peter Jackson, WETA and everyone in New Zealand are at their job as even at their "worst" The Hobbit films were better than a mass majority of films released in that 3 year period. Their idea of a "rush" job is better than most directors best efforts with all the prep time in the world.


Update: The mainstream media failing to do their usual jobs of not providing context (cause context would prevent them from making mountains out of molehills) has resulted in Weta and Peter Jackson to release the below statement in response to all the negative headlines based on the snippet of video below. Those few minutes were taken from the four hours of behind the scenes footage in The Appendices (which I highly recommend watching) that would have provided more info not just on the problems they faced but the solutions they devised.

The You Tube clip is a 6min cutdown of a 45min featurette (one of many) from the recent Battle of the Five Armies Extended Cut DVD, entitled “The Gathering Clouds” [sic]. Somebody has decided to create this cutdown using only the sections of “The Gathering Clouds” that discuss the difficulties faced, not the positive ways they were addressed and overcome – which are also covered in this and other featurettes.
Peter has never made a secret of the fact that he took over the Hobbit directing job with very little preparation time remaining before shooting had to begin. It was a challenge he willingly took on. His comments are an honest reflection of his own personal feelings at times during the movie’s production.

However they are not a reflection of either the actual production of these 3 movies – which was very tight, professional, happy, and finished on schedule and budget – nor do they reflect the finished result. Peter is very proud of the 3 Hobbit movies, and actually regards this period as one of his happiest film making experiences – something he has said publicly many times.

Shifting 2 months of shooting from 2012 into 2013 to allow the long and very complex battle sequence to be properly planned and shot, had no impact on the budget or release date. It is exactly what any responsible director should do, given the compressed pre-production time Peter had for these 3 technically difficult movies.

Ever since The Frighteners, Peter has tried to provide fans with honest, detailed, “warts and all” behind the scenes featurettes – compared to the usual bland Hollywood publicity material seen on most other DVDs. It’s a little sad to see desperate media outlets hijack this honesty to feed their ravenous appetite for negative sensationalism.