Jackson took over directing duties in 2010 following the departure of Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, and according to his comments in the new video had nearly no time at all to prepare his vision before shooting began and he found himself plunged into 21-hour days.
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Jackson said he “didn’t know what the hell he was doing”, resorting to winging it with no storyboards and making it up on the spot as he went.
Because the studio couldn’t provide him an extra “year and a half prep to design the movie” Jackson said preparing “was impossible, and as a result of it being impossible I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all”. Where “The Lord Of The Rings” films took you boldly into a richly realized world, “The Hobbit” felt unnecessarily bloated, laden with heavy VFX where you could feel every pixel, and told a story stretched to the point where you could easily read the original novella once if not twice, before you finished watching the three movies.
A still from the new video shows an apparently exhausted Sir Peter Jackson on set. As a matter of fact, in a refreshingly frank piece included on the Battle of the Five Armies DVD, the director admitted that he was, and we quote, “making it up as we go along”.
“I was able to wing it, right up until the point that I had to start shooting this very intricate battle, and I couldn’t wing it on that, really”, he continues, discussing the decision to postpone the sequence. “Simply because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing”, Peter said, rather bluntly.
Though many Tolkien fans still enjoyed them, plenty of audiences found Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies to be slow-moving slogs with hours of walking and too much garish CGI. Jackson eventually asked the Warner Bros. for permission to wrap production early and to revisit the battle scene later, allowing him to formulate his thoughts and come up with a plan for the trilogy’s epic conclusion.
When the time came to shoot the actual battle from The Battle of the Five Armies, Jackson decided he could no longer improvise.
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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Extended Edition is released in the United Kingdom on 23rd November.
