PJ admits he's not actually making The Hobbit

Die Geek Show Show wrote:Interviewer: As a fan I'm looking back to the background, and 15 years ago you said in an interview with Ain't It Cool News, perhaps you remember it, that it would be pretty hard to make a movie out of The Hobbit, or a satisfying movie.  What changed?

Peter Jackson: Well I mean, I always thought that The Hobbit was written in such a particular style, that Tolkien wrote it like a children's bedside story, that it was always going to be very difficult to adapt because it's just such a different … it's connected to The Lord of the Rings, but it's such a different sort of way of telling a story.  And it always made me nervous, it really made me kind of unsure of how to do it.  And it wasn't really until I started to work on it myself and started to really think about it, and really what ultimately changed things was saying rather than adapting just The Hobbit as the 1936 [sic] novel, we would be taking the Appendices and notes that Tolkien wrote much later on where he was connecting The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and to treat these as three movies that are basically going to lead into the three Lord of the Rings films.  Because that was really the point, that's what I am doing and that's the reason why I'm doing it really, is to say okay, well after these next couple of years we're not going to be releasing one of these movies each year anymore, what's going to be the case from that point on for decades to come, hopefully for decades, is gonna be six movies that have an overriding sort of an arc.  So it was connecting it to The Lord of the Rings and saying we're going to tell it not in the style of Tolkien with the bedtime story, we're going to actually tell it as the filmmakers who did The Lord of the Rings.  So we're coming at it from a different direction for sure.

Peter Jackson wrote:[R]ather than adapting just The Hobbit as the 1936 [sic] novel, we would be taking the Appendices and notes that Tolkien wrote much later on where he was connecting The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and to treat these as three movies that are basically going to lead into the three Lord of the Rings films.  Because that was really the point, that's what I am doing and that's the reason why I'm doing it really, is to [make a series that is] six movies that have an overriding sort of an arc

Tinuviel wrote:Hence why he should NOT have made these movies. Produce it? Sure. But he should have hired a brand new team of writers and directors that actually felt like they could adapt the children's story as is. It all comes down to ego and pride.

bungobaggins wrote:Right from the horse's mouth. It's like someone slipped him a truth serum!

Hmmmmmm, I wonder if this is being discussed on torn at all...

Eldorion wrote:

bungobaggins wrote:Right from the horse's mouth. It's like someone slipped him a truth serum!

Hmmmmmm, I wonder if this is being discussed on torn at all...

Someone posted the interview on TORn and I pointed out the significance of PJ's one statement, but it hasn't sparked any discussion.

Forest Shepherd wrote:I take quiet satisfaction that, no matter what the casual observer may believe, the phrase "PJ and Co." actually stands for "Peter Jackson and Coven."

Edit: unless it never was meant to be PJ and Company, in which case the jokes on me big time.

Tinuviel wrote:I've changed my avatar in order to display the amount of done-ness I feel for these people. It's just not right what they've done to something that is classic literature.

Eldorion wrote:Just a reminder, I called this in February 2009 ... and was roundly flamed for it.

http://eldorion.com/tolkienpurism/hobbitchanges/prediction/.