“People kept misconstruing that it was MGM. It came from many factors,” Guillermo del Toro stressed to the LATimes about his directorial departure on “The Hobbit.” “It wasn’t just MGM. These are very complicated movies, economically and politically. You have to get the blessing from three studios.”
Don’t look for a true answer here why he left. As the LATimes points out, it’s not just one issue, but it sounds like it was a confluence of all the delays, headaches and studio issues that led to some kind of come-to-Jesus decision for the Mexican filmmaker. “It was really the fact that every six months we thought we were beginning, and every six months we got pushed [back]. And before you could blink, it was a year, and then it was two years.”
Del Toro insists that he and Peter Jackson never had creative issues, and at the same time he doesn’t rule out that they could have had differences eventually. But the film never even got that far. “We were at the stage where the collaboration was good. If there were going to be any issues, we never got to that stage [in development],” he said.
Some of the frustrations could have come by watching projects go by the wayside and waiting on “the availability” of actors. “Some of those big deals I’d made, with Disney and Universal, I had to dance really fast to be able to get a period of grace to shoot those Hobbit movies,” he told Deadline in a separate interview also during Comic-Con. “And then be able to make those deals active again. That period came and went, and we were not shooting. That Disney Double Dare You deal is gone. I am developing a relationship with DreamWorks that’s still to be defined, but it’s not as it was going to be at Disney. Disney was a beautiful opportunity, but with the timing and the delays and everything, I couldn’t activate it.”
While del Toro throws no digs, he does sort of send off the Deadline interview with a parting shot.
“I feel the proof is in the pudding. Was it two months ago I left? There have been no new developments. That really is confirmation of the fact that these movies definitely aren’t rushing into production. And that’s the last thing I’m going to say aboutThe Hobbit.”
Read the rest of the interview at the LATimes/Deadline. Both are interesting, but if you’re looking for one element or person to blame, well, you’re not going to find it exactly. It sounds like several factors contributed to it, but perhaps delays were issue number one. Also, file this under rumor, but Stuff New Zealand says they spotted Brad Pitt in Wellington recently. Our Aussie reporter calls them a trusted source, but we all agree he’s been in Oakland/L.A. shooting “Moneyball,” so the chances of him actually being physically halfway across the globe are doubtful. Maybe someone honestly thought they saw him.