While at Comic-Con promoting Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” which he produces, Peter Jackson has discussed at lengths his heavy upcoming slate of film releases.
“The Hobbit” in script form seems to be just about ready. “We’re about three weeks from turning over the script for the first Hobbit movie to the studio. We wrote a treatment for the two films which we pitched to the studio.”
“We included all the events that we’d like to see, plus the fact that we wanted to embellish a few things and put a couple extra narratives in for Gandalf and the Necromancer. So we decided that the two movies should be The Hobbit, Part One and Part Two.”
Jackson also says that the adaptation will be “keeping all 13 Dwarves” but that “they’re going to pick four or five [of them] to make leads and keep everyone else in the background.”
On his and Steven Spielberg’s proposed “Tintin” trilogy: “Steven Spielberg has just finished his first cut. I’m actually going to see it when I get home. He did the motion capture for that and directed it, which he was doing for six weeks. Then it comes down to New Zealand, to WETA, because our company is doing the shots. So Steven and I are collaborating on the production of the film and I’m going to keep an eye on the effects shots.
“For the second film, I’m keeping my options open at the moment, but I am very partial to the Seven Crystal Balls [storyline]. I’m going to read them all again. I’ve read them about three times in the past two years, so I’ll do it again and see which one…”
On his adaptation of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” due out December 14th: “It was a very, very difficult book to adapt. It doesn’t lend itself to a film structure. We haven’t slavishly followed the book. There are big sections of the book that we didn’t use; we elaborated on other bits. It’s certainly a personal adaptation rather than a copy.”
On “Dambusters,” the Stephen Fry scribed film he is producing: “One of things I’m thinking of is possibly shooting Dambusters in 3-D. I wanted to get my head around the technology, so we got the equipment and shot some material to see how it looked.” [IGN]