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The Hobbit - Casting, Pre-production, Post-production News And Discussion

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K

krypt0nian

Banned
Jed Brophy is making his house payments in the LotR films.

JedBrophy.jpg


Hobbit is the hat trick. :lol
 
W

WyndhamPrice

Member
Helmholtz said:
Wait so, the movie will have Frodo sort of narrating Bilbo's story? I'm not very familiar with the books.
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Something like that. It may be Frodo reading the Red Book of the Westmarch (the one Bilbo was writing and Frodo finished in ROTK) to himself, or to someone, or having it be read to him by an older Bilbo (Ian Holm cameo too?). It'll just be a framing device if anything, because there's absolutely no feasible way for him to interact with the main plot.
 
L

Loxley

Member
I like this idea a lot actually. From a cinematic standpoint I think it's a smart way for Jackson to tie The Hobbit into the LotR trilogy without completely breaking the story. It also allows the film to explain outright and in the simplest terms to the audience that this takes place before the events of Fellowship.

However, I of course would not mind another Cate Blanchett-infused opening narration :D
 
P

POWERSPHERE

Banned
Major Williams said:
Think about the main theme with french horns - only strings in the background mimic what the french horns are doing.

It's like he played the theme with one hand on his piano and was like 'Fuck it, let's roll with it' and orchestrated the same exact thing for french horns and strings. No accompanying percussion, no background harmonics/alternate themes to go with it. Through the entire trilogy.

A theme, explored properly (throughout 3 movies no less) should go through multiple iterations and be fully explored to the full extent of emotion that can be extracted from it. It sounds the same throughout the entire trilogy.

We are going to suffer through empty music thinly veiled by big brass, maybe a little girl singing, and thin string movements. Trailer music will be done by someone else and make everyone want to see it, but the film's score itself will fall flat.
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I think Someones a bit jelly welly that his dream job isn't his.
 
G

GarthVaderUK

Banned
'The Hobbit' scoop: Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis on board

Fear not, Hobbit-watchers: The band is getting back together. On the heels of Friday’s announcement that Elijah Wood will play Frodo Baggins in director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, EW has confirmed that Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis will each reprise their roles from the Lord of the Rings films as, respectively, the wizard Gandalf the Grey and the creature Gollum. Both actors had long been assumed by fans to be on board the production, though the unexplained delay in their official casting created some doubts. Both characters are critically important to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit tale; Gandalf recruits the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) to join a quest to reclaim a dragon’s treasure, and Gollum possesses a powerful ring that comes to play a central role in both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/10/the-hobbit-scoop-ian-mckellan-and-andy-serkis-on-board/

Hurrah!
 
D

Dolla Dolla

Member
So awesome.

Will be interesting if they do something similar to the cartoon version of Return of the King, where Bilbo inquires how Frodo lost his ring finger, and then the story is told.
 
W

WyndhamPrice

Member
I somehow knew that Serkis and McKellan would be the last major players to be announced. Glad to see they're officially back.

Shooting starts on February 14th! So excited.
 
F

Fix The Scientist

Member
There was a lot of cool shit going down during The Hobbit that Tolkien never mentioned until later works, it looks like they are going to include most of it which is just so fucking awesome. Gollum and Aragorn even have a backstory but i doubt we'll see that because it doesnt fit the timeline.

Potential spoiler i guess:
Gandalf sneaking through the forest into Dol Guldur to identify the Necromancer is what i'm looking forward to most, that sequence is going to blow my mind. Maybe we'll even get to see Sauron in a physical form?
What further excites me about these non-hobbit events is that they werent written in as much detail as the other books, so PJ can take a bit of artistic license and create something that will melt my face.
 
L

Link Man

Banned
Fix The Scientist said:
There was a lot of cool shit going down during The Hobbit that Tolkien never mentioned until later works, it looks like they are going to include most of it which is just so fucking awesome. Gollum and Aragorn even have a backstory but i doubt we'll see that because it doesnt fit the timeline.

Potential spoiler i guess:
Gandalf sneaking through the forest into Dol Guldur to identify the Necromancer is what i'm looking forward to most, that sequence is going to blow my mind. Maybe we'll even get to see Sauron in a physical form?
What further excites me about these non-hobbit events is that they werent written in as much detail as the other books, so PJ can take a bit of artistic license and create something that will melt my face.
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Pretty sure that Sauron can't take a physical form without the Ring. It's something of a major plot point.
 
R

richiek

steals Justin Bieber DVDs
Link Man said:
Pretty sure that Sauron can't take a physical form without the Ring. It's something of a major plot point.
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In Return of the King, Sauron was supposed to take physical form to fight Aragorn at the end of the film. He was replaced by a troll.
 
P

PhoncipleBone

Banned
richiek said:
In Return of the King, Sauron was supposed to take physical form to fight Aragorn at the end of the film. He was replaced by a troll.
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And thank god too. It was nice seeing the original concept and footage in the documentaries on the EE.
 
W

WyndhamPrice

Member
richiek said:
In Return of the King, Sauron was supposed to take physical form to fight Aragorn at the end of the film. He was replaced by a troll.
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Sauron not being able to take physical form is an interpretation of Jackson, like the literal use of a giant glowing eye. Gollum mentions seeing Sauron when he was captured in Mordor (making note of a 4 fingered hand), and Tolkien's letters pretty explicitly state that he had managed to manifest himself as a humanish being after 1000 years or so. He would just be much weaker without the ring.
 
Hari Seldon

Hari Seldon

Member
Dabookerman said:
Yes it does. And yours is thankfully in the smallest minorities conceivable. In fact I don't recall anyone ever complaining.

If Shore didn't do it.. There would be complete and utter uproar.
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Actually I agree with him, Shore's main theme for LoTR was weak. The music being played during the battle speech of Aragon was especially terrible and partly ruined that scene for me. However some of the other stuff was decent, like the Lothlorien music.
 
Monocle

Monocle

Member
Talk about movies of the forever. I hope production goes smoothly. I'd hardly be able to bear it if this project fell apart somehow.
 
C

Cheerilee

Member
Lionel Mandrake said:
Peter Jackson undergoes emergency surgery. Expected to make a full recovery.

Hope he's back on his feet soon.
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Jackson was admitted to Wellington Hospital late last night with acute stomach pains.

A statement issued by his production company said he underwent surgery for a perforated stomach ulcer.
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More proof that Fat Peter Jackson was inherently superior to Skinny Peter Jackson. Next thing you know, we're going to hear about Skinny Peter Jackson allowing himself to die (in 60-70 years). Unacceptable!

Get well soon, awesome guy who probably isn't reading this!
 
D

Dead

well not really...yet
Apparently Saorsie Ronan (Susie from Lovely Bones) is in the movie as well? From an interview with the casting director

http://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4283633&tpl=archnews&force=1

FTN: I wondered if there was any coincidence between the large Irish presence (Aidan Turner, James Nesbitt and Saoirse Ronan) in the film and the fact that it was you guys casting . . .

Ros Hubbard: Yes, there was quite a lot of influence there! We had been wanting to to put Aidan Turner into film for a long time because he had done an awful lot of TV and we told him when we finally met him “We are going to concentrate in getting you into the movies.” I didn’t think it would be as big as this. But how great for him.

And Jimmy is thrilled to bits, his whole family have gone out, it is just wonderful. And working with Peter Jackson is like working with a family. So they’ll have a great time. Saoirse’s family will go too, everyone is very close and very loving on those sorts of jobs. It’s not like typical studio movies at all.
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B

BobTheFork

Member
I had not checked on this again since they decided the location. I also didn't know Martin Freeman was Bilbo. It's like a dream casting for me, I absolutely love the guy. Christopher Lee coming back just makes it that much better.
 
D

Dead

well not really...yet
Huge New Yorker interview with Del Toro, mostly about his career and Mountains of Madness, but a lot of talk about The Hobbit as well

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_zalewski?currentPage=all

I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. “That’s Smaug,” del Toro said. It was an overhead view: “See, he’s like a flying axe.” Del Toro thinks that monsters should appear transformed when viewed from a fresh angle, lest the audience lose a sense of awe. Defining silhouettes is the first step in good monster design, he said.
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Del Toro’s production design for “The Hobbit” seemed similarly intent on avoiding things that viewers had seen before. Whereas Jackson’s compositions had been framed by the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital “sky replacement,” for a more “painterly effect.” Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the “drawings in Tolkien’s book.” In his journal, I spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation. “Hellboy,” he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. “I am Hellboy,” he said.
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He was adamant that he had left “The Hobbit” of his own accord, but his language seemed careful. “The visual aspect was under my control,” he said. “There was no interference with that creation.” In collaboration with Jackson and two screenwriters, del Toro had completed drafts for Parts 1 and 2. But final revisions were still to come, and he noted that any “strong disagreements” between him and Jackson would have occurred when they debated which scenes to film and which to cut—“You know, ‘I want to keep this.’ ‘I want to keep that.’ ” But, he said, he had quit “before that impasse.” I asked him if there had been creative tension. At Weta, he said, the production delay had made everyone anxious, and he “could not distinguish between a real tension and an artificial tension.”
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He admitted that there had been discomfort over his design of Smaug. “I know this was not something that was popular,” he said. He said that he had come up with several audacious innovations—“Eight hundred years of designing dragons, going back to China, and no one has done it!”—but added that he couldn’t discuss them, because the design was not his intellectual property. “I have never operated with that much secrecy,” he said of his time at Weta.
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etc, etc
 
G

GDJustin

stuck my tongue deep inside Atlus' cookies
I don't know whether the $500 mil budget makes me MORE excited or LESS excited for The Hobbit. On the one hand, I'm very much in the camp that The Hobbit should be a smaller movie. It has epic moments, for sure, but at its core it is a road movie. At its core, it is like FOTR (The best of the three LOTR movies).

But on the other hand, I am of the opinion that PJ should be given any amount of money he wants for these two movies.
 
W

WyndhamPrice

Member
GDJustin said:
I don't know whether the $500 mil budget makes me MORE excited or LESS excited for The Hobbit. On the one hand, I'm very much in the camp that The Hobbit should be a smaller movie. It has epic moments, for sure, but at its core it is a road movie. At its core, it is like FOTR (The best of the three LOTR movies).

But on the other hand, I am of the opinion that PJ should be given any amount of money he wants for these two movies.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the first part alone will make probably almost twice the budget (with part 2 making a billion easily, especially with 3D prices to account for). It's a no-brainer investment and if anyone knows how to make good use of a budget it's Peter Jackson and WETA (Lovely Bones was a fluke, I tell you!). I expect magnificent art direction and painstakingly designed physical props and locations. It's going to be gorgeous.
 
RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
This is turning out great! All of the important actors returning, wonderful! Jackson directing, awesome! I very much prefer it to be him, since I want the whole series to feel like a coherent story that takes place in the same universe. Sounds like del Toro would have changed the visual style of the movies quite a bit from LotR, and I honestly don't want that happening. It would have made the Hobbit movies feel like a seperate entity from the LotR trilogy, and I just don't like that idea. They are part of the same larger story in the books, and they should feel like they are on the big screen as well.
 
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