At 5:32 EST, ComicCon in San Diego as portions of last December’s trailer were shown. I’m paraphrasing much of the 3-minute 
discussion with Geoff Keighley because Andy talks VERY fast when he’s excited; but the meat of the interview is here.
The cast will be in Hall H tomorrow (Saturday) to premier some new footage, and Andy’s VERY jazzed! They talked about how much the technology for Gollum has changed.
The technology, I’m sure, has advanced a lot from when you first did Gollum. How is the performance different for you and is the character going to be different in this?
The performance has changed only in the sense that we didn’t have to repeat everything for the second time with motion capture. Now you can shoot performance capture with live action all in the same get… and so all the interactivity is real. You don’t have to repeat anything. The piece is completely whole when you shoot the scene. The character… Gollum as we know him…he’s a little bit hotter, and looks a bit cooler… he’s 600 years old; but in this he’s 540 years old…
He’s a somewhat smaller role here compared to “The Lord of the Rings”.
It’s a seminal kind of [situation]. Peoples’ images of Gollum really are about this scene in The Hobbit. That’s where they draw all the visions of Gollum that come from Riddles in the Dark passage in the book.
When we shot the scene we shot it in its entirety; so that every time we did it, we shot the scene from beginning to end. It’s about a 13-minute scene. We just played it all the way through. It was a really cool way of shooting it.
How did it feel to get back into the voice? I’m sure you do it for fans all the time, right?
He’s really never left me. I had to hold back leading up to The Hobbit. I gotta find him again. It was really weird. I was almost doing an impersonation of myself… but it came flying back in.
Regarding his becoming 2nd Unit Director: I didn’t know I was even going to do it until about 4 weeks before we started the shoot piece. [From Peter] “I really would love you to come down and do it because we’re going to be sharing a lot…the principal cast is going to become second unit. I want someone who can take care of performance…” It was a huge learning curve…
What are you guys showing the fans tomorrow (Saturday, July 14)?
It’s kind of vignettes of various different scenes from the first movie and then kind of focusing in on the characters… introducing you to all the Dwarf characters. It’s about 8 ½ minutes introducing the characters.
