Seventeen years have passed since Peter Jackson approached Miramax about bringing one of his favorite JRR Tolkien tales The Hobbit to the big screen.
Speaking to the Dominion Post‘s Lenna Tailor Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens speculate that the delay, during which they went on to shoot three wildly successful movies based on Tolkien Lord of the Rings, might have been for the best.
Jackson: “I remember in 1995 I made the first call to [Miramax’s] Harvey Weinstein and said we were interested in doing The Hobbit. The idea was, if it was successful, we would do Lord of the Rings. But Harvey said the rights were in a very complicated state — however, Lord of the Rings was potentially available. It’s strange how that call 17 years ago was the beginning of this whole process.”
“It was fate that we did Lord of the Rings first because it has made for a better Hobbit,” adds writer-producer Philippa Boyens. “It would’ve been a very different film if we’d gone the other way around. Maybe fate was also waiting for Martin [Freeman] to play Bilbo at exactly the right time and age.”
[More]
Posted in:
Share:
At the end of the second week in September a cart came in through Bywater from the direction of Brandywine Bridge in broad daylight. An old man was driving it all alone. He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat. Small hobbit-children ran after the cart all through Hobbiton and right up the hill. It had a cargo of fireworks, as they rightly guessed. — From A Long-Expected Party, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
In Peter Jackson’s LOTR film, the first moment of Gandalf arriving in Hobbiton and finding Frodo waiting on the trail were critical because it established two essential characters and the setting of Hobbiton. It also introduced audiences to the scale of Hobbits with human-sized characters including forced perspective of Frodo riding in Gandalf’s cart.
The meeting serves as the entry point for Lord of the Rings LEGO as well with set 9469 introducing important characters in an easy-to-build kit that is also easy to afford at $12.99 retail in the U.S. It will likely find itself as birthday present to and from friends many times over. Because it is recommended for ages eight to 14, I enlisted Logan (8) and Dresden (10), to assist with the build of the kit. Continue reading “Product review: LOTR LEGO ‘Gandalf Arrives’ set”
Posted in:
Share:
Benjamin Secher of The Telegraph recently interviewed Benedict Cumberbatch. In today’s online edition, the Tele published a wide-ranging story where Cumberbatch speaks at length about his career to date, and his latest effort as a “repressed civil servant” in Parade’s End.
We get a bit more information on Smaug in The Hobbit, and how Cumberbatch played the role. For those just keen on reading Hobbit spoilers, highlight the bit just below!
“Filming The Hobbit brought challenges of a different kind. Although he plays two roles, a necromancer and Smaug (a fantastical villain he describes with undisguised glee as ‘a 400-year-old fire-breathing worm who lives in the middle of a mountain on top of a pile of gold, who is three or four times bigger than the Empire State Building and can fly’), he barely encountered any other members of the cast. He worked on his scenes with the director, Peter Jackson, shooting against a green screen while wearing a motion-capture suit. ‘It’s sort of a grey all-in-one jumpsuit, with a skullcap, a Madonna headset and Aboriginal-like face paint,’ he explains. ‘You feel like a tit in all that gear but Peter is so lovely you soon forget.’ ”
[More]
Posted in:
Share:
The landlady of The Hobbit pub in Portswood is raising money to help pay legal fees as wrangling over the small print of a deal made over copyright with Hollywood’s Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) continues.
Pub landlady Stella Roberts said she could not discuss the negotiations as she had signed a confidentiality agreement but said “We are very frustrated. We’re living in limbo here. We just want the whole thing finished. We just don’t know what to do. We’ve been advised to carry on trading as we were, because we haven’t got a lot of choice.”
A letter from SZC in March had asked the pub to remove all JRR Tolkien branding. The company later agreed to license Tolkien brands in order to resolve the dispute over the pub’s name.
[More]
Posted in:
Share:
During the San Diego Comic-con Andy Serkis spoke extensively about his portrayal of the character Gollum. In doing so, he made some startlingly specific comments about the character’s age.
Here, TORn guest writer Elpidha Lirgalad examines the implications, and reaches some very interesting conclusions about what it could mean for the Hobbit trilogy. These views are her own, and do not necessarily represent those of TheOneRing.net or its staff.
WARNING: Spoilers and speculation!
How old is PJ’s Gollum? And what could that mean?
A guest post by Elpidha Lirgalad
Ever since the release of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, some eagle-eyed fans have been asking why it appears that no time passes at all between Bilbo’s 111th birthday party and Frodo’s departure from the Shire. Continue reading “Greenbooks guest post: how old is PJ’s Gollum?”
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
Posted in:
Share:
The fantastic Hobbit fan artwork you see pictured at right is the work of Sri Lankan graphic designer and illustrator Rommel Arumugam. Arumugam sketched this piece, which he calls Blademasters, at work one day.
“I actually started on doing just Thorin while I was at work (It was a slow Friday), and when I saw the completed version, I decided to do Bilbo and Gandalf as well,” he told TheOneRing.net.
“It was solely done on Illustrator, using a wacom. I decided to make the swords the theme because of how much history beyond and before the hobbit they carried, all the way from Gondolin, to the battle of the Pelennor Fields.”
[High-res gallery]
Posted in:
Share:
