Film and celebrity media flock to Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival so the Peter Jackson-produced West Memphis Three is grabbing a lot of media attention. Staffer Maegwen sends in two clips from E! with video of director Amy Berg, Jackson and Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three. They slip in some Hobbit content too. You can view it if you click here.
The next video has some Hobbit content from the first link but starts with Elijah Wood saying that returning to New Zealand was like a family reunion in a Hobbity context. You can view that one here, with extra Sundance content after Middle-earth chat is over.
Category: Hobbit Cast News
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At the Sundance Film Festival because of his role in the film Celeste and Jess Forever, Elijah Wood spoke briefly about his participation in The Hobbit.
“Did my part already…” Wood said. “I was there for a month. It didn’t actually take that much time for the work. It was sort of half vacation and catching up with old friends and half work.”
“It had been 11 years since I’d been to Hobbiton,” Wood said. “I turned 19 in Hobbiton. That’s [expletive] crazy. I stood on the hill looking at the hobbit holes and I was, like, ‘I turned 19 here and I’m 30 now.’ It was such a weird thing. And a lot of the same crew were there. That was the most bizarre. It felt like taking a step back in time almost. It was extraordinary.”
Read more at The Salt Lake Tribune.
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Speaking with MTV at the Golden Globes the other night, Andy Serkis played typically coy about the appearance of Smaug in the forthcoming films. “I can’t give any secrets away, none of those trade secrets,” Serkis said. “I can’t say that because actually it’s still under wraps.” However, he did seem to imply that they’re still refining how it will look in the films. Ta to Irfon for the heads-up.
Animation/special effects expert Bill Desowitz has posted an interview with Andy Serkis on Indiewire. In it Serkis talks about new performance-capture techniques that have been developed by Weta since he played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. One paragraph describes his scene with Bilbo in The Hobbit:
Indeed, that’s what happened when Serkis revisited Gollum after a 12-year absence for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (December 14). Shooting live on set provided a more dynamic sense of play in his scene with the young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). “The way we approached the scene was very much to treat it like a chamber-theater piece, where we could experiment and try different things out,” Serkis explained. “Of course, the other significant change now is that we’re using facial capture, so my facial muscles are driving the facial muscles of the digital puppet.”