FORCE OF HOBBIT
Peter Jackson on how he conquered an inferiority complex for directing illustrious actors over the course of two Tolkien trilogies. Interview,
Frank Sinatra may have had a few regrets, even though he did it “My Way.” But New Zealand director Peter Jackson insists he has none whatsoever, after filming the Tolkien fantasy trilogies The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings over the past 15 years.
“I’m not a regret guy,” he says during a recent visit to Toronto, where series capper The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five
Armies had its Canadian premiere. “You can’t always look at life as a miserable thing. If you’re a filmmaker and every time you finish a film you just naturally go, “Oh, I could have done so much better,” that’s not much fun, is it really? You might as well go pick another profession if that really is how you derive satisfaction from it.
“Could you have done better? Oh, of course. You look at the film and you see the mistakes and you say, “Oh, sure, I could go back, it’s a no-brainer,” but do you regret that? Well, no, because this movie is what it is, and people are enjoying it. I’ve achieved my goal, really.”
He will allow to feeling bone tired, just as he felt when I interviewed him in 2003 when The Return of the King came out to conclude his first Tolkien trilogy, The Lord
of the Rings.
“I just feel so tired, which is nothing to do with you! I only just finished ( The
Battle of the Five Armies) just before I jumped on the plane. That’s the rugged part, when you’re pacing yourself all the way through to deliver that movie and it’s absolutely in the last month I hadn’t been getting any sleep to get it done.”
He was still in his 30s when he began his Tolkien odyssey, but at 53, Jackson still seems the self-described “nervous nerd” he’s always been. His wild hair and beard have acquired salt-and-pepper contrasts and he’s now wearing track shoes instead of going barefoot, as he did in our first interview encounter in 2001. He’s officially “Sir Peter Jackson,” due to various royal honours bestowed upon him, but he never goes by that title.
He still nervously avoids eye contact as he talks, still wears a rumpled work shirt (this one has a hole in it) and corduroy slacks. And he still sips on a cup of tea as he talks Tolkien for what he insists will be the last time, with me at least.
“No more after today!” he says, smiling. You made The Hobbit trilogy after The Lord of the Rings one, which is the reverse of how Tolkien wrote his stories. But did you always intend to have The Hobbit film trilogy lead into LOTR, as you have now done? Oh sure. As soon as we knew we were going to do The Hobbit, we were immediately thinking about how it was going to relate into The Lord of the Rings films. If you take The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings as books, one is written for children and one is an adult’s book. One ( The Hobbit) is an absolute children’s book in every way. Not that adults can’t enjoy it, but they read it to their kids at night and have done so for decades. LOTR is not a children’s book, it’s so complicated, so dense, so complex.
We didn’t want to have the movies for two audiences. We wanted basically the audience for The Hobbit to be the same audience that had enjoyed The Lord of the Rings films 10 years ago. We had to adapt The Hob-- Since you had this strong vision for The Hobbit trilogy from the start, did you feel frustrated over criticisms that you took a single small Tolkien novel and turned it into three blockbuster films? Yes! I’ve been a little bit frustrated, but it didn’t worry me too much because I knew that I was happy with the last two films, anyway. Everybody complained about the endless breakfast scene (of An Unexpected Journey, the first Hobbit film), but we were setting up the characters for three movies, not just one. I asked Sir Ian McKellen, your wizard Gandalf, how you have changed over the course of six films. He said he feels you’ve grown more confident. That is true. Confident as a human being and as a filmmaker. I’m a little less shy than I was at the start of The
Lord of the Rings. I was a nervous nerd; I was always intimidated. Whenever I was dealing with actors in the old days, I would always kind of be a little nervous.
You know, especially when someone who walks on the set who is kind of famous, when I started Fellowship of the Ring I was Peter Jackson from New Zealand, whom no one had ever heard of, and Sir Ian McKellen was Sir
Ian McKellen. I had this inferiority complex a mile high and a mile deep. But now I’ve come to realize that you don’t have to do that. And it’s not actually that helpful. It’s better to meet actors on level ground. How would you describe your directing style? I never learned how to direct actors; no one ever told me. I never went to film school.
I hadn’t even read any books about how to direct actors. But that gets back to what Ian says about confidence and learning a little bit more about how I can help the actor.
I just have to help them, because I don’t know how to act. I can’t tell Ian exactly the technique he has to do to provide a moment. He has a skill that I don’t.
But what I have come to do with actors now in terms of directing them, and I’m really comfortable with it now, is to talk to everybody at the beginning of the scene and not even focus on what they have to do or how they have to act, but certainly to really talk in-depth about why this scene is in the story and how the audience regards the characters at the beginning of the scene.
You’ve often just got to remind the actor, too, since you’ve been shooting for a year and a half, what the scenes are preceding this one so they know exactly where they are in the story. Sometimes they can read a script and get the wrong idea. So I direct from the audience’s point of view, not from telling the actors how they should act. We’re at the same point we were at the end of The Lord of the Rings, as to whether you’d be willing to tackle another Tolkien project. Now you’ve done The Hobbit, but there’s still his anthology The Silmarillion. Are you game? Sir Ian seems to be.