In order to celebrate the final film from Peter Jackson's Middle-earth saga, the director, his producing and screenwriting collaborator Phillipa Boyens and one of the film's stars, Lee Pace (who plays the elven lord and Legolas' dad Thranduil), made the journey up to Toronto for the North American premiere of "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies."
A fine conclusion for this remarkable sequence of films, the participants were chatty and engaging, clearly excited to showcase their film to the world. Moviefone Canada began by discussing just what this journey has meant to them personally.
Moviefone Canada: We've officially finished the journey. I'm wondering what this means to you, and what it was like culminating your journey?
Peter Jackson: To me, it has a significance because it's a moment in time when [the] six-film series finally comes into focus. The first two "Hobbit" movies are the first two acts of an eight-hour story, so this is the climax of that story, but it's also a film that's the missing piece to carry on to "Fellowship of the Ring," "Two Towers," and "The Return of the King." It's like until this movie actually existed, there were these parts that were out there, floating out there, and now they can finally be together.
We're only four or five years away from a generation that will have no memory or knowledge of how these films were released. All they'll have is the six-film box set and they'll have to start at the beginning and if they like it, they'll go through to the end.
Have you had a day yet when you've woken up and your first thought hasn't been, "The orc's teeth aren't right" or something else?
PJ: Probably not, no. Whether or not it's the first thought or not, there hasn't been a day where there hasn't been a deadline coming. It's always been this looming sort of thing that now, I get to wake up and we're finished, nothing to do. We haven't taken on any other work because [my wife/producing/writing partner] Fran and I so badly wanted for once in our lives, literally, probably in our professional lives of 30-odd years, wanted to not have anything to do.
Now, that doesn't mean that six weeks into our holiday, we'll be so bloody bored, we'll start another project, but that would be fine. At least we'd do it for the right reasons. Literally, you can't believe how much we just don't want anything to do.
Part of the challenge of these films is tying them to what came before. How did you avoid the many pitfalls of such a reinterpretation without getting lost along the way?
Philippa Boyens: Experience. So that's why it was really good to approach these films having made "The Lord of the Rings" first. I think it was a lucky accident that we did do that.
PJ: Yes, it was actually, doing them the wrong way around. We can't claim it was a grand plan, it was purely circumstance.
PB: But it did mean you could get into who Gandalf was and who Legolas was because [Tolkien] didn't stop writing "The Hobbit." He kept writing "The Hobbit." There's a lot of material in the extended version.
PJ: And also "Lord of the Rings." In the actual "Lord of the Rings," he's written retrospectively, filling in a lot of "The Hobbit" gaps as well.
PB: Yeah, so he never says what happened in Dol Guldur. You go into the appendices, or you go back into "The Lord of The Rings" and you know there were Ringwraiths in there, you know there was a necromancer, you know so much more.
PJ: The thing is, and obviously we probably disappointed a lot of people, but we were never adapting "The Hobbit" of the 1937 edition. We were adapting that "Hobbit," plus the material he retrospectively put into it.
PB: What's really cool about Peter's process, is that you get to work with the actor to figure out some of the back story. It was neat because we got to [for example] work with Lee on [his character's] backstory.
Lee Pace: It was such a purely creative process. It was to take the little clues that we were given in "The Hobbit" and mine them for what the essence of that character was, this elven king who had fought in the great battles, who had fought dragons, but now was refusing to fight, now was avoiding this epic battle between good and evil.
And who is also a father.
LP: And who is also a father.
Hence the interesting dynamic when he evokes Legolas' mother. I'm just wondering if you could talk about where that line came from.
PB: Legolas' mother is never mentioned, but we liked that idea. In the end, it never gets told necessarily, but it informs the actor and so when you deliver that line, "Your mother loved you," it has a power that I thought was part of the backstory, that she died, and the only thing remaining of her that he has are these jewels.
LP: But he's such a cold character, he's such a severe character, and it rings true to me that that severity comes from a heartbreak. The elves feel things in a very deep way. They're not human, they're very far from human. Those emotions, that love is profound.
PJ: I also think too that Thranduil's got the hardest decision of everybody in terms of fighting. Fighting for Thranduil is committing his troops and yet, unlike the other characters, who, if they don't die in this battle, they will die of old age at some point ... Thranduil and the elves, they're immortal, but if they get an orc sword through them, they're going to die just like anyone else. So for someone who is basically committing the lives of elves who would otherwise live forever more and committing them to possibly a short, violent death is a much bigger decision, a lot more difficult than anyone else's.
What's Peter Jackson like as a director?
LP: He's honestly one of the most inspiring people I've ever worked with. All of these disparate actors ... I watched the movie last week and we're all telling the same big, big story. All that's coming from conversations that we've had in your kitchen, Philippa, and coming on to a green screen where we don't know what this battle is really going to look like.
PJ: I didn't know what it was going to look like. I'm glad you didn't ask me too many questions!
LP: I remember saying "The army's going to be big, right?" and [Peter] said "Yeah, it's going to be big," and I said "It's going to be really big?," but then I watched the movie and the army is 10 times bigger than I ever conceived it would be.
PJ: When I'm on set, I love the battle stuff because it's CGI and I don't actually have to worry about it. A lot of that battle was created in the last four - six months, which is great, because it's something you don't actually have to think about [while shooting]. If you had to think about that whole big battle and exactly what was going to happen while I was trying to shoot the rest of the movie, it just makes it twice as hard. So I was able to just say, "It's going to be big" and let's not discuss it anymore.
LP: But this is such an important part of what I felt, what I took away from the process is that we had such a good time making the movie. It was such an enjoyable experience for all of us. It was so creative, these characters are fun to play.
PJ: No one's ever told me how to direct. [I've] never been to acting school or directing school. I've stumbled my way through it and not done a good job in some cases. What I've come to do now with directing is that I try not to direct the actors at all. I don't necessarily come and say, "Listen, that's not the way you should deliver this line, you should do this, you should emphasize that," or where you should be. I don't try to direct the actors moment by moment. What I love doing is we talk about what the story is requiring in the scene. So I direct from the audience's point of view.
When you've got fantastic actors, they immediately get it and they'll deliver you three different ways. I always try to direct from the point of view of let's talk about the story, let's talk about what's happened up to this point. There are always exceptions, but [I believe] every scene should have development internally. The scene shouldn't really exist if all of the dynamics, story and characters at the beginning are identical at the end of the scene.
It's good to explain that because the cast don't always understand that. Sometimes it's involving scenes earlier that we haven't even shot yet. I've got them in my head, not necessarily on the page in the script, so I have to try to explain that, and once we all know that the story that the scene is going to provide to the audience. That's the language of directing actors.
LP: But we're also fans of the story, fans of the fans, fans of the movie. What becomes the process on set is I'm going to do something that Pete likes. I want to make Pete laugh, because you're on the mic so we can hear the response. I always want to do something cool.
PJ: So long as you guys know the storyline, you surprise me. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm telling you what the audience needs to do and you guys just come up with the emotional ways of doing it. It's just fantastic. If you look at the behind-the-scenes stuff, you'll see me in a big tent with a 42-inch plasma. I see as the cameras are rolling, that's the image. I've got this bloody big screen, a three-foot one, and I'm always leaning right forward. That's not because I'm short-sighted, but it's because I actually want to be in the cinema, I don't want to be on the set.
For that moment, I mentally try to lean forward and think, OK, flash-forward 18 months, I'm in the theatre, this is what I'm watching, this is what everyone's seeing. I try to put myself in the audience's shoes as we're rolling camera because it's the only perspective that counts. It doesn't matter what I think, it's what the audience gets from the film; that's the only thing that actually matters at the end of the day.
Stylistically, there's great continuity between all six films.
PJ: We've always approached as history, not fantasy. Not because the fantasy is something to be embarrassed about, because it's not, I love it. But I always think that fantasy movies have been a little bit condescending. The danger with fantasy is that it can become too scattered when you're dealing with three or four hundred crew in capacities who design little bits and pieces.
LP: But it's style too. You can't buy style. You can't fake style.
PJ: Well, that's why we hired you to play Thranduil. We had actors with style. Elves are hard to cast. Elves are the hardest to cast, because elves are perfection that the majority of us. They have to be a little otherworldly, and they're really a pain in the ass to cast. It's tricky. But we've been lucky.
PB: What was interesting was that he's younger than his son. That's the other great thing about it.
LP: When you're thousands of years old, a few years doesn't really make a difference.
Do you think you'll ever revisit Middle-earth? Are you planning on making more modifications to the "LOTR" films to tie them more strictly to "The Hobbit"?
PJ: The extended cut is an interesting thing. It's not a dumping ground for outtakes. What I find interesting is that it's essentially the same story for two different experiences of viewing. All this year, we've been shaping the theatrical film. That's the cinema experience, that's what you're focused on.
Then with the DVD version, which comes out in a few months, the extended-cut version, what's fascinating is that you've got the same story, and if you put all of the stuff in it for the theatrical, everyone would scream, oh, it's too long, too long! They scream that anyway, so you couldn't really do it, but then you have a different experience where you're now at home. You're watching it in bed, you're stopping halfway to have dinner, your friends come around, you're getting drunk, you're whatever. It's a whole different way of viewing the movie.
People start to like the longer versions more, but only from the point of view of their sofa or bed, not from a cinema seat, so it's a fascinating thing. But to answer your question, no, I've got other films I want to make. I think it would be a terrible, sad thing to spend the rest of my life going back over these films, trying to make them better, so I don't have any intention of doing that.
"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" is now playing in theatres.
from The Moviefone Blog http://ift.tt/1AHQvWL
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment