Anyone who’s read both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will tell you they are two very different animals. So it stands to reason Peter Jackson’s films would follow suit. Apparently not everyone thinks so, so Jackson made a few comments explaining why those dwarves you see in the trailer are so hilarious and how he managed to juggle all those damn cast members.
“The Hobbit is very much a children’s book and The Lord of the Rings is something else,” Jackson told Total Film, “it’s not really aimed at children at all. I realized the characters of the dwarves are the difference. Their energy and disdain of anything politically correct brings a new kind of spirit to it. And that’s why I thought, OK, this could be fun!”
And about those dwarves. You may recall that Fellowship of the Ring had a particularly large main cast to work with, well it’s even larger in The Hobbit thanks to the new guys. “That was something I worried about,” said Jackson. “I imagined 13 guys with long hair and beards and I thought, ‘How are we ever going to know which dwarf is which? It’s an ensemble from hell really. I thought nine members of the Fellowship was a problem; but here, with Bilbo and Gandalf, we’ve got 15. It’s working out fine though. The dwarves give it a kind of childish, comedic quality that gives us a very different tone from The Lord of the Rings.”
While both books are similar in location, they are definitely different in tone. Jackson wanted to make it clear that even if The Hobbit films don’t feel like LOTR, they will certainly look like them. “I want it to seem like we’ve gone back on location into Middle-earth; that these two movies feel like they belong at the beginning of the other three. We’re the same filmmakers going into the same world,” he said.
You may also remember that director Guillermo del Toro was previously attached to The Hobbit. Jackson told the magazine that some aspects of his style still exist but that he had to overshadow a lot to keep things consistent with his LOTR films.
From speaking to the creators, the article describes the second film, The Hobbit: There And Back Again, as “war, madness and dragon rage.” Jackson’s wife and writing partner Fran Walsh said, “We always saw The Hobbit more in the golden light of a fairytale. It’s more playful. But by the time you get to the end, Tolkien is writing himself into that place where he can begin that epic journey of writing LOTR, which took, as he put it, his life’s blood. All those heavier, darker themes which are so prevalent in the later trilogy start to come into play.”
(via io9)
