In an interview with The Guardian, Viggo Mortensen has gotten directly to the point when it comes to Peter Jackson and his films, particularly everything since The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring up to The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He’s not exactly saying anything new as he notes Jackson’s increasing interest and use of advanced filmmaking technology and how he believes it has replaced his earlier, more subtle work:
Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.
“I guess Peter became like Ridley Scott – this one-man industry now, with all these people depending on him,” Mortensen adds. “But you can make a choice, I think. I asked Ridley when I worked with him (on 1997’s GI Jane), ‘Why don’t you do another film like The Duellists [Scott’s 1977 debut, from a Joseph Conrad short story]?’ And Peter, I was sure he would do another intimately scaled film like Heavenly Creatures, maybe with this project about New Zealanders in the First World War he wanted to make. But then he did King Kong. And then he did The Lovely Bones – and I thought that would be his smaller movie. But the problem is, he did it on a $90 million budget. That should have been a $15 million movie. The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him. And he’s happy, I think…”
That last part, “And he’s happy, I think…” is interesting to me, primarily because Jackson was never intending to direct The Hobbit films. It was Guillermo del Toro that was going to do that and when I look at del Toro, and all he’s done since departing that franchise, from Pacific Rim, his upcoming television series “The Strain” and his current film which is already in production, Crimson Peak, I see happiness. Is Jackson really happy with being saddled with what was originally two Hobbit films and is now three, or will he really be happy once he puts Middle Earth behind him?
It was also interesting to hear just how under the gun Jackson was with the trilogy as Viggo adds that before May 2001, when they screened 20 minutes in Cannes, they weren’t sure how things were going to turn out:
“They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video”
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies hits theaters on December 17, we’ll see what Jackson has up his sleeve after that.
