Chen G.
Mithlond
Dec 27 2018, 8:31pm
Views: 12466
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The Hobbit, like The Lord of the Rings, counts among the most well-planned trilogies in cinema history: having been scripted and shot concurrently - ostensibly a single film spliced into three parts.
Even some of the subplots and original material - which some of the films' detractors fancy to be afterthoughts devised when the expansion to a trilogy was plotted, or a dictate of the studio - were in fact concieved very early in the screenwriting. For instance, the romantic subplot, the Dol Guldur subplot (which goes back to the earliest meetings with Guillermo), Thrain, the Bree prologue, etc...
However, this kind of prolonged production requires a long period of pre-production: a time spent revising the screenplay, manufacturing sets and practical effects, casting actors, storyboarding/previsualsing the camera coverage.
The Hobbit had plenty of pre-production time: about 25 months of it. However, of this period, 18 months were spent under Guillermo Del Toro. When he stepped down, Jackson had to step in and restart the process: he couldn't make Del Toro's film for him - he had to make it his own. However, he only had about six months to do so.
That does show up in the finished film: the over-reliance of CG can be in no small part associated with the lack of time to fabricate practical effects: you can't stall the shoot in order to manufacture a set - you have to do it in pre-production, and being that not enough time was given to it, more CG had to be used.
It also shows in the script: some of the subplots that feel undercooked could have been much better with one or two more revisions. The lack of sufficient time to previsualize the film is perhaps the most felt, when it comes to the more over-the-top action beats. With previsualization, someone will have figured out how preposterous they were earlier down the line, and they'd probably be dialed back more.
Having said all of that, these issues have been grossly overstated. On the whole, it seems to me that Jackson and co-writers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh seemed to have had a solid concept of how to shape the trilogy as a whole. He also very wisely divided principal photography into three "blocks", between which more of the practical effects could be produced.
The decision to go to a trilogy was decided upon by Jackson and Co - without even informing the studio - in between Block 2 and 3, and they plotted the three films before presenting the idea to the studio, so that aspect of the trilogy was also planned.
A lot has been made of a "reshoot" period but in actual fact those weren't reshoots - they were pickups. They weren't meant to change the existing footage into something it wasn't - they're part of the way Jackson produces films: he always schedules a pickup period midway through the editing process - because while editing, you always find that you need certain shots (even something as trivial as a reaction shot) that you didn't shoot.
Also, the existence of the extended cuts helped enormously, because the extended cut of An Unexpected Journey came out when the edit of The Desolation of Smaug was shaping up, and with a rough cut of The Battle of the Five Armies already assembled, so Jackson could retroactivelly tweak the film - adding references to the Thrain plotlines, prefiguring Kili's infatuation with Tauriel and inserting Girion into the prologue - to make it all feel all the more pre-planned and organic.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Dec 27 2018, 8:42pm)
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