Peter Jackson Gives an update on THE HOBBIT
Last week I watched The Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray, and It was seriously like watching the movies again for the first time. In my opinion they are three of the best films ever made. Watching them got me incredibly excited to see what Peter Jackson and Gillermo Del Toro have in store for The Hobbit, and today Jackson gives fans the most recent update on where the two Hobbit films stand.
We've just delivered the script. Literally last week, we delivered the second of the two screenplays -- the first draft. So the studio's got both scripts now, which is a milestone; and if anything was holding it up, it was us doing the screenplays, because we'd just been writing as fast as we can, but it took us this long to get them finished. So we take whatever responsibility there is for the speed. And we're now in the process of budgeting the films, and then hopefully we'll get to a budget the studio [people] are happy with, and they'll greenlight the movies and we'll announce the shooting dates. I'd be pretty optimistic that we'll be shooting before the end of the year. I would imagine October, November, we'd be shooting by. I'm not announcing it, though.
So he's taking all the blame for how slow the film is taking to get up on the big screen. As far as casting goes Jackson says,
We haven't signed any actors up yet, because we couldn't do that until they greenlight the movie. But I would imagine that if we get a green light within the next month or two, we would be hopefully making some casting announcements by, I guess, the middle of the year. We've done a little bit of auditioning, but we haven't really done any meetings with actors or anything yet. We've just been totally committed to the scripts. Everything's a little bit later than what people assume it is. I think people think we've been sort of doing secret casting.
Jackson is definitely playing it safe in this interview. He doesn’t give us any crazy information, but he tells us how it is, the guys not farting around, he's work his butt off to get these two Hobbit films out to the fans. But, now that the scripts are turned in we are one step closer to see this film actually come to life.