While doing press for The Lovely Bones ahead of yesterday’s Royal Premiere in London, Peter Jackson has been busy giving updates on his other projects, particularly Tintin and The Hobbit. Jackson told the BBC that “Tintin is great. It’s made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film. So the movie, to some degree, exists in a very rough state.”
However despite this it doesn’t mean we’re going to see the film any earlier than the planned 2011 release date, because the complex demands of post-production and turning the motion-captured performances into a fully CG movie will still take another two years. It is kind of fascinating how nowadays, because so many films need such extensive special effects work, they are essentially edited together and locked down years before they turn up in cinemas.
As for The Hobbit, he confirmed at The Lovely Bones press conference that the first of the two Hobbit scripts is finished and that the studio is largely happy with it, and that he, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guilermo Del Toro are “now halfway through the second script… and having great fun.”
Apparently the screenplay is his favourtite part of the filmmaking process, as it’s the most creative and least stressful, and so he’s happy to be involved with that on The Hobbit, while handing the directing reins over to Del Toro.