Photo: MTV News
Peter Jackson is taking a break from ‘The Hobbit’ while he attends the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah. He is there to support the documentary film, “West of Memphis,” which he helped to produce. The film focuses on the story of the men known as the “West Memphis Three” who maintained their innocence after being convicted of a triple-murder. Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, rallied to their cause, and after 18 years, the men were released, but without any compensation for the miscarriage of justice. The documentary seeks to prove their innocence and reveal the true murderer.
“This is a story that has not come to an end yet. In fact, it’s very much not ended,” Jackson said. “We have three guys that were released from prison but not exonerated, even though they did not do the crime. We have three young boys who were murdered in 1993, and the killer still walks free. So absolutely, this is not the end of the story. It’s ongoing. It’s literally developing on a daily basis right now.”
But inevitably, anytime Peter Jackson is around, people also want to hear about his work on “The Hobbit.” He said to MTV News, “I’m enjoying the movie [as much as the fans], which is a thing that I’m really excited about. I love going to work every day. I love shooting it.”
He anticipates that principal photography should be completed this summer. “In February, we do another hundred days of shooting, so by about July we’re done; we will have shot both movies at that stage,” he said.
Some fans may have a hard time reconciling Jackson’s interpretation of Middle-earth with the events in “The Hobbit” book. He explained, “We haven’t made ‘The Hobbit’ as much of a children’s story as the original book was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to totally alter the tone. We wanted to have some humor and some of the songs have made their way in there.”
He envisions “The Hobbit” films and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy as “part of a five-film series.” He said, “Fortunately, Tolkien wrote a lot of extra material in the Appendices of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ where he, himself, kind of tied the two stories together, twenty or thirty years after the publication of ‘The Hobbit,’ so we’ve been able to use some of that material, too.”
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