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Guillermo del Toro Will Direct "The Hobbit"
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Apr 25, 2008 01:13 AM
from the passing-the-reins dept.
from the passing-the-reins dept.
jagermeister101 tips us to news that Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings production team have officially selected Guillermo del Toro to direct the upcoming Hobbit film and its sequel. del Toro's resume includes films such as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Blade 2. This confirms rumors which began after the controversy between Jackson and New Line Cinemas was resolved last year.
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Peter Jackson Will Not Be Making The Hobbit 467 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Due to legal wranglings with New Line Cinema over accounting issues for Lord Of The Rings, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh will not be involved in the making of either The Hobbit or the planned Lord of the Rings prequel." I suppose there is still a chance that Jackson & Co. could end up involved, but at this point that looks unlikely.
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New Hope for Jackson Hobbit Film? 268 comments
DrJimbo writes "Just in time for the 70th Anniversary of the Hobbit (published September 21, 1937) Entertainment Weekly has a 5-page article on a possible reconciliation between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema that may pave the way for the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to return and helm the filming of The Hobbit. It was previously reported here that Jackson would not be making the Hobbit film. The EW article says that Jackson wants to make two films: first the Hobbit in its entirety and then another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately Jackson already has a lot on his plate with filming of The Lovely Bones scheduled to start this month and a live action Tintin film in the works."
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He'll do a good job (Score:5, Insightful)
Phew (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see what will come out of it, but I at least hope for the best.
Re:Phew (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely... Guillermo del Toro is an excellent director, and Pan's Labyrinth made it very clear he knows how to do fantasy justice (Pan's Labyrinth was one of the best fantasy pictures in a long time).
I think del Toro is arguably a better director than for the Hobbit than Peter Jackson actually -- Jackson sort of had the "epic scope" thing of the LotR down pretty well, but the Hobbit is smaller, more intimate, and more whimsical story, and could do with del Toro's deft touch.
I had sort of given up hope for the Hobbit with all the crap going on, but now I'm psyched!
Parent
... but can he do "delightful"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I do have one reservation, though. Del Toro is primarily known as a director of horror films. The vast majority of his work is pretty seriously dark and violent. There are definitely some dark moments and some scary/violent scenes in The Hobbit (such as: the troll attack, riddles in the dark with Gollum, spiders in Mirkwood, and of course the Battle of Five Armies). But there are also a lot of light, delightful scenes (such as: songs in Rivendell, lunch with Beorn, seeing butterflies above Mirkwood, the kindly reception at Lake Town, and so on).
I may be going out on a limb here, but the overall tone of the book slants more towards "delightful" than "scary". Del Toro has amply demonstrated that he can do "scary". But can he do "delightful" just as well? If he can, we're in for a treat. If not, well, who knows what it'll be like? I'll definitely be interested to see what he comes up with; I just hope he does justice to the pleasant stuff as much as the unpleasant stuff.
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People said that about Jackson (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Phew (Score:4, Funny)
Well I'm no LORT fan but I'll agree you've been drinking!
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Sequel? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sequel? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings twice before I was eleven years old, and THAT was the unedited edition I received from my mother from an original printing when it was first released. I believe it was the best fantasy ever written in the English language and I have read quite a lot of Tolkien.
Anyways, there might be some Fanboy come out to correct me, but I am not aware of any actual publishings by Tolkien regarding that time period. He had written quite a lot that was never published, and his son did eventually collect quite a bit of it and then publish it later on as The Unfinished Tales, but Tolkien himself never published it or even finished it to my knowledge.
I have The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien and upon a quick glance, there is a letter from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin of Allen & Unwin regarding his work on the sequel. It was written on the 19th of December 1939 and here is an excerpt:
Now I had always thought he referring to the Lord of the Rings, but he apparently attempted to publish the Silmarillion after the Hobbit and was rejected. If any parts of this story are to come from Tolkien's own hand, it is not going to be much, probably pretty raw, and not necessarily suitable for a movie.
If anybody is really interested, I think it would have to come from The Quest of Erebor which is included in the Unfinished Tales and possibly from certain appendices in The Lord of the Rings.
Parent
Not sure about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers,
Ian
Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit (Score:5, Funny)
HOLLYHELL, Monday - In an admirable display of synergy between hard-headed business sense and sensitivity to artistic rightness, New Line Cinemas has hired Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord Of The Rings.
"Peter Jackson may have made us three billion dollars and paved our goddamn driveways with Oscars," said a spokesdroid, "but when he dared question the three nickels and a gum wrapper payment, well. We knew we just couldn't work with someone so risibly unprofessional."
Sandler is likely to be working under renowned producer Uwe Boll. "Okay, here is what I am thinking, ja? Your Bilbo Baggins will be a WOMAN in Nazi Germany. A naked woman. And the One Ring will not show up. And she gets raped by Hitler! Gandalf will be played by Keanu Reeves. I AM THE DIRECTOR! I mean programmer. PRODUCER."
Jackson has lost weight, shaved his feet and gone back to his roots to make a warmhearted New Zealand-based family film in the style of his earliest works, under the working title Zombie Cancer Bukkake Pus-Nodules, with a budget in the range of over forty New Zealand dollars.
Work at New Line continues. "We at New Line are convinced that Professor Tolkien would have agreed with us that Adam Sandler will realise her artistic vision eleventy-one percent. We've bought three years' worth of shark futures."
It makes perfect sense (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
People think that because LOTR movies were well done and was based on a Tolkein work that another movie based on what he has done will also be well done.
This, of corse, isn't likely, but that isn't going to stop someone from trying to make money on the idea
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hobbit isn't nearly as epic in scale as LotR, but it's a solid story with good character development.
It's much more suited to film adaptation than LotR was mainly because it isn't so grandiose in scale. Fewer characters to follow and a much simpler plotline.
That LotR was as good as it was is nothing short of amazing. The Hobbit, with Del Toro at the helm and Jackson, Walsh, Boyen writing the script and producing, the film should be in good hands.
For all the liberties Jackson took with LotR, he approached the material with respect to it's source and to it's fans which is a major reason for it's success. I have no doubt they will do the same with The Hobbit.
Remember, we're dealing with Peter Jackson who is a lifelong film geek and not George Lucas who is really only out to make a buck... not good movies.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Informative)
Hellboy was an excellent piece of work considering that it was a daft comic book adventure. Ron Perlman was great (as usual) and little details such as the rooftop conversation with the little boy changed the movie utterly from being a simplistic series of fights to something that genuinely made you laugh and get involved with the characters.
The problem with Guillermo doing The Hobbit is not that he would do a bad film - I'm sure that he will do as good an adaptation as he is allowed to do by producers and budget (though he will inevitably get slated by people who think the film should be just like the LotR films). No, the problem with Guillermo doing The Hobbit is that he wont be doing something else more unusual or unlikely. He is supposed to be getting on with an adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's "At the Mountain's of Madness" and I personally would really like to see that. It's going to take someone of Guillermo's ability and heft to get this done properly. I'll be dissapointed if the Hobbit took its place.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Informative)
You have GOT to watch Blade 2 with the directors commentary on. It's hysterical! Del Toro talking about "the vampire Michael Bolton!" had me laughing like a maniac.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seconded... I can also recommend Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone) [imdb.com]. Don't read about the plot beforehand, that will spoil too much. Just watch it.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:4, Insightful)
He was trying to create an entire world, where the world was one of the characters and all the flowery stuff most people skip over was part of that character development.
Like it or not, you have to respect it.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the draw? (Score:4, Insightful)
And people could just as easily say Kirk, Uhura, Spock, etc. are shallow and undeveloped. That's how it is when you are one of the major pioneers in any genre or medium.
Did Star Trek start Sci-Fi TV? No, but it certainly brought it to the masses and started a rabid fanbase.
The character development of future sci-fi shows (Star Trek, Andromeda, Babylon 5, Firefly, etc.) owes a lot to Star Trek - not just because of the lessons learned, but because they paved the road that they're all walking over now. The same goes for Tolkien and current fantasy literature.
The books are pretty damn good for something written, when, like in the late 40s-early 50s?
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
What? You say that like most old books use to be crappy before the invention of hi-def printing and surround sound grammar.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
I on the other hand find for instance the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses lacking in great valor and of little legendary significance. The story is also terribly hard to memorize, which would certainly have made it a dud in the middle ages. And it is yet another ripoff of Homer's work. This is no problem however, since it really isn't an epic story despite the fact that it is modeled on an existing one.
Tolkien was reviving a magical realm from the dawn of (written) history. This is the realm in which the epic poems -- concocted by cultures to connect their known and written history to mythical ancestors and their great deeds -- are set. Most of his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with his universe. There is no place for character development in LOTR. It's not that type of story.
Good modern fantasy very often takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's that is intimately familiar to the readers and focuses more on characters. Still a very "small" story like James Joyce's Ulysses would not work if set in Middle Earth: the story needs a mundane background, just like most of 20th century great literature. Similarly, you cannot simply move for instance WWII literature to Osgiliath without it becoming cheesy.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)
Good point. I read LOTR in 1984, and played D&D later. You can think of D&D as a generalization of the LOTR fellowship and the background it is set against to a "universe of fellowships". This trivializes the LOTR fellowship. In Middle Earth Gandalf is for instance a unique and for the readers of those days fundamentally new character, and in D&D he is the mold for the spellcaster in *every* little group. In 1955 an allegorical story about delivering the world from an unspeakable evil was relevant. Today you can save a virtual magical world from an unspeakable evil every weekend. Familiarity with Tolkien's universe and fellowships saving the world fundamentally changes the experience of reading LOTR.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
(for the humor impaired, look at the parent posters' username...)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
if Tolkien was a network, then the Lord of the Rings would be Tolkien Ring. And The Hobbit would be 10 Base T.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
You may not think much of fantasy as a genre, and I'd tend to agree with you if you do, but I do think Tolkien is one of the best, if not the best fantasy writer there has been; to the extent that 95% of the rubbish that's been churned out since is a poor pastiche of him.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to disparage JRRT. He created a whole genre, he had immense integrity. I loved his books when I was a teenager. But he wasn't a great wordsmith.
A few who have surpassed him, IMHO:
Not everything by these authors is "great" some are a bit uneven, but their best work is really "first rate" literature by any standard.
I've never gone for the doorstop fantasy trilogies that fill many bookshop fantasy shelves. Some may be good, but I never felt the urge to try them, they just looked so derivative. I doubt though I'm missing anything by bypassing Robert Jordan. I'm told that George RR Martin's is pretty good though, I liked his earlier work.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Interesting)
I dispute the "created a whole genre" stuff. You're saying absolutely no one wrote a book about dragons, elves, and midgets before 1945?
That stuff has been around for over a thousand years as far as popular stories go (The Odyssey, for one). Tolkien just popularized it with the modern public (at the time).
Created a genre, no. Popularized a genre, yes.
Parent
Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually (Score:4, Insightful)
The earliest fantasy as we would describe it appears in the 16th century, and was known at the time as an "Artificial Romance." Cervantes was spoofing these stories in Don Quixote, and they had wizards, and dragons, etc.
The genre reappears with a more horror-based theme in the 19th century, and an author named William Morris (if I have the name right) creates the first invented fantasy world in the 1850s. In the early twentieth century, you have fantasists like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard (who arguably created Sword and Sorcery as a genre), and H.P. Lovecraft. And all of this takes place before The Hobbit was published, much less the Lord of the Rings.
(For more information, read Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock.)
And, for the record, at one point Tolkien himself mentioned that he was very fond of the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Second rate?
The Hobbit is more of a child's book, granted (LOTR was originally going to be a sequel to The Hobbit but turned out to be longer, deeper, and "darker"), but Tolkien is not second-rate. And yes, it's Tolkien. If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.
Tolkien may not have been the best story teller, though I would hold that he is excellent; what draws me to his works is the extreme depth and development. It is like a contemporary rock song compare
Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is define Tolkien for me is his human down-to-earth display of magic, out-of-this-world influence. There is no big shiny stars going around Gandalf's hat, he is using his magic power very very rarerly. Force of the Ring is not seen, but felt as influence, as emotions - and such stuff. It allows much easer for reader/watcher (thanks to P.J. who kept the same balance in the movie) to connect with characters, because even if Frodo is the One who will destroy Ring, it is taking him, and last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this, because if you even know the end, you really feel he can fail, because he is just a hobbit. It is humanity within fantasy what Tolkien actually defined (and no, not adult fantasy). And this is why so few authors have been capable to at least copy experience of LOTR world.
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Re:What's the draw? (Score:5, Informative)
There are serious undergraduate and graduate level literature classes on Tolkien, and his universe provides an interesting linguistic study as well. Granted, he started writing The Hobbit as a children's story, and it's not among the top tier of his work. However, the later trilogy became much more, and I daresay few literary professors would write it off as you are wont to do.
Furthermore, if you want anyone to take your viewpoint seriously, you do yourself a disservice by misspelling his name.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This one in particular -- he did Pan's Labyrinth. He'll do a good job with the Hobbit.
True to the source... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sequel to the Hobbit (Score:5, Funny)
2. And Back Again.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?
Well, I read them 40 years ago. I can't recall either. According to TFA:
This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy.