The letter “H” is the only thing the words “honesty” and “Hollywood” share in common. It’s a cut-throat business, but most of it happens behind closed doors and we can only speculate later on what may or may not have happened when movies work, or don’t.
However, in a new video from the Blu-ray release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Peter Jackson and his team are so candid as to their lack of preparation when making these films that it almost feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch. They can’t actually be saying these things can, they?
Peter Jackson didn’t just say “I started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all,” did he? Did they just admit that most of the props and costumes weren’t completed until the day of shooting? That there were no storyboards? The scripts weren’t ready? That the planning was so spontaneous sometimes the crew would have to take an extended lunch to let Jackson figure stuff out?
It’s amazing. There’s even video of the day Jackson and the studio agreed to stop shooting The Battle of the Five Armies for several months because they were so wildly unprepared to tackle such a massive scene, and were literally just shooting random fight footage for no reason.
This is a stunning video and one that I applaud. I wasn’t a fan of The Hobbit Trilogy and though they made billions for Warner Bros. and everyone involved, now we know why they felt so different from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which had three and a half years of prep before rolling a camera.
[Joshalots, H/T Birth Movies Death]
Contact the author at germain@io9.com.