TheOneRing.net alerts us to a remarkable story from Tehran posted on June 25 online in Time. It reports that the Iranian government is trying to lure people protesting the results of the recent election to stay home by showing a greater than usual number of Hollywood films on television. These included a marathon day of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Perhaps the Tehran resident who anonymously supplied the description to Time is exaggerating or is reporting on an atypical group of people reacting to the trilogy. Still, it’s fascinating to read how viewers are apparently reading all sorts of hopeful, anti-government meanings into the action of the film. Gandalf the White compared to the Mahdi, a savior figure in the Muslim religion; Treebeard seen as a supporter to Mousavi because that candidate’s emblematic color is green; Shadowfax identified with the mythical white horse Rakhsh.

Perhaps the most-quoted lines from the trilogy, which occur during Frodo and Gandalf’s conversation in Moria, are being taken up into the cause:

And so we see political meaning even in the notice that one part of the trilogy is ending, asking us to be ready for the next. In edame dare: This is to be continued. The phrase has become our hesitant slogan, our words of reassurance. As does this conversation, translated from Farsi, from the movie: “I wish the ring had never come to me … I wish that none of this had happened.” “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” In edame dare. This will be continued. People are not going to let up so easily.

The trilogy–both the novel and the film–has had a political and personal impact on many people in the past. It would be wonderful to think that it would inspire the Iranians in their current situation. Whether or not it has a lasting effect, the story is a heartwarming one, well worth reading.

Self-described “avid reader” of the Frodo Franchise blog Daniel Hartropp has sent me a link to a new video interview with Guillermo del Toro. It appeared today on the Times Online.

It’s a short (4:38 minutes) but interesting piece that gives a few more scraps of specific information about The Hobbit. He confirms that design and writing work are ongoing, and new technology is being developed. (Of course, for the trilogy fantastic new technology like Massive, selective digital color grading, and the sub-surface particle scattering technique used to create Gollum’s realistic skin were all developed, as well as many small programs.)

Guillermo confirms the estimated date that was given way back when the project was finally officially produced: principal photography is still due to start in March. He estimates that it will last about 370 days-which includes both parts of The Hobbit. I presume that there will be pick-ups on top of that, as there were with each part of the trilogy. He also mentions “a few months” of post-production. I suspect, though, that some post-production will begin almost as soon as principal photography does and will probably last longer than a few months.

The rest of the interview has a few interesting lines. Guillermo says that the films will create “a slightly different feeling in some of the landscapes,” many of which will naturally be ones not used in the LOTR film.

He repeats a line that I’ve seen him use in at least one earlier interview, but it’s a good one and worth quoting: Wellington is “Hollywood the way God intended it.”

On horror: “I love monsters. Like some people like movie stars, I like monsters.”

I was fascinated to see that this interview was produced by Tourism New Zealand. It looks like that government agency and the producers are already cooperating to their mutual advantage and no doubt will continue to do so until after both parts of The Hobbit (and perhaps the DVDs) come out. It was filmed in the Weta Cave, the relatively new shop/museum in the Weta building in Miramar.

I’m in Copenhagen at the moment, as part of an intensive three-week trip. Last Friday in London I saw Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot. I thought it was a wonderful production (the run of which has sold out and is now extended until August 9, by the way). I’m at a film conference at the moment and will be in Bologna next week for Il Cinema Ritrovato, an annual festival of rediscovered and restored films of all eras. After a few days in Brussels to see friends, I head for home and am due back on July 9. I plan to increase the rate of blogging once I’m there.

So it’s great that in the meantime Daniel and others who have helped me out with this link. I seem to be developing a little circle of spies-so thanks to all you guys!

[June 25: TheOneRing.net has posted a transcript of the interview.]

Jim Barratt, author of a recent monograph on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, has passed along a fascinating press release issued today by New Zealand’s Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage.

In Chapter 10 of The Frodo Franchise, I talked about the New Zealand Film Commission as one of the government agencies that benefited to some extent from the production of the LOTR trilogy. Over the years, PJ has had an up-and-down relationship with the Commission. It provided funding for his pre-Frighteners films, but he had been critical of its policies on a few occasions. Now he’ll be involved in updating those policies. more »

For anyone who has been wondering what ever happened to co-presidents of New Line Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne after they left the studio, Variety has a story on their new projects. Their production company Unique has announced a slate of eleven films, including a musical based on a children’s story by Paul McCartney, with McCartney involved, and some fantasy films. They have a first-look deal with Warner Bros. and apparently enjoy being back to the hands-on production that characterized NL before it grew into a super-indie with LOTR.

TheOneRing.net has linked to a BBC radio interview with Guillermo del Toro that includes the news that Hugo Weaving will be returning as Elrond. They send people to the 2:10:55 point for that bit of info.

The interview contains some other interesting Hobbit chat, though. The interview begins at 2:04:30 with talk about The Strain and returns to it at the end, which comes at 2:17:30. But in between GdT talks about life in Wellington, where from 9 am to 8 pm he and the team work on the screenplay and the design. According to Guillermo, 8 months of work have already been put into the design of Smaug, and they have just solved a major engineering challenge. He estimates that there will probably be another 8 months spent on finishing Smaug.

One key bit of information comes when he talks about what the two films will cover. He points out that the animated version of The Hobbit eliminated Beorn and that the giant spiders would be an easy episode to jettison. But Guillermo says that he wants to include all the major set pieces of the book that people will be expecting. Maybe he’s said that already in one of his many interviews, but this is the first time I’ve seen or heard him be so explicit about that.

Finally, he says that when Fran, Phillipa, Peter, and he starts working together, they watched each of the three parts of the extended trilogy, one per morning for three days, as a way of launching in. And I’ll bet they watched them in 35mm, in the little Weta theater that is so familiar to fans from the supplements.

The Hobbit portion of the interview starts at about 2:08:00.

The Screen Actors Guild negotiations over a new contract have now dragged on so long that a potential strike might actually have affected the production of The Hobbit. Today, however, the membership voted 78% in favor of the proposed deal, and so the hovering threat of a strike has disappeared. The new contract will last two years, to June 30, 2011. That’s well after the principal photography for The Hobbit is currently scheduled to end–though additional pick-up filming will presumably occur for both parts, and that would be likely to last beyond that expiration date. Variety has an account of the deal here.

A story posted by Variety today says that the company that designed the titles for the LOTR trilogy is going out of business. Pacific Title and Art Studio has been an extremely familiar name within the film industry. It was founded in 1919 by Leon Schlesinger, who went on to head the Warner Bros. animation department in the golden age of the 1930s and 1940s. It did the titles for The Jazz Singer, Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, and a lot of other less familiar films.

Pacific Title is another victim of the economic recession, as well as production incentives that have led American films to shoot films and do their post-production work elsewhere. While it’s faintly possible that someone will step in and buy the firm, Pacific Title currently aims to finish its current projects by the end of this month, at which point it will be liquidated.

It’s sad to see such a major Hollywood institution go under after such a long run of success. Even at the end, it has been done the titles for such prominent items as Terminator Salvation, Gran Torino, Watchmen, and Fast and Furious. A sign of the bad economic times, but also of the growing competition for post-production offered by companies abroad–a trend which I discussed in the final chapter of The Frodo Franchise.

Yesterday the New York Times published a major story by Michael Cieply on the current state of New Line Cinema. It’s based largely on an interview with president and COO Toby Emmerich and Richard Brener, who oversees production, but there are quotations from Peter Guber (working on a project for NL) and founder and ex-president Robert Shaye, among others.

more »

Many thanks to Frodo Franchise fan (and fellow Madisonian!) Nataliya Akulenko, who has alerted me to an interview with Guillermo del Toro posted by the BBC on June 5. Although it was done on the occasion of the release of The Strain, the interview does a nice rundown on GdT’s current and future projects, including The Hobbit.

Of course we all know that the director’s passion for the horror genre will color some of what happens in the film, but I think Guillermo expresses himself on the subject particularly well in this interview:

Frankenstein, Jekyll, vampires – you’re steeped in horror at the moment, will it spill over into The Hobbit?

The intensity of the scenes of the Hobbit will have the intensity they had in the book when I was a kid reading them.

The spiders of Mirkwood are a pretty harrowing experience and facing the great goblin in the caves is quite a thrilling moment. The Battle of the Five Armies, the first encounter with Gollum – there are scary moments in the book.

But they are already there. We are not inventing or trying to do horror for horror’s sake we are trying to imbue those moments of intensity in the book into the movie.

Horror from the point of view of a kid and from that of a horror-film buff are two different things, and it sounds like the filmmakers are trying not to mix them up.

The quoted passage above leads directly into some interesting comments on Gollum:

Are you going to do anything different with Gollum to heighten that?

From a design standpoint it will be the same creature just a few years earlier, but I think that there is never a scene quite like riddles in the dark in the trilogy.

As an introduction to Gollum and a flashpoint in the origin of that character, it is so powerful and so primal that it would be different in that way. We are presenting a side of the character that is very strong and very beautiful and iconic.

GdT also talks a bit about how happy he is making the film. Pretty easy to believe, considering whom he gets to work with and where he’s doing that work!

TheOneRing.net and the New York Times have revealed that Peter Jackson will be at Comic-Con this year. PJ has never been there before, although he has sent videotaped greetings and clips from his new films. This year, according to the NYT story,

Come July 27, the director, a three-time Oscar winner, will face the mob in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center in support of “District 9,” an alien-internment thriller set for release by Sony on Aug. 14. Mr. Jackson produced the film, which was directed by his friend Neill Blomkamp, who will also attend.

McCere, who posted the TORN story, says the site “hopes to present an update to last year’s popular presentation, an unofficial look at ‘The Hobbit.'” TORN contributors will of course also try to interview PJ during the con. Let’s hope they manage it!

Even before this announcement, the full passes and day passes for this year’s Comic-Con were completely sold out. “Hall H,” mentioned in the quotation above, holds 6500 people. I got into it without difficulty last year for the combined Bolt and Up! presentation–earlier than I expected, in time to catch the Terminator Salvation promo reel and Q&A. I would imagine the line will be horrific for PJ’s presentation! For those of you who already have passes, good luck!