The Los Angeles Times’ “24 Frames” blog has posted a story based on an interview with Guillermo del Toro. In discussing his decision not to direct The Hobbit, he had this to say:

The genre auteur says he has no regrets about departing the New Zealand production, but says that anyone who think that MGM’s financial mess was the main culprit for his departure is oversimplifying the issue.

“People kept misconstruing that it was MGM. It came from many factors,” Del Toro told 24 Frames in an interview at Comic-Con. “It wasn’t just MGM. These are very complicated movies, economically and politically. You have to get the blessing from three studios.”

Instead, he said, it was the cumulative effect of all of these problems that began to wear him down. “It was really the fact that every six months we thought we were beginning, and every six months we got pushed [back]. And before you could blink, it was a year, and then it was two years.”

So was there was a last straw in this bundle of woes? Some insiders have said that Del Toro and Jackson clashed over creative-control issues. The director said that in all their time working on the movie, he and the “Lord of the Rings” filmmaker were nothing but copacetic, though Del Toro didn’t entirely rule out that it one day could have become fraught. “We were at the stage where the collaboration was good. If there were going to be any issues, we never got to that stage [in development],” he said.

As far as I can tell, the main named person who said that MGM was holding up the greenlight on The Hobbit was Guillermo himself, who made a statement that seemed to imply such a thing on TheOneRing.net. That followed shortly upon an unnamed “absolutely reliable source” who told TORN that MGM was indeed the main factor behind the delay.

Well, not to say “I told you so,” but although I’ve been covering the MGM developments, I’ve also been opining that I didn’t think the studio’s financial mess could be the main factor in the delay. Warner Bros. would not walk into a deal with a studio known to be tottering on the brink of bankruptcy without multiple contingency plans. Still, it sounds like there is some sort of tangle among New Line, Warner, and MGM, “economically and politically.” I hope someday we find out what the real cause was.

Yesterday TheOneRing.net scotched rumors that The Hobbit has been greenlit and is planned to be 3D. Guillermo del Toro had given an conference-call interview about Splice, a horror film he co-executive-produced. Today the full text of the interview went up on “Shock Till You Drop” with additional quotations from GdT:

Question: Do you know when production is going to begin on The Hobbit and when you’re actually going to get onset?

Del Toro: There can’t be any start date, really, until the MGM situation gets resolved because they do hold a considerable portion of the rights and it’s impossible to make a unilateral decision by New Line or Warner. We really believe that dates will be known after the fact of MGM’s fate. Whether they stay and get supported or they get bought or they transfer some of the rights, nobody knows. We’ve been caught in a very tangled negotiation. Now I’ve been on the project for nearly two years. We have designed all the creatures. We have designed the sets, the wardrobe. We have done animatics and planned very lengthy action sequences. We have scary sequences and funny sequences and we are very, very prepared for when it’s finally triggered, but we don’t know anything until MGM is solved.

Question: Just to absolutely clear, the story that was reported earlier that The Hobbit has been greenlit for 3-D, that is false?

Del Toro: In both counts, there is absolutely no final answers. It’s not greenlit. That’s categorical. It’s not greenlit. 3-D has been discussed literally once in the room. The budget and the schedule and everything we’re handling – the cost of the film and the number of days it would take to shoot – is being handled right now without looking towards 3-D. Is there a chance it would become 3-D in the future? Maybe. But right now it’s not being planned as such.

This confirms that a lot of progress has been made on the preparations for the filming. I’m not keen to see The Hobbit made in 3-D, since the idea is to make it blend smoothly in as a lead-in to the LOTR trilogy, so I was happy to hear that 3-D seems unlikely to be used.

The MGM financial crisis seems to be more involved in the delay in the greenlighting of the film than I would have expected. I’ve been assuming that the contract between Warner Bros./New Line and MGM would have been full of contingency measures to be taken in such a situation–especially given that the latter studio’s debt problems were well known. At this point, we can but wait. At least it’s good to hear from Guillermo after a long silence on the part of the filmmakers, who obviously are forbidden by their contracts to talk freely about the situation.

Yesterday blogger Anne Thompson posted an interview concerning The Lovely Bones on Indiewire. Two interviews, really, since she talked by phone with Fran Walsh and by flip cam with Peter Jackson. (His is posted as three clips adding up to around 15 minutes.)

There are many, many interviews that these two and their colleagues have done during the publicity tour leading up to the release of their new film. I link this one because Anne Thompson asks more sophisticated questions than most interviewers, and the discussion gets into some interesting topics, including the two level of narration by the heroine, Susie Salmon, and the way Peter and Fran approached the filming of the murder scene. As usual when asked to go beyond the standard Frequently Asked Questions, Peter has some cogent things to say the choices made in the adaptation process.

I also have an excuse to link the piece because Fran also refers briefly to The Hobbit:

All along, Walsh and Jackson were also juggling other projects, such as District 9, which they produced. Jackson also collaborated with Steven Spielberg on Tin Tin and with Guillermo del Toro on The Hobbit.

In that case Del Toro joined the usual troica of writers in a room and slugged it out on two scripts. “He brings a tremendous earthy sense of humor,” says Walsh. “The biggest issue is always length.” She was surprised at how joyful she was to return to Middle Earth after being relieved to leave it at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Casting began on The Hobbit in Wellywood this week.

Anne’s piece also suggests that the next writing project for the pair is the second Tin Tin film, confirming what PJ said in an earlier interview.

Many of Guillermo del Toro’s fans may not be aware that last year he contributed an audio commentary to a DVD release of Carl Dreyer’s classic 1932 film, Vampyr. That has nothing to do with The Hobbit, so I have posted an entry on his commentary over on “Observations on Film Art.” Del Toro loves Vampyr and admits to being highly influenced by it. He also knows a great deal about the history of vampire films and makes some cogent remarks on the unique style of the film. Fans of del Toro, including visitors who come here from “Del Toro Films,” might be interested. I should mention that the DVD in question is from the excellent British company Eureka!, and it has region 2 coding.

Early this year, I announced the publication of a new anthology on the trilogy, Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings. One of its editor, Harriet Margolis, was very hospitable to me during my research trips to New Zealand in preparation for The Frodo Franchise. We’ve kept in touch ever since.

This past week, Harriet attended a Q&A evening with Guillermo del Toro, held to support a local film project. Recording was not allowed, but Harriet took notes at a rapid pace and has kindly written up a blow-by-blow summary of what went on. more »

We’re still in that frustrating period where we know things are going forward on The Hobbit, but the filmmakers are not allowed to tell us anything. They’ve all signed confidentiality agreements, and besides, they don’t want to reveal spoilers. Yet the studio also wants to keep our interest up.

TheOneRing.net alerts us to an interview with Guillermo del Toro on Total Film. I enjoyed reading it. Guillermo is a charming and entertaining interviewee. I can’t say that I learned much of anything that I didn’t know before. Hints of design decisions, but nothing very specific. But that is the point of interviews at this stage: to entertain without revealing. The interview concludes by saying that principal photography begins in “late spring.” Or late autumn, if you live in New Zealand.

Guillermo del Toro has agreed to help out a struggling team of filmmakers by participating in a fundraising event. The film is Roots, Rock and Harmony, to be directed by local director Bonnie Slater. The event will be billed as “An Evening with Guillermo del Toro,” though also onstage will be Jonathan King, director of the horror film Black Sheep (a fun, gory film in the early Peter Jackson mode) and the upcoming fantasy adventure Under the Mountain (due for a December 10 release in New Zealand).

This Q&A event is scheduled for November 11 at the Paramount Theatre in Wellington. That’s a classic old movie theater on Courtenay Place, the wide street familiar to many, since it ends at the Embassy Theatre and was covered with a red carpet for the world premiere of The Return of the King.

I’m not sure how people in the Wellington region can get tickets. There’s no listing yet on the theater’s “events” page of its website. If you’re keen to attend, you might want to sign up for the Paramount’s “Enews” notifications or check out the contact info at the bottom of this page.

My strong suspicion is that no surprise news about The Hobbit will be forthcoming during the evening, but anyone who has watched an interview with Guillermo knows that he’s a charming, smart, and entertaining speaker.

Guillermo del Toro has taken on yet another project. He’s producing a Spanish horror film in conjunction with the Barcelona firm Rodar y Rodar. That’s the same combination that brought us The Orphanage, an excellent earlier horror film which was successfully distributed in the U.S.

The new film is Los ojos de Julia, or Julia’s Eyes, to be directed by Guillem Morales. Focus Features, a subsidiary of Universal and one of the few art-house niche companies still operating in Hollywood, is co-financing.

Spain and particularly Barcelona have been turning out quality horror films, so it’s not surprising that GdT is involved. According to Variety’s story, “Del Toro helped broker the production deal with Focus Features Intl. and has helped supervise writing and casting.”

When he had time to do that, I don’t know, but like Peter Jackson, Guillermo seems determined to help foster young talent working in the horror genre. Principal photography is due to start October 5.

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.]

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!