To be precise, Peter answered two questions on his Facebook page but only counted them as one. The first was “Will you have time to sift through 4,000 questions just to answer twenty of them?” Peter answered that one but didn’t count it as one of the twenty, since it was a “little dull.” Actually, I thought it was quite an interesting answer, giving some sense of what Peter’s life is like at this point in the filming process:

I’ve been very busy recently, not just with shooting, but with location scouting and prep work during our days off, so I’ve found it hard to get to the questions. However, today I have enjoyed sitting down and reading through them all. I’ll get started and continue to answer what seem to be the most popular questions during the next few weeks (as well as some one-off, quirky ones!).

The “real” first question was whether the White Council’s attack on Dol Guldur will be shown. The answer:

I’m not going to say just what and when, but I will confirm that both the White Council and Dol Guldur will feature in the movies. And not just in one scene either. Just how to visualise it has been a challenge, but fortunately Alan Lee and John Howe went crazy with ideas, and it should look pretty cool.

I think we pretty much could assume that those two items would figure prominently in the films, but it’s nice to get confirmation. Apparently we won’t have to wait very long for more answers to appear!

Peter Jackson has just posted again on his Facebook page. He recalls the history-making 20-questions session that he and Harry Knowles ran on Ain’t It Cool News way back in August of 1998. Peter answered questions about his plans for The Lord of the Rings. (See The Frodo Franchise, p. 151.)

Now he wants to do the same thing for The Hobbit, but this time the venue will be Facebook. Peter invites questions from fans:

So let’s get into it … if there’s anything you’d like to know about the movies we’re making, please send me questions (on this page) and we’ll start answering 20 of them. Who knows – if we have fun, why stop at 20?

Let’s get it underway. Over to you …

On his Facebook page, Peter has posted a brief piece about the fact that cast and crew will take a four-week break for Easter. This period, he says, will be partly occupied by script revisions “for those Rivendell scenes we have coming up.” He also has a nice anecdote relating to the famous habit the screenwriters had during LOTR filming, when they often provided revised pages to the actors shortly before the scene was to be shot. He also has some interesting things to say about the three stages of screenwriting.