Tuesday
13Oct2009
Ian McKellen Updates 'The Hobbit' Yet Again
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 11:42AM
Sir Ian McKellen loves to talk The Hobbit and Magneto. He recently gave
Empire updates about both, although he says he doesn't have much of an idea about what's happening with
Magneto. "The most I could hope for would be to top and tail that," McKellen says, meaning appearning only at
the beginning and the end of the film, which is being packaged as an origin story.
"The scripts for the two films will be delivered very soon. Then they'll be budgeted, and then they'll be cast. And they'll be going when they've always said they would be, which is next spring – March or April. [Director Guillermo del Toro] even told me at one point, 'We're going to film for 383 days.' He's got that artistic autism!" "[Peter Jackson is] the same; they're very, very, very alike. They also very different, but they've so much in common. They both can't stand Hollywood and have wonderful imaginations, and they're both obsessed with gore and fantasy. Both of them laugh a great deal. Guillermo's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met. His English vocabulary is way superior to mine!”We recently reported that MGM finally got approval from its bond holders to move ahead with planning the Hobbit movies, so that's part of the hold-up. Casting is probably narrowed down to a few choices for most of the major roles already. It simply doesn't compute that Jackson and del Toro would put that off completely until the budget was cleared. Most likely, it will come down to scheduling, especially with a shoot lasting over a year, but I would expect you'd hear a lot of names attached to this massive project one right after another and in fairly short order.
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