Peter Jackson Discusses 'Tintin' and 'The Hobbit'

In a new interview with the BBC, Peter Jackson expresses no concern about handing over the reins of The Hobbit to Guillermo del Toro, and talks about his own next step as a director, the 3-D animated Tintin. "Tintin is great. It's made," Jackson says of his co-production with fellow celluloid hero Steven Spielberg. "The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film". The process of taking the edited footage and transforming it into the Tintin we'll see in theaters should take a little less than two years, meaning Jackson will be inordinately busy in the fall of 2011, talking both that film and The Hobbit, still scheduled for a December release that year. There's a chance it might be delayed - I'm speculating here - because of the thin ice under MGM's feet right now. But Jackson doesn't think bringing in a new director, even one who's stylistically different like del Toro, is any big departure. "We're writing the screenplays with him, so in terms of the script, there is continuity," he said. "We're writing Ian McKellen's dialogue just the same as we did in Lord Of The Rings. But Guillermo, being the director, will obviously take the script and interpret that and shoot his film. So that'll be interesting to see. "That's actually the reason I wanted him to do it," Jackson continues. "I felt like I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately do things differently, which is not the way I want to work. I want it to be natural." I do believe it will be a different experience, although it should dovetail nicely with LOTR. That's gotta be the hope, too. Even though del Toro is significantly darker, there are enough departures in The Hobbit from the follow-up that it shouldn't be a Peter Jackson-directed project. I don't know about you, but I'm excited to see what the similarities and differences are.