Partly Cloudy, 64°
When MGM Studios approached me with the idea to adapt J.R.R. Tolkein’s “The Hobbit” for film, I immediately had a lot of ideas. I thought it would be a great idea to expand the story into a trilogy and further explore the world of Middle Earth by bringing in events from “The Silmarillion.” I also wanted to create new characters to drive the story forward and really expand the battle scenes. I’m proud of all these choices, but the one decision I can’t stop kicking myself for making was to film the whole trilogy without a script.
I had hoped filming “The Hobbit” with only a loose outline for each scene would really free us to give the films a natural air. I think I was really into “Curb Your Enthusiasm” at the time and wanted to bring that sort of improvisational dynamic to the scene where Azog, leader of the Necromancer’s Orc army, sends his son Bolg to capture Thorin Oakenshield’s ranging party. In the end, it ended up delaying the process and forcing us to make the whole thing a trilogy about a year into shooting — it turned out to be a good idea, but we could have saved some time if we had made that decision to begin with.
For example, we actually started filming the riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo Baggins with just the note “Bilbo wins a riddle game”—we didn’t tell the actors what kind of riddles or even what Bilbo won. We kept the cameras rolling on Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis for the whole day, and eventually they discovered that Bilbo ended up winning the One Ring forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. It worked in the final cut, but I can’t help but feel like we could have come up with the same idea in the writer’s room in about half an hour.
Not to mention all the ways filming without a script interfered significantly with the production process. For example, the scene where Legolas runs up a collapsing bridge before plunging his dagger into Bolg’s skull took far too long to get into place. It probably would have been a better idea to plan out the action and contact fight choreographers and visual effects artists than to bring actors into a room with the direction “Legolas fights Bolg and wins.”
And we probably would have wasted a lot fewer people’s time if we had actually written in specifications for the massive 40-minute battle scene instead of showing up with a catering truck, a couple hundred extras, and a screenplay reading “There is a battle.” People just kept wanting to lead armies until eventually there were five armies; hence the third movie’s subtitle “The Battle of the Five Armies.”
And don’t get me started on the nightmare week we had when we showed up with nothing but the word “Barrels.”
All in all, I’m happy with the way “The Hobbit” trilogy turned out, but if I could do it all again, I’d probably write a script before we started shooting it. I’d probably also cast the actors in specific roles before we got them in the room to film.
