Los Angeles Times Blog: 24 Frames
Movies: Past, present and future
July 27, 2010 | 7:30 am
As Peter Jackson makes progress -- in theory -- on getting "The Hobbit" moving forward again, Guillermo del Toro has a few things to say about the movie he spent two years developing.
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.
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