Peter Jackson has finally given a straight answer about what he is doing next, and the answer involves a quiff. Collecting an honorary Grand Prize at Spain’s Sitges Film Festival on 11 October, 34 years after he took Braindead there, Jackson ran through his slate for a fan audience. As reported by the Spanish film magazine Fotogramas, and translated in the English-language trades this week, he said: “We have ‘The Shadow of the Past,’ which is in the scriptwriting stage. ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ is almost finished filming. I think there are about two weeks of shooting left. And we’ve also already written the script for Tintin 2, the second Tintin film. That will be the next film I make.”
That is three pieces of news in four sentences, which is roughly the reverse of how Middle-earth usually works. Jackson also said each of his two Tolkien trilogies took 288 days to shoot, and that he doesn’t much enjoy filming. Nobody who has watched the extended-edition appendices will be surprised by either claim.
The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is directed by Andy Serkis, who also puts the motion-capture dots back on to play Gollum, with Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens producing. Warner Bros is reported to have it pencilled in for 17 December 2027. If Jackson’s two-week estimate holds, the cameras stop before Christmas, and Serkis can presumably go back to eating his fish cooked.
British readers may feel a faint sense of déjà vu. In 2009, Chris Bouchard and a crew of fans made their own The Hunt for Gollum for around £3,000. They shot it in North Wales, Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, put it online for free, and racked up more than 15 million views (we talked to Bouchard about it). Seventeen years later, Warner Bros is making the official version with Hollywood money. It’s hard to imagine a better proof of concept. Somebody at the studio really ought to send Bouchard a fruit basket. Or a fish.
The second line of Jackson’s update matters because The Shadow of the Past, the follow-up Middle-earth film, spent part of October being declared dead. Knight Edge Media reported that development had stalled after the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, with the new bosses apparently wanting to see how Gollum performs first. The site later updated its story after Warner Bros said the film was still in development. Jackson’s “scriptwriting stage” isn’t a start date, but it is the director confirming it’s alive. Reports say Stephen Colbert, a man who once argued Tolkien lore with an actor on national television and won, is among the writers. They also say it will finally tackle the bits of The Fellowship of the Ring the films skipped, including the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs and Tom Bombadil. Neither detail has been confirmed by the studio, so hold the yellow boots for now.
Then there’s the Tintin news, which is the real surprise. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn came out in 2011, with Steven Spielberg directing, Jackson producing, Jamie Bell as Tintin and Serkis as Captain Haddock. It took about $374 million worldwide, and the plan was always that the two men would swap seats for a second film. Fifteen years of “soon” followed. Hergé’s boy reporter is famously almost never seen filing a story, so it’s fitting that his sequel has spent a decade and a half on a deadline nobody enforces.
Jackson didn’t say which album the script adapts, or whether Spielberg, Bell or Serkis are involved. The two-parter The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun has long been the fans’ favourite for the job, since The Secret of the Unicorn was itself a mash-up of three books. For now, though, that is speculation rather than announcement. Nor has he given a production date. “Next film” from a man who has just spent months in a mo-cap volume with a swamp-dwelling murderer might reasonably mean 2028.
The most charming detail from Sitges is the one most of the trades skipped. Asked what made him want to make films, Jackson named King Kong, which he eventually remade, and Thunderbirds. So the man who gave the world the Battle of the Pelennor Fields learned his trade from Gerry Anderson’s puppets, which explains a great deal about his love of miniatures. If Tintin 2 turns out to have a scene where Haddock is rescued by a large green rescue craft trundling out from behind a row of collapsing palm trees, now you know who to blame.
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