Peter Jackson discusses if he thought that he might be stuck with the Lord of the Rings territory forever:
Not really. When Guillermo (Del Toro) was working on it I was producing it and working on the script - I was enjoying it, I wasn't disliking it.
I thought it would be interesting to have a different sensibility directing the movie so you'd have somebody else's version of a Middle Earth story. But by the time Guillermo left and we were wondering what to do, I just thought, ‘Well, I can imagine the version of The Hobbit that I'd like to see'.
It's not necessarily the film he was going to make, but being part of the production for so long, at that point I'd sort of admitted to myself into the film to such a degree that it was fine to take over, I was completely OK with it. We've got largely the same crew and quite a few of the same cast, so it was a reunion of sorts, which was kind of fun.
The director goes to talk about how was the vibe between the actors:
Yeah. Everybody's gotten to know each other very, very well and the spirit's great. I just believe when you're shooting a movie to have the atmosphere on set be friendly, and focused on the work, but have some fun.
It's a long time to be getting up early in the morning and working 'til late at night - and if you're not enjoying it, you're not going to make a good film. There has to be a spirit on set amongst the cast and the crew that will ultimately rub off on the screen. We're having fun.
Jackson also talked a bit about the use of motion-capture on Tintin, and if the actors may have felt like he was putting them through some strange initiation ritual:
Well fortunately we had Andy Serkis on the cast and he's a motion-capture veteran. So he was very helpful in being able to ease his fellow cast-members into the process. But motion-capture acting is not anything other than performance, you're doing exactly the same thing you would normally do on a film.
It's an interesting process in the sense you don't appear as yourself - that's probably the thing that was amusing them more than anything. Because when you're doing motion-capture in the system that we use, when you look at a take played back on a screen you're seeing the animated characters; you're not seeing a human being, you're seeing a render of Tintin or Captain Haddock or the Thompson Twins.
On Tintin Sequels and the possibility of he directing one:
Well we're just taking them one at a time, but the film's certainly performed really great in the territories it's screened in so far. So I think that the studio's already pretty much got its heart set on a sequel.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and
The Hobbit: There and Back Again are coming on December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013, respectively! And
The Adventures of Tintin is now on theaters.