I Am DB

Okay, I promise that I won’t post every entry in this video blog series, but despite its presence all over the web today, how could I not highlight Peter Jackson’s first video from the set of The Hobbit?

Obviously I was excited about The Hobbit finally becoming reality, but seeing this video has me nostalgic for 2001-2003 and already gives me confidence that the passage of time will not have dulled Jackson’s magic Middle Earth touch. When it was announced some years ago that The Hobbit was going to be filmed but Peter Jackson was not going to direct it – opting only to co-write the script and oversee the film as its producer and creative godfather – I was of course disappointed. Any fan of his Lord of the Rings films would have been. Although Guillermo del Toro was a worthy successor, it just wouldn’t be the same without Jackson in the director’s chair. When, after working on pre-production for two years, del Toro left the project amidst the legal and financial complexities that had ensnared it like Frodo in Shelob’s web, I naturally hoped Jackson would step in himself to direct.

But when he finally announced that he would, I found myself feeling worried. I was worried that for whatever reason, Jackson’s heart wasn’t really in it. It seemed like he was agreeing to direct because that was the easiest way to get the movie made at that stage. But I didn’t want him to feel he was forced into it. I didn’t want him to feel he was just going through the motions. My happiness at having him back in charge outweighed my concerns, but there seemed to be a bit of a pall over the project. The troubles Jackson had to endure before production could even start – mainly a contentious battle between acting unions in which The Hobbit was used as a bargaining chip and which nearly led to the films being made outside of New Zealand, not to mention Jackson’s hospitalization for emergency stomach surgery – only created more of a feeling that this whole project was more trouble to Jackson than it was worth. The union issue was of course resolved and Jackson recovered from his surgery and got back to work, and we LOTR fans breathed a sigh of relief when production recently began. And now that it has, hearing Jackson say in this video that he originally didn’t think it was a good idea to try and return to the experience of Lord of the Rings but has since come around completely as production has loomed, well, that’s all I needed. My worry is gone, replaced by full throttle anticipation.

The road goes ever on…to December 2012.