Peter Jackson’s long goodbye to Middle-earth — and his Five armies cameo

at 3:02 am by - January 3, 20153:02 am by Demosthenes

Stuff.co.nz has this nice little piece about Peter Jackson, including his cameo in The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies.

Given how long he has been hanging around Middle-earth, it’s easy to imagine that Peter Jackson finds it hard to say goodbye.

In the end credits of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the Oscar-winning director includes the ballad The Last Goodbye – sung by his Lord of the Rings star Billy Boyd – as a way to honour the many fans of his six adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s magical world over the past decade and a half.

A more subtle farewell, however, occurs just before that, when Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) returns home after his quest to help the dwarves retake their mountainous kingdom and rehangs the portraits of his parents above his fireplace.

It’s a callback to the original from 2001, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, when those paintings – of a beardless Jackson and his partner, producer Fran Walsh, done in 1998 – first appeared.

“Everybody always asks me about what’s my cameo,” Jackson says. “And that painting is my final cameo in these films.”

The filmmaker was 37 when the cameras started rolling on Fellowship in 1999, and now, at 53, Jackson finds it hard to pinpoint how his life has changed in the lifespan of his Middle-earth movies.

[Read More]

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