Oscar-winning director admits he was ‘winging it’ and ‘was making it up as I went along’ for much of the fantasy trilogy’s chaotic shoot

Peter Jackson has revealed he began filming his blockbuster Hobbit trilogy without proper preparation, in many cases shooting scenes without storyboards and completed scripts in a process he described as “making it up as I went along”.

In the remarkably candid behind-the-scenes featurette from the Battle of Five Armies DVD, the Oscar-winning New Zealander details the radical shift in preparation time between previous JRR Tolkien trilogy The Lord of the Rings, which he had three and a half years to prepare, and its sequel saga. Jackson took over directing duties in 2010 following the departure of Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, and according to his comments in the new video had almost no time at all to prepare his vision before shooting began and he found himself plunged into 21-hour days.

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“Because Guillermo Del Toro had to leave and I jumped in and took over, we didn’t wind the clock back a year and a half and give me a year and a half prep to design the movie, which was different to what he was doing,” reveals Jackson. “It was impossible, and as a result of it being impossible I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all.

“You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot […] I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it […] even from a script point of view Fran [Walsh], Philippa [Boyens] and I hadn’t got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction so that was a very high pressure situation.”

The chaotic state of affairs on set in New Zealand helps explain why The Battle of Five Armies was pushed back by five months in 2013, from a July 2014 release date to its final December 2014 slot. Jackson explains he “winged it” right up until the film’s climactic battle but was eventually forced to concede that production would have to be called to a halt while he worked out how to shoot it.

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“We had allowed two months of shooting for that in 2012, and at some point when we were approaching that I went to our producers and the studio and said: ‘Because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing now, because I haven’t got storyboards and prep, why don’t we just finish earlier?’

“And so what that delay gives you is time for the director to clear his head and have some quiet time for inspiration to come about the battle, and start to really put something together.”

While Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy scored close to $3bn worldwide, it was not a critical hit on the scale of its predecessor. Some fans complained over the decision to split Tolkien’s breezy 293-page fantasy fable into three epic movies with a total running time of almost eight hours, and The Battle of the Five Armies was the saga’s worst-reviewed film with a barely-fresh 60% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.