Nori seems like a pretty chill dwarf, and so does his actor Jed Brophy. The chill part, not the dwarf. And yet, it seems like even the chillest dude has his limits. Especially in the face of interference from on high.
Jed Brophy recently offered his opinion as to why The Hobbit trilogy was such a critical failure. At least, compared to the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His view? It was Warner Bros. meddling in The Hobbit‘s production that ultimately caused it to be of lower quality than the original trilogy. To quote from Brophy himself:
They [studios] get in the way… I may be speaking out of turn here, and probably if those people ever find me I’ll get slammed, but I think that Warner Brothers kind of got in the way of Peter and The Hobbit… None of them are people that can actually look at a script and in their head imagine how you can actually get the best drama out of that. And if you get in the way of that process you’re actually stopping someone from actually getting a flow on, and that’s what I think happened, that’s what I could see happening is that there was not that same flow.
Now, Peter would see stuff on Lord of the Rings and get this amazing idea about how he could shoot the next scene from stuff that was already happening on set, but if you’ve got people dictating what your day is going to be then that stops it.
The Hobbit: If It Wasn’t For That Meddling Studio
It probably didn’t help that when Peter Jackson started directing The Hobbit trilogy, Warner Bros. didn’t give him much time to do it. The reason for this? Apparently, Guillermo del Toro was originally going to direct the first Hobbit film. However, Del Toro left production rather abruptly due to financial problems with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer: one of the companies producing The Hobbit. Peter Jackson now suddenly had to direct The Hobbit, with basically zero prep beforehand. Jackson actually had this to say once upon a time in 2015:
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 I was going to make, which was different to what he was doing…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.
So yeah, we got The Hobbit due to a combination of studio meddling and Peter Jackson having to direct The Hobbit with virtually no notice. What’s even more amazing is that the film was as watchable as it even was. I think it speaks more to Jackson’s directing skills than anything good about the film. Or films, really.
Conclusion
Jed Brophy, the actor behind Nori the dwarf, publicly puts the blame on Warner Bros. for The Hobbit trilogy’s rather…lackluster performance in the critics department. To be fair, while that might’ve been part of the problem, it probably wasn’t the whole problem. The rather unusual circumstances behind the development could’ve done that too. At the very least though, it does prove that Peter Jackson is a fantastic director. It’s just a shame that it was only his skills that kept The Hobbit trilogy from completely bombing.
Source: JoBlo.com
