The Hobbit's Peter Jackson on the Challenges of a Middle Film

Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, is currently engaging fans in an interactive, video Q&A on the Blu-ray site for The Hobbit. Open only to fans who have purchased the Blu-ray or Special Edition DVD with a digital download code for the movie via UltraViolet, part of the appeal is that he's answering questions from Twitter and YouTube, giving fans an opportunity to be seen and heard as part of the process. And one fan, who noted Jackson has been open in the past about the challenges of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, asked the filmmaker whether opening up the Hobbit seris from two films to three has created similar problems in finding the "emotional arc" of the newly-created middle film, this year's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. "It is complicated to do a middle film," Jackson admitted, adding, "but the advantage is that we have multiple storylines. The first of the Hobbit movies is a fairly linear film: Gandalf leads the Dwarves across Middle Earth at the beginning of this adventure. The great thing about the second movie--as it was with The Two Towers, actually--is that the story starts splitting into multiple storylines and we can follow different characters as the story intensifies and the stakes go up." He added that adding the extra film has allowed him to continue to flesh out the world of The Hobbit. Among other things, it gave him the opportunity to add Legolas to the story, and taking time with Stephen Fry's The Master in the world of Man. "There's a lot of ironic humor--a satiric edge to the master," Jackson said, noting that Stephen Fry seemed like an obvious choice. For Fry's part, he said he's unclear on whether he'll appear in the third movie as well, or just the second--a question to which Jackson responded by taking another fan question.