Now actor Jed Brophy, who played the dwarf Nori, argues that Warner Bros. interference is responsible for the uninspired nature of the films. “[The 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 Bros. kind of got in the way of Peter and The Hobbit.” To be fair, rumors of studio interference have swirled around the production for ages, but this is one of the most direct admissions of that fact in quite some time.
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Many fans believed that Peter Jackson was working on tight deadlines and strict rules from Warner Bros. that prevented him from achieving his true vision, and Brophy seems to agree. “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. If you get in the way of that process, you’re actually stopping someone from actually getting a flow on. 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.”
Of course the projects troubles began before Jackson took over, with Guillermo del Toro stepping down as director early on, reportedly due in part to conflicts between himself and the studio which was struggling to figure out how to handle the business side of things. The whole series of events, and the films themselves are a stark reminder of how corporate indecision can have lasting effects on the overall quality of a film, and hopefully those involved took that lesson to heart.
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Source: Digital Spy
