We’ve been on a journey with Peter Jackson since Amazon announced it was pouring 500 million damn dollars into an upcoming Lord of the Rings show earlier this year. Jackson, of course, directed the very successful, very influential Lord of the Rings movie trilogy for New Line Cinema back in the early 2000s, so when the world learned Amazon was returning to Middle-earth, his name inevitably came up.
And it kept coming up as Jackson waffled back and forth on whether he was involved at all with the show. His latest word on the subject came from an interview with French outlet AlloCiné. “I’m not involved at all with the Lord of the Rings series,” he said. “I understand my name can be quoted, but nothing is happening with me on this project.”
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Well, that’s pretty clear…or is it? Speaking to Metro alongside longtime screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens (who worked with him on the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Jackson sung a slightly different tune.
"I don’t have thoughts on [the Amazon series] because I haven’t seen [anything], I think they’re going to send us some scripts to see if we can help them along…I wish them all the best and if we can help them we certainly will try…It’s a big task."
Jackson also noted that he couldn’t work on Amazon’s series in the recent past because he was busy with Universal’s adaptation of Mortal Engines, a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic world where the great cities of the world have engines and move around the world assimilating other settlements. Jackson produced the movie and wrote the screenplay with Boyens and Fran Walsh, another of his longtime collaborators. But now that the movie is opening (it hits U.S. theaters December 14), we suppose anything is possible.
Thus far, Amazon has mostly kept information about its Lord of the Rings show under wraps, although we have learned that 1) it’s costing a whole hell of lot of money; and 2) it’s probably about the adventures of a Young Aragorn. We get why Amazon would want to look for Jackson to guidance, but there’s wisdom in what Boyens says, too. “Fresh eyes on that story is such a good thing to do,” she told Metro. “So I’m excited to see what they come up with.”
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