The Unexpected Party news

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[Updated] The full transcript is now on the Weta site

Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro had their wee online chat about The Hobbit and The !?!?! - here's the bits I think are interesting. Note: I only managed to get up at 8:15am so missed a few questions/answers (I joined from about questions 16 ...)


Will Ian McKellen return as Gandalf?
Guillermo_del_Toro: Absolutely!!
Peter_Jackson: Hi Robbie - absolutely


When do you expect filming to begin?
Peter_Jackson: ... the plan is to write for the rest of this year and start early conceptual designs. 2009 will be dedicated to pre-production on both movies and 2010 will be the year we shoot both films back to back. Post productin follows one film at a time with The Hobbit being released Dec 2011, and F2 release Dec 2012. That is the schedule in about as much detail as we have ourselves at the moment


Will the two movies be shot at the same time?
Peter_Jackson: Hi Shane - Yes the movies will be shot back to back and the shooting of the movie will be driven by which actors are working with us at a given time and what locations we are in. For instance, if we are shooting hObbiton scenes for Hobbit movies we would also shoot Hobbiton scenes for F2. So during our year of filming we will be shooting both movies at the same time out of sequence.


And then I had to leave because of family commitments ... I'm sure there'll be oodles of blogs with the stuff on somewhere:

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