Adaptation by Vague Recollection

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Faramir Jones

People here might find this interesting. In the UK newspaper The Guardian, on 19th November, there is a reference to a featurette in The Battle of Five Armies DVD, in which Peter Jackson admitted that, due to Guillermo Del Toro's departure, he 'started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all'.

He also said:

“You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot […] I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it ][…] even from a script point of view Fran [Walsh], Philippa [Boyens] and I hadn’t got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction so that was a very high pressure situation.”

If you would like to read more, here is the link:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015...ade-the-hobbit

It makes sense that there was nothing planned and the storyline devolved rather rapidly from the original plot to became sequence after sequence of chase scenes interspersed with combat, because actual drama and storytelling requires thought, whereas the former only requires camera angles and stuntmen that can be performed on the fly.