Steven Spielberg's 3D adaptation of Tintin is in the can, but it will be another two years before anyone sees the film due to the amount of post-production work involved, Peter Jackson has said.
Work will now start on transforming the raw footage into a finished film, explained the Lord of the Rings director, who is taking a producing credit on the project.
In London to attend the Royal gala premiere of new film The Lovely Bones tonight, Jackson told the BBC: "Tintin is great. It's made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film. So the movie, to some degree, exists in a very rough state."
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the first in a proposed trilogy, will feature the voice of Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell as the intrepid Belgian journalist, with regular Jackson collaborator Andy Serkis as the salty Captain Haddock. The initial plan was for Spielberg to direct the first movie, with Jackson taking the second and another unannounced film-maker the third, but studio Universal passed on the project last year, leading to a downscaling. The film will now come out under the auspices of Paramount and Sony. It is based on three Tintin books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.
Tintin will be shot in full 3D, but Jackson confirmed that his next project as a producer, The Hobbit, would not follow suit. "[Director] Guillermo [Del Toro] wants to shoot in 35mm, old-fashioned film," he said, "which
suits me, because he wants to keep it in the same space as the original trilogy".
The New Zealand film-maker said the aim was for the two Hobbit films and The Lord of the Rings to feel like part of the same cinematic universe, despite Del Toro being in the director's chair this time around.
"We're writing the screenplays with him, so in terms of the script, there is continuity," said Jackson, who directed and co-wrote all three Lord of the Rings films. "We're writing Ian McKellen's dialogue just the same as we
did in Lord of the Rings. But Guillermo, being the director, will obviously take the script and interpret that and shoot his film. So that'll be interesting to see.
"That's actually the reason I wanted him to do it. I felt like I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately do things differently, which is not the way I want to work. I want it to be natural."
The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling Alice Sebold book about a murdered 14-year-old girl who watches her family from heaven, is being tipped as an awards season favourite. It stars Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon and Mark Wahlberg.
