14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that Viggo Montensen played one of the leading roles in Peter Jackson's award-winning trilogy “Lord of the Rings,” that doesn't mean that he's necessarily a fan. It's quite the opposite actually, and the actor isn't afraid to dish out some criticism to the director in an interview with The Telegraph.
In his view, only the first “Lord of the Rings” movie was really any good, whereas the second and third film were “sloppy” and would have gone straight to video, were it not for an intense session of expensive re-shoots which Jackson managed to score, banking on the success of the first movie.
“Anybody who says they knew it [Lord of the Rings] was going to be the success it was, I don't think it's really true,” says Viggo, pointing out that this didn't happen until 20 minutes of footage from the first film were shown at Cannes, in May 2001.
Viggo explains why, in his opinion, the following films didn't have the required depth, “In the first movie, yes, there's Rivendell, and Mordor, but there's sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it's grittier.”
“The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it's like that to the power of 10,” the actor continues, taking his battle with Jackson's newest trilogy.
He claims that Peter Jackson's obsession with big-budget movies followed his next projects too, titles like “King Kong” and “The Lovely Bones,” but at least “he's happy, I think.”
It's clear then that Viggo is not a fan of the way the Tolkien books were turned into films, but he does acknowledge that the success he scored with “Lord of the Rings” has allowed him his own pick of scripts in the following years.
“It's true, I was getting an awful lot of offers, mainly bad scripts. All of a sudden I had options. But now, more than ever, I was thinking I should do what I'd always done, which was to find a good story, something I wouldn't be embarrassed to see in the cinema,” the actor explains.
It will be interesting to wait and see the response Peter Jackson has to give to this quite frankly devastating portrayal of his films and his work. While Mortensen in known as a no-nonsense kind of guy, Jackson has managed to sway many a fan in his favor with his work.