The web site Weta Holics held a chat session with Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro where the executive producer and director (respectively) of the two upcoming movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (the book that came before The Lord of the Rings).

Peter Jackson	Guillermo del Toro

In the chat, Jackson and del Toro answered questions from fans and talked about their approach to the two "prequels" to the highly successful epic Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies.

Close to 6,000 fans asked almost 4,000 questions before the chat started and then asked another one question per second during the hour the chat was running. In other words, a total of over 7,000 questions. Several people (not least Peter and Guillermo) worked hard to sift through the questions and in the end answered 60 questions. One for every minute. We do of course regret that we didn't get to all questions, but hopefully we can have more chats in the future.

The full transcript of that chat appears in the Read link below. There is too much to repeat here, so definitely check out the site if you want to get all the great details, but here are some of the highlights:

• The first installment will cover the events of the book, and the second installment will fill in the 60 year gap between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring.
• Casting has not begun, but any actor from the LOTR trilogy is welcome to reprise their roles and will be written into at least one of the movies.
• The tone of the Hobbit movies will reflect that it was a time of innocence before darkness started to fall upon Middle Earth.
• The dragon Smaug will get special treatment and will represent the definitive depiction of a dragon in any movie made to date.
• Howard Shore will be back to do the score.
• When asked about LOTR coming out on Blu-ray, Peter Jackson said that they are working with Warner Bros. on the Blu-ray editions, but it will certainly not be released this year.

For the rest of the details, check out the Read link!

For more great stuff related to The Hobbit movies, be sure to check out the conversation Guillermo del Toro had with fan site TheOneRing.net.