“It’s very premature. I mean we have an incredible source material with the appendices because ‘The Hobbit’ is obviously a novel but we also have the rights to use this 125 pages of additional notes where Tolkien expanded the world of ‘The Hobbit’ published at the end of ‘Return of the King’ and we’ve used some of it so far and just in the last few weeks as we’ve been wrapping up the shooting and thinking about the shape of the story, Fran and I have been talking to the studio about other things we haven’t been able to shoot and seeing if we persuade them to do a few more weeks of shooting, probably more than a few weeks actually, next year. And what form that would actually end up taking, well the discussions are pretty early. So there isn’t really anything to report but there’s other parts of the story that we’d like to tell that we haven’t been able to tell yet.

“We’ve used more source material than ‘The Hobbit.’ For instance in ‘The Hobbit’ when Gandalf mysteriously disappears for chapters, it was never really explained where he’s gone. Much later Tolkien filled in those details. In these appendices he did talk about what happened. And it was all together a lot darker and more serious than what is written in ‘The Hobbit’. And also to be honest I want to make a series of movies that run together so if any crazy lunatic wants to watch them all in a row there will be a consistency to it, a consistency of tone.

“So I don’t want to make a children’s story to go into ‘The Lord of the Rings’ so we are providing a balance. I mean a lot of the comedy and the charm comes from the characters. You’re dealing with Bilbo Baggins who is a bit more reluctant to go on an adventure than Frodo was and with Dwarves who have a personality and camaraderie all of their own, so there’s a lot of humor but there are still some serious themes involved.”