Taika Waititi, a New Zealand filmmaker and actor, appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night. Waititi shared a Hobbit-sized secret regarding the second film in the popular film franchise directed by Peter Jackson.
Taika Waititi shared, “When I did What We Do in the Shadows when Jermaine and I were shooting that, we didn’t have much money to do that film, and The Hobbit had just wrapped. And, so, our production designer– man, I don’t know if I should tell this. Okay, but I will. Our production designer, in the dead of night, took his crew to The Hobbit studios and stole all of the dismantled, broken-down green screens and took all of the Timber, and we built a house.”
Taika Waititi admitted that the house in his 2014 film What We Do in the Shadows was built from The Hobbit’s green screen and Timber. There was about a $200 million budget difference between Jackson’s second Hobbit film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows, which as Waititi pointed out, had already wrapped, so Jackson probably did not care. Although, according to Taika Waititi, Jackson also likely doesn’t know.
“I had never talked to Peter Jackson about this. I don’t know if he knows. I like telling it at parties, that story. But I don’t know if he actually knows,” admitted Taika Waititi.
