by Neil Daniels
Time’s Richard Corliss wrote, ‘The Pirates!, for all its vagrant appeal, isn’t in that exalted category; it lacks urgency and coherence. The movie is like a pirate without a parrot, Darwin without Natural Selection, Wallace without Gromit.’
LA Times’s Kenneth Turan enthused, ‘The twists and turns of the Pirates plot are many, but hanging on for the duration is a pleasure. The visual treats are many, including random signage (“Live Sports: Urchin Throwing, Cockney Baiting” reads one) and a clever riff on movie maps that illustrate nautical progress.’
The New York Times reported it was: ‘More eccentric than whimsical, Band of Misfits is set in a somewhat louder, rowdier key than some of Aardman’s earlier charmers. It’s the first of the studio’s stop-motion features to be shot in digital and the first shot in 3-D, developments that some Aardman purists may find the outrageous equivalent of Bob Dylan going electric or David Fincher going digital.’
A short film was also released on 13 August called So You Want To Be A Pirate! which features the voices of Freeman, Hugh Grant, Brian Blessed, David Tennant and Russell Tovey.
Freeman also had a part in an almost forgotten half-English, half-Spanish fantasy film called Animals, co-written and directed by Marçal Forés, best known for his work on a BBC pilot (‘The Things I Haven’t Told You’) that never became a series. The film is about a teenager named Pol who lives with his brother and is still at school. He has a fairly ordinary life but he has a secret – his cuddly teddy bear, Deerhoof, can think, talk and move. Pol shares his secrets with him. The school that he attends sees the arrival of a student called Ikari, who is an elusive somewhat enigmatic character with something to hide. Pol is intrigued by Ikari and his interest in his new classmate sparks off a series of dark and disturbing events that turn his life from the ordinary into the extraordinary. It was released in Spain on 22 October 2012.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Neil Young wrote of the film, ‘A self-satisfied slice of quirky Catalan cool, Animals boasts flashes of brilliance but squanders considerable potential on a waywardly sophomoric script. Sales prospects for the slick-looking feature debut of Barcelona’s Marçal Forés are boosted by a photogenic young cast, the large amount of English-language dialogue and the unexpected presence in a supporting role of popular British star Martin Freeman – Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming Hobbit trilogy. But while combining Ted and Donnie Darko – with touches of Afterschool and Ghost World – sounds like a promising concept on paper, the results are too strenuously weird for anything other than marginal youth interest.’
Variety’s Jonathan Holland wrote, ‘Troubled teens and a talking teddy bear populate the bizarre world of Animals, Catalan helmer Marçal Forés’ shimmering, ambitious debut. This stylishly wrought item shuttles between fantasy and realism a la Donnie Darko in its exploration of its protag’s problematic emotional life, although too much of the lead character’s delicate, self-regarding preciousness spills over into the film itself. But while the last half-hour has an anything-goes air, there’s still enough verve and quality in the early reels – including some wonderfully dreamy atmospherics – to suggest that Forés is one to watch. Limited fest pickups are likely.’
Freeman’s role in the film came as a surprise to many fans and to this day it remains something of an oddity in his arsenal of movies.
DVD Talk’s Tyler Foster wrote of the DVD release, ‘Animals is a frustrating film, packed to the brim with symbolism that director Marçal Forés has trouble stringing into a cohesive story. Watching the trailer, the film looks like a bizarre dark fantasy which has no boundaries, pitching Pol’s emotional growth as the start of a rift between himself and the bear that turns bloody, but the actual movie is far more contained, trying to string together important bits of subtext into a portrait of teen angst. At times, the film touches on feelings that young people, especially gay teens, may find incredibly familiar, but Forés complicates his movie with too many subplots and additional ideas to explore, resulting in a murk that prevents the film from having much of a point.’
Does Freeman have an agenda when it comes to choosing roles? What inspires him as an actor?
‘It has to be something of interest to me, and I have to be able to bring something that interests me,’ he said to the Sunday Times’s Benji Wilson. ‘There has to be a story and a three dimensional aspect to the character.’
There’s always a chance of win or lose with every project. As with any freelance endeavour, the chances of success can be fifty-fifty.
He spoke to Nerd Repository’s Kyle Wilson about the gamble that is acting full-time: ‘I think you just have to take a leap of faith as so many things are in life and so many jobs are a leap of faith because you’re not seeing the finished result. You can’t come in at the end and go, I knew The Godfather was going to X, Y and Z. On the way to making The Godfather, of course, it could have been many other things. It’s all a big leap of faith.’
Freeman ventured into another left-field project with a Radio 3 adaptation of B.S. Johnson’s 1960s ‘experimental’ novel, The Unfortunates. The author, now barely remembered, killed himself aged forty in 1973 as he struggled to gain commercial success. The Unfortunates was written in a stream of consciousness and published in 1969. Martin plays a sports writer who is sent to a city on an assignment but is soon faced with the ghosts of his past, notably that of a friend who tragically died of cancer. The character is something of an everyman, so it was perfect casting for Freeman, despite his reluctance to play such a part. The production edit saw the recording divided into eighteen sections and randomised before the broadcast and then placed on a ‘carousel’ on the Radio 3 website so listeners could choose at random.
‘I just thought it was an interesting idea,’ Freeman said to the Daily Telegraph’s Olly Grant. ‘I hadn’t heard of the book before. Or of B.S. Johnson. But I liked the idea of a book being published in no particular order, and of applying that to a radio version.’
The book’s shapelessness has been played up in an intriguing way.
‘They did it like an FA Cup draw,’ he explains. ‘They put the chapters on little wooden balls and then drew them out [one by one] to get a random result.’
Rachel Cooke wrote in The Guardian, ‘Although I’m always slightly confused by the concept of drama on Radio 3 (I mean, why?), I enjoyed listening to it. Freeman was just right; his bewildered mildness captured perfectly the tone of the book, which is sometimes comic, sometimes elusive, and occasionally very affecting.’
The big news of 2012 was that Freeman had been cast as Bilbo Baggins, the lead character, in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which is the first one in a three-part film adaptation of the 1937 novel The Hobbit by the late fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien, who created The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is a prequel to director Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
The New Zealand director had made his name on a series of ‘splatstick’ (a combination of slapstick comedy and blood-andgore) horror comedies such as Bad Taste and Braindead before moving onto such Hollywood blockbusters as King Kong and, obviously, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His name is now in the same ranks as James Cameron and Steven Spielberg as one of the most successful film-makers of all time.
It truly hit home that Martin Freeman was cast as Bilbo Baggins when people congratulated him on the street in London. It was the first time he’d ever been recognised for a job he had not yet done. It then took months to get the make-up and attire fitted for the part. It was a gradual process of getting his feet sized up, the plaster cast made for his head and ears and so on.
The massively successful film trilogy had already grown into a billion-dollar empire; the third part, The Return of the King, won the Best Picture Oscar in 2003. Jackson was desperate to return to Middle Earth with much of the same cast and crew. The journey to the big screen would be a long and laborious one.
The screenplay was written by Jackson with his long-time collaborators Fran Walsh (Jackson’s partner), Phil
ippa Boyens and director Guillermo del Toro, who was originally slated to direct the film (with Jackson as producer) before quitting the project – due to delays and financial problems – in 2010 after working on the planned two-film project for two years. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is set in Middle Earth years before the events of The Lord of the Rings took place. The film expands on the original book with portions adapted from the 125-page appendices and footnotes of The Return of the King, the third novel of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The 1937 novel was originally conceived for children and offers none of the dark adventures of The Lord of the Rings but rather a more gentle fantasy adventure. Said footnotes and appendices were published over twenty years after the original publication of The Hobbit and were known only among the series’s most eager aficionados.
Peter Jackson explained his reasons for including the extra angles at the 2012 Comic-Con: ‘In these appendices, he did talk about what happened, and it was a lot darker and more serious than what’s written in The Hobbit. Also, to be quite 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 of tone. I don’t want to make a purely children’s story, followed by The Lord of the Rings. We are providing a balance. A lot of the comedy and the charm and the fairy tale quality of The Hobbit comes from the characters.’
It was during this time that series two of Sherlock was being filmed. The schedules of both Freeman and Cumberbatch proved difficult for the writers and even Moffat (the head writer of Doctor Who) and Gatiss were very busy themselves.
‘Yes, it is true he nearly turned down The Hobbit because he was already committed to the second series of Sherlock,’ said actor Amanda Abbington, his long-term partner of twelve years, in an article by Cheryl Stonehouse of the Daily Express. ‘Martin is never fazed by anything. He’s never star-struck. He’s a very talented man but he never forgets where real life is. A commitment is a commitment.’
Freeman is very loyal to Sherlock. He didn’t want to turn down The Hobbit and he could have left Sherlock but he didn’t want to because he loves the series and is very proud of it.
‘… the BBC weren’t making it particularly easy for me to negotiate,’ he admitted to the Sunday Times’s Benji Wilson. ‘They weren’t going, “Yeah, fine.” They were going, “No. We wanna do this, we wanna do it now.” I remember the conversation with my agent, and I was saying, “Are we going to have to let The Hobbit go?” and he went, “Yeah, I think we are.”’
The delays in production and the financial issues that had delayed The Hobbit seemed to work in Freeman’s favour, though by the time the film was given the official green light, Freeman had signed on for the second series of Sherlock. It was on, off, on again and off because it seemed like it would clash with shooting Sherlock. Martin was enormously disappointed, as was Jackson.
‘I met Peter in England and spent the afternoon with him while the World Cup was on,’ Freeman explained to UK Ask Men’s Jamie Watt. ‘He was about as normal as you can be, and I appreciated the fact that he understood my misgivings about being away from home for so long. I really wanted to do the film, and when it looked like I had to walk away from the role because of Sherlock, that wasn’t a very amusing scenario. But, you know, these things happen and I put that behind me and I just hoped that I was going to hate it when it came out.’
Six weeks away from the shoot, Jackson still hadn’t signed anyone; he was thinking of other actors but Freeman was his main choice. He was stressed and having sleepless nights. An avid Sherlock fan, Peter Jackson was so keen to cast Freeman as Bilbo Baggins that he fitted the film’s production around the actor’s schedule.
‘Martin was the only person that we wanted for that role, and that was really before we met Martin,’ Jackson told reporters at a press event in New York. ‘We knew him from [the BBC’s] The Office and Hitchhiker’s Guide [to the Galaxy], and we just felt he had qualities that would be perfect for Bilbo. The stuffy, repressed English quality. He’s a dramatic actor, he’s not a comedian, but he has a talent for comedy.’
If Jackson didn’t have enough clout in Hollywood, the studio would never have accepted the change in schedule because Freeman was not a big enough name yet. But Jackson and his creative team were adamant that Martin was the man for the role.
‘Peter moved heaven and earth for me so when I got to New Zealand to begin filming I felt very welcome and loved,’ said Freeman to the Daily Telegraph’s John Hiscock. ‘It was a huge compliment to me, but I think there are plenty of other actors who could have given Bilbo a go – I’m not the only one.’
Ships like this don’t sail very often and Freeman, at this stage in his career, was willing to move away from his family for a short while for the chance of progressing his career. He was truly gutted when he thought he had to turn the part down.
Martin was aware of the extensive online campaign to get him the part in the first place. It was humbling if slightly odd.
‘I have enough faith in Peter to know,’ he told Dark Horizons’ Garth Franklin. ‘I know that he’s… ’Cause he’s said to me about other things he’s done, where he’s taken maybe too much notice of what was happening on the Internet, and actually been given a bum steer. I think he’s learned from that. We can all look at the Internet and go, “He hates me! Oh, but she loves me. Oh, but he hates me…” you know. That way, madness lies. So I think yeah, it’s very nice, it’s gratifying that people wanted me to be in it. But they didn’t get me the job.’
What was it about Freeman that made Jackson so passionate that he was a perfect fit for the part?
‘I think he saw a strange looking bloke with an odd face,’ Freeman joked to Hampshire Life’s Frank Grice. ‘Quite a small, round face and someone who would fit the ears. Honestly, I genuinely don’t know. I’m not being cute with that answer; I don’t know what he saw. Hopefully, he thinks I’m quite good, and so could do it, I hope.’
He added, ‘I think, sometimes, you got to be careful what you wish for. Of course we all want to be told we’re brilliant in various ways. And then, if someone thinks were brilliant for a reason we find unflattering, then we’d rather not hear it.’
The problem of schedule conflicts was solved. Jackson flew Freeman to New Zealand for four months on The Hobbit before sending him back to England for two months on Sherlock. It meant that the director spent longer on editing and was able to make adjustments to the film, which he would not have been able to do otherwise. Jackson called Freeman, who at the time was rehearsing in London, to tell him the film was back on. Martin was enormously flattered that Jackson had gone to so much effort.
‘To be fair, Sherlock wasn’t really budging, the BBC weren’t really budging so Peter Jackson budged and rearranged the entire shooting schedule of The Hobbit so I could do both. Which is very flattering and very lucky for me,’ Freeman explained to the University Observer’s Steven Balbirnie. ‘So it meant that I could film some of The Hobbit and have downtime to go and do Sherlock series two and come back to The Hobbit. It’s amazing that I got to do both.’
If it wasn’t for Sherlock, Freeman would have had to have spent eighteen months working on The Hobbit, which would have made time with his family rather difficult, but he and his partner, Abbie Abbington, knew that either way he could not turn it down. Freeman has worked on other films that he loves more but none of them would end up making a billion dollars at the box office. That sort of opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Only a crank would turn it down.
‘His heart ached a little bit,’ Abbington told the Daily Mail’s Vicky Power regarding Martin spending time away from his family. ‘But we know the film is going to be huge. He does get stressed, though. Sometimes he rings me up at 7am to say, “I’ve been covered in crap, hanging upside down and I’ve got bloody ears on.” But he knows it’s for the greater good and he does it with a smile.’
Freeman did not get into acting because he wanted his name on billboards, movie
posters and to be on TV chat shows. He chose to be an actor because of films such as the classic Dog Day Afternoon with Al Pacino, one of Freeman’s acting heroes. It’s not about the size or scale of a film, it’s about the story and characters. If the size of the film is huge but the script is poor, he’s not interested but, if it is a good solid script, then he’s game. He’ll do his best to serve the story. He’s not concerned about how big he is in it but rather how good he is.
The Hobbit was a potentially huge film but with a strong script. The one thing he learned from accepting The Hobbit was not to be so reticent about taking on roles outside of his comfort zone.
‘Being an actor is just like being any other sort of self-employed person – we’re all just happy to have a job in the first place, but we also thrive off the uncertainty of it,’ Freeman admitted to UK’s Ask Men’s Jamie Watt. ‘I didn’t see any of my previous roles coming either. With film, there’s art and then there’s scale, and some people, like Peter, are able to marry the two of those together brilliantly. I honestly wouldn’t give a fuck about these movies if they were just about scale, but you actually care about the characters in these films.’
When it was officially announced that Freeman had landed the part, fans were ecstatic. He was just the right actor for the job. His friend Simon Pegg, a science-fiction and fantasy nut, laughed that Freeman would have to do the gruelling convention circuit.
‘Martin’s the anti-me: a soul aficionado and a vinyl junkie – absolutely not a resident of the geek universe. Not the type of person who will relish the attention he’ll get for being Bilbo Baggins. Ha!’ Pegg told The Observer’s Tom Lamont.
As with The Lord of the Rings films, The Hobbit movies were produced back–to-back over an eighteen-month period with principal photography commencing on 21 March 2011 in Jackson’s native New Zealand. Filming ended after 266 days on 6 July 2012. Pick-ups (minor filming to augment a scene) for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey took place in July. Freeman enjoyed the experience of filming in New Zealand and he was certainly appreciative of it but he missed his family, London, his tailor, his record collection and Bar Italia. He told Flicks And Bits in 2013 that ‘It was lovely. I had never been to New Zealand before. It’s as far you can go from London before you fall off the world [laughs]. I knew a couple of the cast loosely from London, obviously my old mate Benedict, but I didn’t know anybody well at first.’