Peter Jackson talks Del Toro’s influence on The Hobbit

Long before the Hobbit was announced to be a trilogy and before Peter Jackson was set to direct it another director was set to be the director: Guillermo Del Toro.
Having created such iconic movies as Pan’s Labyrinth and having managed to capture a magical mysterious atmosphere with Hellboy II Del Toro seemed like a fantastic way to bring a new spin to Middle-Earth. And while I am very happy with Peter Jackson I can’t help to mourn the loss of a Del Toro helmed Hobbit. In an interview with io9 Peter Jackson is now talking about Del Toro’s influence:

[Guillermo] had designed a lot of the movie . . . I looked at his designs when he took over and a lot of his designs are very Guillermo . . . it was very much stuff that you would recognize from Pan’s Labyrinth or Hellboy. It was his artistic vision and I couldn’t make that movie. I looked at his designs and I said the only person who can make a Guillermo Del Toro movie is Guillermo. It shouldn’t be me. I can’t put my head into somebody else’s idea — I have to generate it from the beginning. So really I redesigned the film pretty much. Some of Guillermo’s DNA is in there — there were some things he did that I thought were pretty cool and I’ve taken bits of pieces of his stuff — kind of altering it and changing it as I saw it. But the film was largely redesigned.

I wonder if we will ever see the original desings and what might have been in store for us.