SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- Elijah Wood doubts he'll be there and back again for The Hobbit.
Although early reports indicated one of the two films being adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel would serve as a narrative bridge between The Hobbit and Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which Wood starred as Frodo Baggins, he says that's no longer the case.
"It's just simply The Hobbit," Wood says. "At the moment, I don't think they're doing a bridge film. I know they're finalizing the script and they're going to do two movies, but beyond that, I really don't know."
Guillermo del Toro, the gifted visualist behind Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy, is directing the back-to-back productions, which are being produced by Jackson. The mammoth shoot -- expected to last more than 300 days -- gets underway next year with the first film out in December 2011. The second is to follow in December 2012.
And Wood stresses, regardless of his participation in them, he's thrilled they're finally being made.
"For a long time, I thought they'd never make that film. I remember being on the set of Lord of the Rings and asking Peter Jackson, 'Would you ever do The Hobbit, because it's a amazing adventure story?' and he was too involved in the world of Lord of the Rings at the time to even conceive of (The Hobbit).
"I think it's a great story and is purely an adventure story that doesn't have some of the heaviness and weight that Lord of the Rings has, and I think Guillermo is perfect for it."
It's been almost a decade since Wood shot the Rings films in New Zealand. The three movies -- The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King -- went on to gross nearly $3 billion worldwide and claim 17 Oscars.
Understandably, he says that experience "holds such a dear place as a human being and an actor. It had such an impact on my life. When I think about the films, it evokes the memories of the human experience I had -- living in New Zealand for that length of time, making the friends that I made, the tours around the world we would take. I grew as a human being so much, and made such so many friends, and made this connection to New Zealand, which I love so much. All of those things are the things I think about, and they shaped my life."
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