Hobbit drama news alert: Peter Jackson says he got some decidedly mixed messages about potential involvement in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings show, The Rings Of Power, over the last few years.

This is per THR, which reports on a recent podcast conversation it had with the Lord Of The Rings filmmaker, in which he revealed that Amazon had originally reached out to him about potentially getting involved in its massively expensive adaptation of the Tolkien canon—and then ghosted him.

Jackson: “They asked me if I wanted to be involved—[writer-producer Fran Walsh] and I—and I said, ‘That’s an impossible question to answer without seeing a script.

So they said, ‘As soon as we get the first couple scripts, we’ll send them to you.’

And the scripts never showed up. That’s the last thing I heard.”

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To be clear, Jackson—who expressed his enjoyment at the idea of approaching the show as a “totally neutral viewer”—didn’t sound upset about how it all shook out: “Which is fine. No complaints at all.”

Read more: AV Club