The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring came out in December of 2001 after an incredibly long, difficult, and hilariously complicated journey from JRR Tolkien’s pages to Peter Jackson’s camera. Making even a simple movie is very complex with a ton of moving pieces and The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a lot of moving pieces. Weta Workshop, the New Zealand based props and costume studio that has gone on to work on the biggest science fiction and fantasy movies of the 21st century, created thousands of models for the films from swords, armor pieces, and jewellery all the way up to entire forests and cities.
The trilogy is also noteworthy for essentially existing in two different formats: the theatrical edition which was released in theatres and the extended edition, which blew open the notion of a ‘director’s cut’ by adding nearly an hour of footage to each movie and making them more or less essential. (Though I could do without the Wall of Skulls scene from Return of the King.) The Extended Editions also included a truly ludicrous amount of behind the scenes footage, with each film including enough supplementary material to make three feature-length documentaries about the making of each film. Add The Internet to the equation and you get a truly insane amount of available information into the making of one of the greatest achievements in film ever.
I love these films and have seen both them and their documentaries a ton and I’m still was able to find a bunch of information I had no idea about. Here it is, in a handy list, numbered completely arbitrarily for ease of navigation.
Also spoilers? I guess? For some movies you should really watch.
25 A Battle Was Shot On A Real Battlefield
The last big confrontation between the Forces of Good and Sauron’s Army takes place in the land out front of The Black Gate, where everything important is capitalised. To achieve the look of a blasted wasteland trampled over by thousands of soldiers, the film crew used an actual blasted wasteland.
The final battle scene, the one with hundreds of extras and extremely expensive actors riding extremely expensive horses in extremely expensive costumes jumping up and down and running around everywhere, was filmed on a minefield. In a behind the scenes video, Viggo Mortensen recalls the Army coming over to set one day and explaining what all the unexploded ordnance lying around looks like, and advising every not to touch any of it. Karl Urban, who plays Eomer, recalls seeing the fins of a bomb sticking out of the ground. Way to make a tense set even worse.
24 Original Aragon Didn’t Last A Day
Unfortunately, scheduling isn’t the only factor in finding the right actor for the part. Stuart Townsend was originally cast to play Aragorn and even spent weeks in training for the part but, on the first day of shooting, Jackson realized he was not the right fit. Townsend was too young, is the common answer, but I think the real reason is that he just wasn’t Viggo Mortensen.
Something tells me Townsend wouldn’t have camped outside
Mortensen was practically an unknown in Hollywood, a Danish/American actor known for deep character roles like his turn as an Amish farmer in Witness. Mortensen wasn’t going to accept the role at all until his teenage son convinced him to take the part. Things worked out for Viggo’s kid, too: he was a research assistant on the film and played an Orc in the last battle.
23 Viggo Mortensen Is Tougher Than You
Mortensen would go on to be a colourful addition to the cast and, for my money, exemplifies the rough-and-tumble way the movie was shot better than anyone else.
How to method act as a man who never existed
In the battle of Amon Hen at the end of Fellowship, Aragorn leaps off a ruin into a group of Uruk-hai. Viggo filmed the jump himself and broke one of his front teeth in half in the process. Later, when Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas believe Merry and Pippen to be dead, Mortensen finally nailed his cry of anger and pain after kicking one of the Uruk-hai helmets and falling to his knees. The pain was real: he broke his toe when he kicked the helmet and channeled it into his scream.
22 Sean Bean Is Too
Speaking of someone who got way too into their role, Sean Bean also went the extra mile in his portrayal of Boromir, but not for the same reasons as his Ranger counterpart. Bean is a bad flyer, unfortunately, playing a role in a film involving lots of shots on mountains. On one flight, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan played trick on Bean: they asked the pilot to shake the plane up a bit.
Haha, we made our friend think he was gonna die!
Bean didn’t take it well and refused to fly to set any longer. He would get into full makeup and costume and then trek, Skyrim-style, through the woods and up a mountain to shoot his scenes, then hike all the way back.
21 The Fellowship Of The Ink
There’s only one way to commemorate spending over a year with the same group of dudes playing dress-up for one of the biggest movies ever made: Disneyland. Or, if you’re stuck in New Zealand, tattoos.
The absolutely only way an elvish tattoo will ever be cool
All nine members of the Fellowship each got the Tengwar (That’s the written form of Elvish) character for ‘9’ tattooed somewhere. Mortensen’s is even visible hidden among his Russian gangster tattoos in Eastern Promises. The only member of the cast who didn’t get one was John Rhys-Davies who plays Gimli in all the closeups. Davies said “…whenever there’s anything dangerous or that involves blood, I sent my stunt double to do it.” Director Peter Jackson got in on the fun too: he got the number ten on his shoulder, also in Elvish.
20 Elf Ears Have A Shelf Life
Cate Blanchett made plenty of fans around the world for her haunting portrayal of elf queen Galadriel. One of those fans was her husband, Andrew Upton, who was so taken by her elf ear prosthetics that, when filming was finished, he had them gifted to his wife who promptly bronzed them and no displays them on her mantel.
Like a baby’s bottom, except for a grown woman’s head
The other famous lady elf of the trilogy, Liv Tyler, was also given her ears as a gift. Unfortunately, her prosthetics had a much less noble fate: Tyler forgot her ears on the dashboard of her car and the delicate latex fakes melted in the LA sun. Celebs, they’re just like us: they have filthy cars full of junk too!
19 Big Feet, Big Problems
Those big hairy Hobbit feet aren’t just disgusting reminders of the rigors of being an actor- can you imagine how bad latex prosthetic feet must smell after tromping around in mud all day? They also put the trilogy in the Guinness Book of World Records: over 1,800 prop feet were made for the film and the quality came at a price: the moldings couldn’t be removed due to the high-quality adhesive used to attach them to the actors, so they have to be torn off every time they were removed.
The process of putting the feet on took the main cast an hour and a half to apply every morning, meaning they had to wake up early to get them fitted and they often had to be re-glued throughout the day.
18 The Weinsteins Didn’t Get It
So, listen, it’s 2018 and we all know by now what a d-bag Harvey Weinstein is, I’m not going to get into it. Bob and Harvey Weinstein made a lot of demands of Jackson while the director was trying to make a deal to finance the movie, one of which was a demand to make all of The Lord of the Rings into one movie.
Do we need the hobbits?
Sure! I don’t see how that could wrong, Hollywood is full of movies successfully trying to slam a complicated story into a trim, feature-length runtime. Movies like The Lord of the Rings. In the 70s, experimental animator Ralph Bakshi parlayed his success with The Hobbit into an animated LOTR which advertises that it’s the whole trilogy in one film, but actually abruptly ends after the Battle of Helm’s Deep and was never finished.
17 No One Had Ever Really Done This Before
In the age of the incredible artistic, commercial, and logistical achievement that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Star Wars juggernaut, the worst-in-every-single-way DC Cinematic Universe, and the adaptation of Game of Thrones it’s easy to forget that making these things properly is really, really hard. Here’s the truth: none of those things would exist if it weren’t for The Lord of the Rings.
So you have Jackson to thank for Justice League
No one had ever filmed an entire trilogy at once before. Back to the Future and The Matrix did their sequels back-to-back, but even they waited to see if the first one was a hit before they started. Jackson knew, with the backing of New Line, that it was all or nothing for him. These were each massive movies being directed by a guy who hadn’t really ever shot a movie like this before, let alone three at the same time.
16 Minas Tirith Was Big
Anybody remember Waterworld, the famous dude that pretty much destroyed Kevin Costner’s career for a bit? If you’ve never heard of it you should watch it, because it’s actually not that bad, and because at the time it had the most expensive set ever: a giant city built out of sheet metal floating on the ocean. While no single set quite matched the expense of Waterworld, Minas Tirith came close.
Also, Isengard was made of styrofoam and kept blowing away
The recreations of the streets, plazas, and throne room of Minas Tirith added up to make the largest set ever built in the southern hemisphere, which is absolutely wild when you think that these same movies made two other fantasy cities, both of which are still standing and you can go visit right now.
15 The Weinsteins Wanted To Cut Two Major Characters
Here’s another example of Hollywood producers not understanding their source material and not bothering to learn: the Weinstein brothers didn’t think the movie needed both Faramir and Eowyn! I mean, Faramir is just Boromir’s brother, why bother? And Eowyn, well, she’s a woman so get her out of our super serious sword movie.
Yeah, so that’s also part of the problem. As readers of the books, or watchers of the Extended Edition of Return of the King, know, Faramir and Eowyn fall in love while both are recuperating from their wounds. While their love story isn’t essential to the plot, the existence of both characters certainly is: Faramir forces Frodo and Sam on a serious detour, and Eowyn ends the freaking Witch King. Also, is a human woman with agency.
14 Jake Gyllenhaal Blew His Audition
Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the most consistent working actors in Hollywood, a handsome leading man whose blockbusters keep failing but still does amazing work in smaller films like Prisoners. He would have been a fine fit for Frodo at the time he auditioned except, unfortunately, he didn’t do his homework.
So he’s like, short?
Gyllenhaal did his audition and, presumably, felt pretty good about it. Jackson then told him he was the worst actor he’d ever seen and asked if his agents had told him he needed to do an English accent. When Gyllenhaal said no, they hadn’t, Jackson suggested he fire them. I don’t know whether he did or not but, considering what he’s gone on to do, he made the right choice either way.
13 Ian Holm Didn’t
Now onto an actor who nailed his audition: Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo in the original trilogy and is a criminally underrated English actor. I don’t even know if Holm had to audition for the part, since Jackson had always wanted him to be a part of the trilogy in some way.
Holm played Frodo in the (excellent) BBC radio play of the The Lord of the Rings made in the 1980s. Jackson was a huge fan of the radio series and has often said it was a major source of inspiration for his film trilogy. The radio series is also slavishly faithful to the books, it clocks in at 26 30-minute episodes and the changes it makes are pretty minor, even including things cut form the books but alluded to in Tolkien’s notes.
You can listen to the whole thing on Soundcloud here
12 Here’s One More Stupid Thing The Weinsteins Demanded
Okay, let’s all take one more swipe at the Weinsteins: They wanted to end one of the hobbits. Bob Weinstein apparently told Jackson that it was unacceptable none of the hobbits die. They go on this big adventure but they all come out of it alive? Well, don’t you know that’s bad screenwriting, Peter?
When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail
See, Hollywood has this nasty habit if thinking they can fix everything and that their narrative is true. If Jackson was writing a screenplay from scratch then, sure, it makes sense to take away one of the four main characters to raise the stakes or give the other three a reason to move on or really prove the bad guy is serious: this is basic stuff. Except, Tolkien gives us plenty of reasons for the above without the need to off one of the lads. Though, it’s not surprising that Bob Weinstein doesn’t see a use for a pure, kind, optimistic character.
11 I Wish They Wrote A Song About This
So, Lord of the Rings is filmed in New Zealand and, in the early 21st century the other best thing to ever come out of New Zealand was the groundbreaking comic music duo Flight of the Conchords.
Before you say “Taika Waititi”- he worked on that show
While Jemaine Clement has turned the success of Conchords into a very lucrative career in Hollywood, both as an actor and composer, his partner Bret McKenzie has a much nerdier claim: he played an elf in both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. McKenzie even has a a few lines: when Arwen has a vision of her and Aragorn’s son and decides to flee back to Rivendell, McKenzie is the smooth-skinned elf who calls after her as she rides away.
10 Sean Bean Cheated
It’s no secret that Lord of the Rings was a tough shoot for everyone. It’s a miracle that the films turned out as well as they did, considering the logistics involved in three units shooting all over New Zealand at once. There are almost always script revisions on set when shooting a movie and when your director is also one of your screenwriters there are bound to be some changes, especially when he’s as obsessed and committed as Jackson.
One does not simply learn lines that haven’t been written yet
While it’s not as flashy as other famous scenes, the Council of Elrond is actually pretty complicated form a filmmaking perspective: we have a ton of characters, many of whom we are meeting for the first time, all with their own agendas. Sean Bean copped to an unknown actor’s trick: since he was being shot in closeup, he was able to have his pages in his lap.
9 Orcs = Cricket Fans
The scale of the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers was enormous, dwarfed only by the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in the following film, Return of the King. To accurately recreate the sound of thousands of angry warriors psyching themselves up for battle, the film crew turned to the next best thing to a furious Orc army: Angry cricket fans.
Were the rugby fans too chill?
Peter Jackson spent the “Interval” of an otherwise, apparently, pretty boring match between England and NZ to get some that authentic sound that only thousands of drunk people can give you. Jackson used a microphone to conduct the crowd, who provided plenty of grunts, snarls, cheers, and roars. Apparently, Jackson got pretty into his role as conductor: according to a redditor he stomped around and jumped up and down to encourage the crowd.
8 It Takes A Long Time To Make A Movie
Making a movie is really weird. Most people would assume that, like a play, you shoot all the scenes in order, beginning to end, and call it a month. The truth is, due to scheduling factors scenes are often shot wildly out of order and some actors who are in the same shots are often not even on the same continent when the other side of their scenes are shot. While Lord of the Rings was by no means a standard film shoot, the scheduling nightmare that was making the movie definitely made this necessary.
One of the most emotional scenes in the trilogy is when Frodo, having been convinced by Gollum that Sam isn’t cut out for the trip, tells his pot-carrying, potato-loving buddy to GTFH. The shots of Frodo, and the shots of Sam reacting, were shot almost a full year apart.
7 Viggo Mortensen Loves Horses
Shortly after LOTR, Viggo Mortensen starred in the forgettable Hidalgo for Disney, which is basically a whole movie about Aragorn’s relationship with Bill the Pony and Brego, his mount in The Two Towers. Mortensen’s casting is just perfect because he basically is Aragorn: he’s an educated, confident, charming man who grudgingly accepts his fame but would rather hang out in the woods.
Proof you can be a method actor without going all Jared Leto on it
Mortensen bonded so much with Uraeus, the horse who played Brego, that he bought him after filming was completed. He then bought another of the film’s horses so that Uraeus would “have a friend.” Then he bought a third one two because I guess someone reminded him how much money he made on the trilogy.
6 Bill The Pony Was More Than He Appeared
So here’s another fun horse fact from this very expensive horse-adjacent trilogy: Bill the Pony, the unsung tenth member of the Fellowship, was sometimes a real pony and other times two guys in a pony suit.
Yes, this isn’t just a lazy setup for a bad sketch
Apparently, the two-guys-in-a-horse-costume trick was only used on difficult terrain, like swamp or muddy ground because if a horse has trouble walking in mud, then two guys hunched over hugging each other’s waists in complete darkness should be able to handle it no problem. The cast recalls a few times when the guy in front would get too far ahead of the guy in back, and Bill would stretch out grotesquely which sounds just enough like a terrifying spell I’m surprised they didn’t work it into the movie somehow.
