Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s beloved fantasy epic was one of the most ambitious productions in Hollywood history, and the story of how it reached the screen is every bit as extraordinary as the quest for the One Ring itself.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001 as the first chapter in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novels. Shot back-to-back-to-back across 15 months in New Zealand, the production was enormous in every sense: thousands of crew, hundreds of locations, and a level of creative ambition that the industry had rarely seen. Featuring iconic performances from Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood and a huge ensemble cast, the film launched a trilogy that would go on to reshape blockbuster filmmaking. We’re telling the behind the scenes story now with 60 huge facts about The Fellowship of the Ring. You can hear us discuss the film in full on our podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and on the ATRM website.
1. Hollywood had been trying to adapt Tolkien for decades
Long before Peter Jackson came along, Middle-earth had a complicated history on screen. Tolkien’s first published work set in that world, The Hobbit, arrived in 1937, with The Lord of the Rings following in 1954 and 1955. Disney were interested in producing animated versions of both as early as the 1930s and 1950s, but neither project went anywhere. Walt Disney reportedly considered Tolkien’s work too serious and too violent for his studio, while Tolkien himself admitted to having a ‘heartfelt loathing’ for Disney’s films. Not a great foundation for a working relationship.
Others tried too. In the 1950s and 1960s, a producer called Al Brodax (best known for producing the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, 1968) attempted to secure the rights. A science fiction magazine editor called Forrest J. Ackerman had a treatment produced which Tolkien rejected. And in 1967, Dutch studio Rembrandt Films produced a 12-minute animation of The Hobbit, marking the first time Tolkien’s work had ever been put on screen.
2. Megastars were once attached to a Lord of the Rings film
In 1969, Hollywood studio United Artists bought the film rights to Lord of the Rings. Their plan was bold: a feature film starring The Beatles as the four Hobbits, with English model and actress Twiggy as Galadriel, directed by Stanley Kubrick. John Lennon apparently wanted to play Gollum. However, Kubrick, fresh off 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), declared the material ‘unfilmable.’
When that fell apart, United Artists brought in British director John Boorman (later known for Arthurian epic Excalibur, 1981). Boorman wanted Al Pacino as Frodo, and his script described the Dark Lord Sauron as looking like Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. In another notable departure from the source material, Boorman’s Frodo was something of a lothario who had a romantic encounter with Galadriel. That project also stalled. Producer Saul Zaentz then acquired the rights from United Artists and produced an animated The Hobbit in 1977, followed by director Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings in 1978. There is actually a nod to Bakshi’s version in Fellowship: the moment at Bilbo’s party where he names Hobbit families, says “Proudfoots,” and one guest shouts “Proudfeet!” is framed with the character’s feet in the foreground, exactly matching the same shot in the Bakshi film.
Into the 1980s, George Lucas tried to get the rights to The Hobbit, reportedly for Steven Spielberg to direct. The rights were too entangled across various companies by that point, so Lucas made the fantasy adventure Willow (1988) with director Ron Howard instead. Things then went quiet until Peter Jackson came along.
3. Jackson first encountered Tolkien’s world as a teenager
Peter Jackson first became aware of The Lord of the Rings when he saw Ralph Bakshi’s animation at the cinema at the age of 17. He read the book afterwards and immediately wanted to see a live-action version. That desire faded until 1996, when Jackson directed the horror comedy The Frighteners. To make that film, he had to significantly expand his visual effects studio, Weta Digital, to handle the CGI workload. After The Frighteners wrapped, Jackson needed a big project to keep Weta operational. His mind went back to Lord of the Rings.
His first instinct was that Tolkien’s epic would be unattainable, so he started developing an original fantasy concept instead. Reportedly, it was about an upside-down medieval town and was called Blubberhead, which sounds like the most Peter Jackson project imaginable. It never got off the ground, and Jackson turned his attention fully to Middle-earth.
4. Getting the greenlight was a saga in itself
By the mid-1990s, Jackson and his co-writer and wife, Fran Walsh, were fully committed to pursuing Lord of the Rings. Jackson approached Saul Zaentz about buying the film rights, hoping to make The Hobbit first and then The Lord of the Rings. But the rights were split between Zaentz and United Artists, the same tangled situation that had stopped George Lucas years earlier.
Jackson had a first-look deal with Miramax after they had produced his film Heavenly Creatures (1994), so he was obliged to take the project to Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was interested, and Miramax spent $14 million developing it. The problem was funding: Miramax couldn’t secure the money for three films and told Jackson he had to condense the entire trilogy into a single two-hour movie. Jackson said that was impossible. Weinstein disagreed and apparently threatened to hire Quentin Tarantino to direct it instead if Jackson didn’t comply.
A crucial wrinkle then emerged. Weinstein believed Miramax owned the rights to all the development work Jackson had produced, but they didn’t. Jackson did. With Miramax forced to pull out, Jackson put together a 35-minute pitch video showcasing everything they had developed and sent it to studios, asking for funding to make two films (he assumed nobody would back three). 20th Century Fox, Universal and Sony all passed, citing issues with the script. To make matters worse, someone leaked Jackson’s script onto the internet, though Jackson later speculated this might have actually helped by generating public interest.
Jackson had one final shot. A friend of his called Mark Ordesky worked at New Line Cinema, a studio known mostly for horror films. Through Ordesky, Jackson secured a pitch meeting with the head of New Line, Robert Shaye. At the end of the presentation, Shaye had just one question: “There are three books. Shouldn’t it be three films?” Ordesky later said that Jackson was so stunned he just sat there in silence, and Ordesky had to kick him under the table to get him to respond. Jackson eventually managed: “Sorry… say that again.” Shaye’s reasoning was straightforward: “Why would anyone want movie-goers to pay $18 when they might pay $27?” New Line greenlit a $281 million production budget to make all three films.
5. The director fought to shoot all three films simultaneously
Jackson wanted to film all three movies back-to-back in his native New Zealand, knowing the country had the landscapes needed for Middle-earth. New Line were happy with New Zealand as a location but wanted to make one film at a time. Jackson argued they had to shoot all three at once because the production would require building enormous sets, and the New Zealand government wouldn’t allow those structures to remain standing indefinitely between films. New Line agreed.
It was a colossal gamble. Not only was the studio committing to finishing all three films before the first had proved itself at the box office, they were entrusting the entire venture to a director whose track record consisted largely of low-budget horror and splatter comedies. But New Zealand turned out to be an inspired choice. Personal to Jackson, obviously, but the landscapes looked perfect for Tolkien’s world, and the country became so closely identified with the films that the connection endures to this day. Few films in history are so inseparable from where they were shot.
6. The scale of the production was staggering
Pre-production for the three films started in 1997, a full two years before cameras rolled. The back-to-back-to-back shoot across New Zealand then lasted 15 months: 438 days of principal photography, nine units filming simultaneously, 150 different locations, and 2,400 crew members. It has been estimated that 50 million man hours went into making the whole trilogy, the equivalent of 25,000 years of one person’s work. Jackson said he got through the entire production on three to four hours of sleep a day.
7. Jackson auditioned around 200 actors for Frodo
The Ring-0Bearer who leads the quest is Hobbit Frodo Baggins. Finding the right Frodo was critical, and Jackson left no stone unturned. He auditioned roughly 200 actors in London for the part, including a young Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal later admitted that he turned up to the audition thinking he was fully prepared, only for Jackson to point out afterwards that the role required a British accent. Gyllenhaal’s agent had neglected to mention this. The feedback Jackson sent back was blunt: Gyllenhaal was, in his words, “the worst actor I’ve ever seen.”
8. The successful actor cast himself
Elijah Wood was filming the sci-fi horror The Faculty (1998) when he heard about the casting call through a film critic called Harry Knowles. Rather than audition through conventional channels, Wood made his own tape. He dressed in breeches and a flowing shirt, read directly from Tolkien’s books, and shot three scenes showing Frodo at various points in the journey. He had the video FedExed directly to Jackson in New Zealand.
About a month later, Jackson called to offer him the part, later saying that “Elijah cast himself.” The phone call wasn’t entirely smooth, though: all Jackson could hear was Wood’s sister screaming with excitement in the background. Wood was the first actor cast and Jackson said that as soon as the tape started playing, for the first time across all those auditions, he felt like he was looking at Frodo.
There was a nervous six-week period before filming began when the cast met for the first time and Jackson had to hope they would bond, particularly the actors playing the four Hobbits. They did. Wood later said the memories he treasures most are the downtime between takes, when the Hobbit actors would spend time in each other’s trailers watching films together. He also recalled that the first time he met Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) was in a hotel lobby. They didn’t know each other, but as soon as they spotted one another they ran across the room and hugged.
9. A huge acting name turned down a massive payday
New Line wanted Sean Connery to play the wizard Gandalf, so Jackson sent the scripts to Connery’s home in the Bahamas. Connery declined and later explained: “I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don’t understand it.” He was reportedly offered a $6 million salary plus 15% of the total gross, a deal that would have earned him around $250 million across the three films.
Several other major names were considered. Horror legend Christopher Lee wanted to play Gandalf, but Jackson offered him the villainous wizard Saruman instead. Christopher Plummer turned the part down, as did Anthony Hopkins. Sam Neill said no due to scheduling conflicts with Jurassic Park III (2001). Patrick McGoohan, known for playing Longshanks in Braveheart (1995), also declined for health reasons.
The breakthrough came when producer Philippa Boyens was watching footage to assess whether Patrick Stewart would suit the role. Instead, she suggested the person Stewart was sharing the screen with: Ian McKellen. McKellen hadn’t read the books, but said that Jackson’s passion for the project won him over instantly. He later revealed that he based his accent as Gandalf on audio recordings of Tolkien himself reading The Hobbit aloud.
10. A chance restaurant encounter saved McKellen’s involvement
The actor was cast, but a problem emerged when filming on Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) overran, and McKellen realised he would have to pull out of Lord of the Rings. That same day, he happened to run into New Line boss Robert Shaye at a restaurant in London. McKellen told him, “I’ve just heard I can’t do the film!” The next thing McKellen knew, the shooting schedules for both X-Men and Lord of the Rings had been rearranged so there was no longer a clash. Shaye, it seems, called in some favours.
11. McKellen’s Tolkien knowledge reshaped Gandalf’s dialogue
Once cast, McKellen read the trilogy cover to cover multiple times and started making script suggestions off the back of it. Before shooting a scene, he would approach Jackson with the book in hand and say, “I see you’ve left this Gandalf line out, but if you were to include it, this is how I would do it,” then act the passage out on the spot. Jackson said he was sold on changing much of Gandalf’s dialogue as a result, and the majority of what the wizard says on screen comes directly from Tolkien’s text.
Another detail from the books that nearly didn’t make it into the film was Gandalf’s pipe. The wizard smokes frequently in the novels, but the studio raised concerns about children seeing a beloved character smoking on screen. Jackson considered rewriting it so Gandalf had just given up smoking and chewed toffees instead. They went with the pipe in the end, and the early scene at Bilbo’s party where Gandalf blows a ship out of pipe smoke became one of the film’s most charming moments.
12. McKellen’s nose had to be rebuilt every morning
The makeup designer on the film was Peter Owen, and McKellen had to sit in his chair for three hours every morning before filming could begin. The original plan was straightforward: add the beard and alter McKellen’s eyebrows. But once the beard went on, McKellen’s nose looked disproportionately small. So Owen created a prosthetic version of McKellen’s own nose, just slightly larger, to balance his face out. Owen won the Academy Award for Best Makeup for his work on Fellowship.
Costume designer Ngila Dickson, meanwhile, created 40 different versions of Gandalf’s cloak for McKellen and his various stunt and body doubles. She said the hat was the most difficult element, taking months to design before Jackson was satisfied. The silver scarf Gandalf wears was actually McKellen’s own addition, taken from a detail in the books. It was painstaking work on just one character’s look, and the kind of thing audiences tend to take for granted.
13. Two Oscar-winners turned down Aragorn
One of the first actors Jackson met with for the role of Aragorn, the ranger who is heir to the throne of Gondor, was Russell Crowe. Crowe, fresh from his Oscar-winning turn in Gladiator (2000), said he sensed the studio wanted him more than Jackson did, and chose to step away.
Jackson’s actual first choice was Daniel Day-Lewis. He tried to persuade the famously selective actor by meeting with him multiple times, while the studio kept increasing their financial offer. Day-Lewis wasn’t interested in appearing in blockbusters and later said he wouldn’t want to be in a film he wouldn’t want to see himself. Vin Diesel auditioned. Nicolas Cage was offered the part but declined due to family obligations. After all of this, Jackson cast Stuart Townsend, an Irish actor whose most prominent credit at the time was the British romantic comedy Shooting Fish (1997).
14. Townsend was fired the day before filming began
The actor trained for two months ahead of production, but then, according to Townsend, he received an email from Jackson the day before filming started telling him he’d been let go. The official reason was that at 27, Townsend looked too young for the role. Other stories emerged over the years suggesting the issues ran deeper: senior cast members had reportedly raised concerns, with Ian McKellen allegedly confronting Townsend directly about his on-set attitude, asking, “You do want to be in this film, don’t you?”
Mark Ordesky got a call from Jackson telling him Townsend had left the project and they needed a new Aragorn immediately. Ordesky suggested Viggo Mortensen, an actor Jackson and the writers had already been considering. Mortensen received a call offering him the part and wasn’t sure about it, but his 11-year-old son Henry was a devoted Tolkien fan and convinced him to say yes. Mortensen later said they told him it was a 15-month production in New Zealand. “Wow, that’s a big decision,” he replied. “I need time to think about it.” They said, “Yes, no problem. You’ve got till this afternoon.”
15. Mortensen had conditions for playing Aragorn
When Mortensen accepted the role, he came with requests. He was trilingual, speaking English, Danish and Spanish, and asked Jackson if more of Aragorn’s lines could be written in the Elvish language Tolkien had created. He also said he wanted to perform as many of his own stunts as possible, which included using a real steel sword rather than the lighter prop versions other actors were given. Jackson agreed to both.
16. The sword master called Mortensen the best he ever trained
The cast were trained for their sword fights by Bob Anderson, a former Olympic fencer who had moved into film choreography after retiring from competition. Anderson’s credits included several James Bond films, the original Star Wars trilogy, and Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987). His official title on Lord of the Rings was ‘Sword Master.’
Anderson said Mortensen was the best actor he had ever trained as a swordsman. Mortensen took the commitment seriously to the point of carrying his sword with him everywhere, including in public, and was reportedly questioned by police over it at one point. In the film’s climactic battle at Amon Hen, the Uruk-hai commander Lurtz throws a knife at Aragorn and he deflects it with his sword. Mortensen performed that deflection for real.
Because he insisted on doing his own stunt work, Mortensen picked up injuries regularly. During the Lurtz fight, he chipped a tooth and told the makeup team to superglue it back in, until Jackson insisted he visit a dentist.
17. The prologue almost didn’t exist
When writing the film, Jackson knew early on that there was a huge amount of exposition to set up before the story could begin. He handed the prologue to co-writer Philippa Boyens and told her she had four pages to do it in. Jackson then had second thoughts and decided he didn’t want to open the film with a prologue at all, preferring to start with Bilbo’s warm monologue about Hobbits that immediately follows it (in the Extended Edition version). When they presented their plan to New Line, the studio’s one piece of non-negotiable feedback was: “There must be a prologue.”
The prologue narration went through several versions. It was originally read by Frodo, speaking at the end of the trilogy. That changed to Gandalf narrating. Jackson wasn’t satisfied with either, because neither character was alive during the events being described. He then had the idea of using Galadriel, the ancient Elf queen played by Cate Blanchett, as it demonstrated the immortality of the Elves. Blanchett’s delivery of the dramatic, theatrical dialogue is a large part of why the prologue works so well.
18. The actor inside Sauron’s armour had a simple brief
The Dark Lord Sauron appears for roughly one minute of screen time in the prologue’s battle sequence, but creating him was still an enormous task. Jackson’s effects studio Weta Workshop designed and constructed the suit from real steel, a process so complex it took six weeks to build. The person inside the armour was a New Zealand stuntman called Sala Baker, who said that playing Sauron was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. Jackson’s acting brief to Baker was beautifully simple: “Darth Vader has got nothing on you.”
19. Weta Workshop staff appear in the prologue
Several cast and crew cameos are tucked into the prologue. Members of the practical effects team at Weta Workshop played Elf warriors during the battle sequence. The seven Dwarf Lords who receive the Rings of Power are mostly Weta Workshop crew members. And one of the film’s concept designers, the renowned Tolkien illustrator Alan Lee, plays one of the nine Kings of Men who are corrupted by Sauron’s rings.
20. The uncle was almost played by the Doctor
When casting the role of Bilbo Baggins, Frodo’s older Hobbit relative who sets the plot in motion at his 111th birthday party, Jackson considered hiring Sylvester McCoy (the seventh iteration of Doctor Who) before settling on Ian Holm. Holm had already voiced Frodo Baggins in a BBC Radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings, making him well-versed in the material. McCoy would later appear in Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy as the wizard Radagast the Brown. Also, in that BBC radio version, Sam was played by Bill Nighy.
21. The writers compressed 17 years into a few weeks
Jackson, Walsh and Boyens took significant liberties with the timelines from Tolkien’s novels. In the book, the gap between Gandalf leaving after Bilbo’s birthday party, travelling south to the city of Gondor to research the Ring, and returning to Bag End is 17 years. In the film, Frodo and Sam leave the Shire with the Ring on the same night Gandalf visits him to reveal what it is. In the novel, that departure comes months later. Tightening all of this was essential for the pace of the film, even if Tolkien himself was clearly in no rush whatsoever.
22. A producer owned the original One Ring
The Ring itself was made by a renowned New Zealand goldsmith called Jens Hansen. Its look was based on the wedding ring of Rick Porras, a co-producer on the film. The design is exactly what it needs to be: simple and majestic. And for the moment early in the film where the Ring drops to the floor in Bag End and sticks there with an unnatural weight, the production team made the floor magnetic so the Ring wouldn’t bounce.
23. Hobbiton was built a year before filming began
The Shire village of Hobbiton was built in its entirety on a family farm near Matamata in New Zealand. Overseen by production designer Grant Major and art director Dan Hennah, it contained 28 separate Hobbit holes, each one designed to look different. Construction began a full year before production started so the vegetation could grow in and the settlement would look like a genuinely lived-in place. The gardens had real vegetable patches, and the large tree that stands over Bilbo’s home, Bag End, was built especially by the production team, with every leaf manually attached.
Two separate sets were built for the interior of Bag End. One was built at normal scale for Ian Holm and Elijah Wood. The other was 33% smaller, for Ian McKellen’s scenes, to make Gandalf look much larger than the Hobbits. A 7’4″ actor called Paul Randall, known as ‘Tall Paul,’ stood in for McKellen in certain shots. The attention to detail extended to having different-sized books and props across the two sets. Early in the film, when Gandalf turns and bangs his head on Bag End’s low ceiling, that wasn’t in the script. McKellen ad-libbed the reaction and Jackson kept it in because he thought it was genuine.
After production wrapped, the Hobbiton sets weren’t destroyed. The family farm stayed open and Hobbiton remained as a tourist attraction, where visitors can walk through the Hobbit holes and visit the Green Dragon Inn.
24. Saruman’s tower was carved from wax
The imposing tower of Orthanc, home to the corrupted wizard Saruman in the fortress of Isengard, was created entirely from scratch. Concept designer Alan Lee had previously drawn a partial sketch of Orthanc for a centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson told Lee to finish the illustration, and based on that completed design, Weta Workshop built a miniature standing 15 feet high with a 65-foot circular fortress surrounding it. The tower was carved from wax and then cast in resin to create the black, volcanic glass appearance it has on screen.
The interior scenes between Gandalf and Saruman were filmed on a purpose-built set. McKellen said he had never worked on a set like it: the design was deliberately angular and sharp, creating a horror-movie atmosphere. Christopher Lee, who played Saruman, said the steps leading up to Saruman’s throne were so steep he had genuine difficulty climbing them.
25. Some of the villains were born from horror
Shortly after the Orthanc scenes, we see Saruman breeding the Uruk-hai, a stronger breed of Orc. In the books, Tolkien suggests they are a crossbreed of Orcs and Men, but Jackson’s film shows them being birthed from pods beneath Isengard, emerging from mud covered in a visceral, membrane-like substance. It’s a sequence that draws heavily on Jackson’s background in horror filmmaking. The Orc workers tending to the process were all played by Weta Workshop staff.
26. The first day of filming threw the Hobbits straight into danger
The scene where the four Hobbits hide under a tree root from a Ringwraith was filmed on the very first day of shooting. It was shot in the parklands of Mount Victoria in Wellington. Weta Workshop created the hollow the Hobbits cower in, but the path and overhanging ledge were all real, and the location later became a tourist destination.
The Ringwraiths’ piercing, high-pitched scream was created by sound designers Phil Heywood and Simon Hewitt. They recorded co-writer and producer Fran Walsh performing the scream, then edited it digitally to make it sound more unearthly. The finishing touch was the sound of two plastic party cups being rubbed together. In a brief scene where a Ringwraith interrogates a Hobbit in the Shire, hissing “Shiiiire! Baaaggins!”, the voice belongs to Andy Serkis, who would go on to play Gollum.
27. Elijah Wood overshot a jump and ended up in a river
Crossing the Brandywine River marks the point at which the Hobbits officially leave the Shire, a significant emotional threshold in the story. The Bucklebury Ferry scenes were shot at Keeling Farm, near Manakau, where the entire area was dressed and rigged to create the river crossing. In one take of Frodo leaping aboard the ferry to escape a Ringwraith, Elijah Wood misjudged his leap, overshot the ferry entirely, and ended up in the water.
28. Mortensen’s first scene involved being charged at by nine men
The first scene Viggo Mortensen filmed was the sequence on Weathertop, the ancient hilltop ruin where Aragorn defends the Hobbits from the Ringwraiths. As soon as Mortensen landed in New Zealand, he was taken straight to sword master Bob Anderson for training. Mortensen described being put in a room with Anderson and nine other men carrying swords. Anderson handed him a blade, shouted “Go!” and all nine charged at Mortensen, screaming. Mortensen said his only response was “Holy shit!” Anderson replied: “Right, that’s what you’re going to be dealing with. Now let’s get to work.”
The Weathertop location was a farm near Port Waikato which had a flat-topped mountain formation perfect for the scene. When cast and crew started arriving at locations like this, it must have been the first real sense that Jackson’s vision might actually work.
29. A Hobbit actor was hit by 16 apples
Just before the Fellowship reaches Weathertop, there is a lighter scene where Pippin asks Aragorn about second breakfast and Aragorn throws him an apple in response. When they filmed the scene, Jackson had them shoot an apple being thrown at Billy Boyd (who plays Pippin) 16 times before he was satisfied with the take. Boyd said that Mortensen enjoyed it far too much.
30. Uma Thurman and Kylie Minogue were both considered for roles
In the books, the Elf who arrives to rescue the wounded Frodo after Weathertop is not Arwen but a male Elf called Glorfindel. Arwen does appear in the novels but has a minor role: she is mentioned briefly at Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring and marries Aragorn in The Return of the King, but plays virtually no part in the plot. Jackson expanded her role significantly for the films.
He wanted a well-known actress for the part. Kylie Minogue auditioned. Jackson’s first choice was Uma Thurman, who was offered the role but turned it down as she had recently fallen pregnant. Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd were also approached before Jackson cast Liv Tyler. Tyler hadn’t read the books when she was cast but quickly did, learned some Elvish, spent months in New Zealand before filming learning sword training and horse riding, and worked on deepening her voice for the role. Her father, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, later asked why she let them digitally alter her voice. “They didn’t,” she said. “It’s all me.”
31. The Elven home had real running water
Arwen takes Frodo to her home of Rivendell to recover from his Weathertop wounds, and the Rivendell sequences were filmed in Kaitoke Regional Park, near Upper Hutt on New Zealand’s North Island. It’s a lush, forested park, and Jackson always wanted to shoot the Elven sanctuary there. The production team built the set on location and incorporated real running water flowing through it. The area is signposted for visitors today, part of what has become an extensive Lord of the Rings tour across New Zealand.
32. The Thin White Duke wanted to play an elf
David Bowie apparently wanted to portray Elrond, the Elf Lord who hosts the pivotal council at Rivendell. However, Jackson was worried that Bowie was too famous to play a supporting character. Instead, one of the film’s producers, Barrie Osborne, had just finished working with Hugo Weaving on The Matrix (1999) and recommended him to Jackson. That’s how Weaving came to be cast as Elrond.
33. Elrond’s council was a headache for the writers
The Council of Elrond scene exists in the novel, but Jackson and his writers changed it substantially. In the book, it’s a relatively sedate debriefing where characters explain what is happening and what needs to happen next – Unlike the film, there are no arguments. Instead, Gandalf delivers a monologue of roughly 7,500 words (which would have translated to about 45 minutes of screen time) so Jackson knew it had to be cut down dramatically. He later admitted to committing “crimes against the book” in reshaping the scene into something full of conflict and tension.
Even after the rewrite, the scene was a persistent problem. Director of photography Andrew Lesnie said that if they had filmed the scene as it appeared in the original script, it would have been 40 minutes long. Jackson was never fully satisfied with it and kept rewriting throughout production, leading to Sean Bean’s delivery of Boromir’s speech, one of the scene’s key dramatic moments, being shaped by last-minute changes. The revisions were handed to Bean only the night before filming, and in the scene we see in the finished film, he is actually sitting with the script on his lap.
34. An actor climbed a mountain (literally) every day
The Pass of Caradhras scenes, where Boromir picks up the One Ring from the snow and is briefly tempted by its power, were filmed on Mount Ngauruhoe. The location was 3,600 feet up the mountain, so the cast and crew were flown there each morning by helicopter. Sean Bean had a fear of helicopters, so after his first flight he refused to get back in one. Instead, he would climb the mountain on foot each day, a two-hour trek. Jackson said they would sometimes pass Bean on their way up in the helicopter, a thousand feet below, seeing him scaling the cliff face in full Boromir costume.
35. The lake monster was designed to look, er, graphic
The scene outside the Walls of Moria, where Gandalf works out the password to the Dwarf entrance, was filmed at 5am in a car park that the production filled with water. The lake monster, known as the Watcher in the Water, that lunges at Frodo was created by Weta Workshop, and Richard Taylor, the head of the Workshop, briefed his team on the creature’s appearance by saying it should look like “a huge sphincter with teeth.” And it kind of does.
36. The mines were inspired by 18th-century art
The designs for the Mines of Moria sets drew on the work of two very different artists. The first was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Venetian artist known for his 18th-century series Imaginary Prisons, a collection of etchings depicting vast, labyrinthine architectural spaces. The second was M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist famed for his impossible staircases and spatial paradoxes. Jackson asked concept artist Alan Lee to draw inspiration from both when designing the Moria seen in the film. Lee’s resulting artwork was so impressive that Fran Walsh later had it blown up and framed as a birthday present for Jackson.
37. Jackson wanted one monster to feel human
The cave troll that attacks the Fellowship inside Moria’s Chamber of Mazarbul was created entirely in CGI. It began life as a clay model, and Weta’s Richard Taylor was focused on making it look believable, giving it huge, spade-like hands suited to digging in a mine. Jackson’s feedback, though, was always to push the design in a more sympathetic direction. He said he wanted the troll not to be evil, but more like “a big stupid kid who has fallen in with bad friends”. That quality comes through, particularly in the pained moan the troll lets out as it dies.
38. A napkin sketch led to a spectacular sequence
The vast underground Dwarf city of Dwarrowdelf, where the Fellowship encounters the Balrog, an ancient demon, was designed by Alan Lee and brought to life digitally by Weta based on his illustrations. The digital creation matches Lee’s original drawings almost exactly. Weta said the Balrog was one of the most difficult creatures to create for the trilogy because Tolkien’s descriptions are deliberately vague: he writes of “a shadow blacker than black” with a mane of fire. The first design was more humanoid, but then Jackson saw an illustration by renowned Tolkien artist John Howe depicting the Balrog and said it should look like that. The animation supervisor, Randall William Cook, said Jackson’s entire brief was: “It needs to be big.”
After Gandalf falls with the Balrog, the remaining Fellowship members flee down a massive staircase that collapses beneath them. This sequence isn’t in the book, and in the original script, the stage direction simply read “the Fellowship run down the stairs towards the bridge.” Jackson asked Alan Lee to design the staircase, and Lee came back with an elaborate, crumbling structure on an enormous scale. That design gave Jackson the idea to turn a simple chase into a full set piece with the staircase disintegrating as the characters descend.
39. Ian McKellen changed one of the most famous lines
McKellen found filming the Balrog confrontation on the bridge of Khazad-dûm one of his most difficult experiences, as he was acting with nothing more than a tennis ball to establish his eyeline. In the books, Gandalf’s line is “You cannot pass,” repeated four times. It was the same in the script, but McKellen changed the final delivery to “You shall not pass,” and Jackson liked it enough to keep it. It became one of the most quoted lines in modern cinema.
40. The screenwriters’ secret weapon was a co-writer’s girlfriend
Jackson and Fran Walsh first started adapting the books in 1997 during the Miramax period. Jackson said they broke the three novels down into a 90-page treatment, which made it obvious they needed help. He brought in Stephen Sinclair, who he had previously co-written Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992) with. Sinclair only worked on the films for a few weeks and isn’t credited on Fellowship of the Ring, though he does receive credits on The Two Towers and The Return of the King.
But Sinclair’s most significant contribution may have been indirect. His girlfriend at the time was a devoted Tolkien scholar who helped him with some of the dialogue. She was called Philippa Boyens, and after Sinclair left the project, Jackson kept Boyens on as his and Walsh’s co-writer. It proved to be an inspired decision. Rather than hiring an established screenwriter and asking them to read the books on a tight deadline, Jackson had someone who knew Tolkien’s world inside and out. That depth of knowledge is part of why the films feel so richly textured: the small details threaded throughout much of the dialogue carry the fingerprints of someone who genuinely lived and breathed this material.
Another notable connection: Isildur, the ancient king who cuts the Ring from Sauron’s hand in the prologue, is played by Harry Sinclair, Stephen’s brother.
41. Several characters and storylines were cut entirely
Beyond swapping the Elf Glorfindel for Arwen, the writers left out several characters and storylines from Tolkien’s novels. In the books, shortly after leaving the Shire, the four Hobbits are captured by an undead spirit called a Barrow-wight. They are about to be killed when they’re rescued by a mysterious figure called Tom Bombadil, an ancient being whom Tolkien never fully explains. The writers decided this storyline wasn’t essential to the main plot and cut it.
In the novel, there is also a fifth Hobbit: Fredegar ‘Fatty’ Bolger, part of Frodo’s circle, who helps the Hobbits leave the Shire and even has a brief confrontation with the Ringwraiths. He does appear, very briefly, in the film. When Bilbo is listing Hobbit families at his party and shouts “Bolgers!” we cut to a table where a rounded fellow is sitting. That’s Fatty.
42. The film’s composer was discovered by accident
The first person Jackson contacted about composing the score was James Horner, whose credits included Braveheart (1995) and Titanic (1997). Horner’s daughter had recently undergone surgery, though, and he turned the job down. Wojciech Kilar, a Polish composer who had scored Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and The Truman Show (1998), was also considered.
About two months into production, Jackson and editor John Gilbert were cutting scenes together for a special Christmas screening for the crew. As temporary music, they laid in Howard Shore’s scores from David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Crash (1996). Jackson thought it worked perfectly, so in early 2000, he called Shore and offered him the job, saying Shore’s music had a dark beauty that appealed to what he was looking for on Lord of the Rings. Shore wasn’t immediately sold, but Jackson flew him out to New Zealand. As soon as Shore saw the scale of the production, he was in.
43. Shore spent months researching before writing a note
The composer’s preparation was extraordinary. He spent four months reading before he wrote anything. He re-read the novels and every other Middle-earth text available. He studied the languages Tolkien had created, including Quenya (Elvish) and Black Speech (the language of Mordor), so he could write choral music sung in those languages. Where a composer’s work on a typical film runs to about eight weeks, Shore spent nearly four years on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
His attention to detail extended to the structure of the music itself. The main melody in the Fellowship theme contains nine notes, one for each member of the Fellowship. Shore said he took inspiration from classical composers including Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Brahms. His biggest influence, though, was Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a series of four operas completed in 1874. Shore said the idea of having a huge network of interconnected leitmotifs came directly from Wagner’s work. Interestingly, the Ring Cycle is also about a supernatural ring, though Tolkien always insisted there was no connection between his work and Wagner’s.
44. A pop star wrote the end credits song
One of Jackson’s briefs to Shore was that he wanted an otherworldly song performed by a woman to play over the end credits. Shore said the best person to write that wasn’t him, and suggested Irish singer Enya. So Enya wrote an original song called “May It Be” with her longtime lyricist Roma Ryan. It plays over the closing credits and is sung in part English, part Quenya. Its downbeat melody threaded with hope makes it a perfect companion to the film’s ending. Enya also wrote “Aníron,” the Aragorn and Arwen love theme heard at Rivendell.
45. The cinematographer was hired because of a talking pig
Jackson hadn’t worked with director of photography Andrew Lesnie before Lord of the Rings, and they had never even met. But in 1995, Lesnie had shot Babe, the family film about a farm pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and Jackson later said he was struck by how Lesnie used “backlight and natural light to create a magical effect.” When it came to hiring for Lord of the Rings, Jackson knew he wanted an Australian or New Zealand DP who would be more accustomed to his way of working. He immediately thought of Lesnie, who was Australian, and he was brought on board.
46. Lesnie invented a system to coordinate filming
Co-ordinating the cinematography across nine simultaneously operating filming units was a colossal logistical challenge, so Lesnie devised a system he called ‘The Notebook Club’: camera operators would log information and things they had discovered on a daily basis, and every unit would review the other units’ notes each day. This meant that, when one unit learned something, they all did. It was essentially a vast, living cinematography database. Lesnie was managing 21 cameras across those nine units, and a significant portion of his job must have been pure planning.
47. Jackson wrote letters to the world’s most famous Tolkien illustrators
The two most renowned Tolkien illustrators in the world at the time of Jackson’s trilogy were Alan Lee and John Howe, who had brought Middle-earth to life in various books for decades. While writing the script, Jackson had their illustrations pinned up all over his office and knew he wanted them involved in designing the look of the film.
Jackson sent a handwritten letter to Alan Lee at his home in Dartmoor, England, asking if he was interested. Lee read the letter and called him immediately to accept, going on to design Rivendell, Isengard, Bag End and much more. John Howe was living in Switzerland, and Jackson, not knowing the time difference, called him at about 3am to offer him the role. Howe said he spent the call listening to Jackson ramble enthusiastically about his vision for 15 minutes: “I was just waiting for him to shut up so I could say yes.” Howe designed Mordor, Weathertop, Galadriel’s forest realm of Lothlórien, and others.
48. The effects team started in a bedroom
In 1987, two effects sculptors called Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger formed an effects company called RT Effects, working from their bedroom in New Zealand. They created the puppets for Public Eye (the New Zealand equivalent of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image) and then met Peter Jackson on the set of a television commercial. Jackson hired them to work on Meet the Feebles and Braindead, and when Heavenly Creatures required digital effects, Jackson and Taylor formed Weta Digital together, and Taylor renamed RT Effects to Weta Workshop, after an insect native to New Zealand.
For the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Taylor assembled a team of 158 effects artists who worked on the project for seven and a half years. On the first day, Taylor called them all together and said: “If you aren’t willing to treat this task as the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life, you aren’t worthy of the task.” Jackson later said that the importance of Richard Taylor to Lord of the Rings cannot be overestimated. For a figure most audiences have never heard of, he is one of the trilogy’s true unsung heroes.
49. Hobbits were made to look small using every trick in the book
One of the first challenges Weta had to solve was making the smaller characters (Hobbits are roughly 3’6″ tall) look convincingly tiny on screen next to full-sized humans and Elves. The team used a range of techniques, often within the same scene.
Each Hobbit actor had their own scale double: actors who were actually around 3’6″ tall. In some shots where we see Hobbits from behind, they are being played by their doubles. In others, the body of the scale double is on screen but the Hobbit actor’s face has been digitally composited onto the double’s head. Digital reduction was also used: in the famous Fellowship of the Ring group shot at Rivendell, the Hobbit actors and John Rhys-Davies as dwarf Gimli were all shrunk digitally in post-production. In the earlier Prancing Pony scene, where the Hobbits look tiny next to the human patrons, the extras were simply hired performers walking around on stilts.
Perhaps the most famous technique was forced perspective, where one actor is positioned further from the camera than the other to create the illusion of a size difference. Sets and props had to be designed carefully to disguise this. In the early scene where Frodo sits on Gandalf’s cart, it looks like they’re side by side, but Elijah Wood is actually sitting about seven feet further back than Ian McKellen.
50. The trilogy revolutionized forced perspective
The traditional drawback of forced perspective was that the camera had to remain static. As soon as the angle of a shot changed, the illusion broke. Jackson told his crew he wanted to shoot forced perspective scenes where the camera actually moved so Andrew Lesnie developed a new motion control system called the Slave Mo-Con. The camera was mounted on a computer-controlled dolly, and the set was on one too. As the camera moved, the set moved with it, keeping the perspective illusion intact.
The effect is (in)visible early in the film, in Bag End, when Bilbo pours tea for Gandalf. The camera moves around and towards Ian Holm and Ian McKellen, yet Bilbo’s height relative to Gandalf never changes. Audience won’t notice the effect because the illusion is completely invisible, but knowing what’s happening behind it makes it feel like genuine movie magic.
51. The miniatures were so large they got a new name
Weta were also responsible for building the film’s miniatures for various Middle-earth buildings and constructs. They produced 58 in total, and these models were so large and so meticulously detailed that the crew started calling them “bigatures.” The Rivendell miniature stood about 7 feet tall. The two Argonath statues that the Fellowship sail past were 8 feet tall each. And the Isengard miniature was 65 feet wide and 15 feet high. Their scale meant Jackson could film them in extreme close-up and the detail held up completely.
52. One actress was lit up like a Christmas tree
When filming the Lothlórien scenes with Cate Blanchett as the ancient Elf queen Galadriel, Andrew Lesnie developed a lighting innovation he called the ‘Galadrilight.’ The rig consisted of hundreds of Christmas tree lights mounted beside the camera, creating clusters of tiny reflections in Blanchett’s eyes to make her look otherworldly. Lesnie said people sometimes asked what special techniques he used to give Blanchett that glowing quality in her close-ups, but he insisted he didn’t do much: Blanchett had a natural luminescence to her skin that bounced light in a way most people’s simply doesn’t.
Lesnie said the inspiration for the lighting rig came not from the script but from a line in the novel describing Galadriel’s eyes as being like starlight.
53. Galadriel’s mirror shows a classic storyline cut from the trilogy
The scene where Frodo looks into Galadriel’s mirror and sees a vision of the Shire being burned and its inhabitants enslaved is a reference to “The Scouring of the Shire,” a chapter from Tolkien’s final book, The Return of the King. In the novel, when the Hobbits return home at the end of the quest, they find the Shire has been taken over by Saruman and transformed into a wasteland. They have to fight to reclaim it. Jackson left that chapter out of his scripts entirely (the ending of The Return of the King is long enough as it is) but included this brief visual nod to it here.
54. Galadriel’s home was the largest miniature of all
Galadriel’s homestead in Lothlórien was the biggest miniature Weta created for the film. The towering mallorn trees of the forest were so tall that the team only built models of the tops and bottoms of each tree. Even split in two, each section stood about 26 feet high.
55. The all-seeing eye was Jackson’s invention
The fiery, lidless Eye of Sauron that appears throughout the trilogy was an invention for the films. In the books, the Eye is mentioned, but only as a metaphorical reference to Sauron’s far-reaching power and influence. Jackson wanted to make it literal and give Sauron a physical, visible presence on screen. Weta Digital created the design: a vast eye surrounded by swirling flames, perched atop the tower of Barad-dûr. In the novels, Sauron is never seen at all. Jackson’s decision to show him in the prologue’s battle sequence and then as the Eye gave the villain a tangible menace the audience could connect with.
56. The director liked one location so much he moved there
For the climactic battle at Amon Hen, Jackson told production designer Grant Major and location manager Dan Hennah what he was looking for: a mountain backdrop, trees, and terrain suitable for a large-scale action sequence with hundreds of extras. They came back with Closeburn, a lake peninsula near Queenstown, and Jackson said it was the place as soon as he saw it.
Jackson hired roughly 250 extras as Orcs, and Weta Digital multiplied their numbers in post-production. For the moment when Boromir is struck by arrows, Sean Bean wore a metal breastplate under his costume, and arrows were physically stuck into him on cue. The edit then cuts to Bean reacting as if he’s just been hit, with the sound design of the impact layered on top. (One detail worth noting about the Orcs: they only wear armour on the front of their bodies, never the back. Weta Workshop designed them that way, the idea being that Orcs never retreat in battle and therefore only need frontal protection. Not a great tactical decision, perhaps, but a strong visual detail.)
Jackson didn’t just like the Closeburn location. He bought it. He and Fran Walsh now own seven parcels of land and three homes there.
57. Boromir’s death was moved across books
In Tolkien’s novel, Boromir’s death happens off-screen: Aragorn finds his arrow-riddled body, and the event doesn’t occur until the opening of The Two Towers. The writers moved it to the climax of Fellowship and made it a scene the audience witnesses in full. Lurtz, the Uruk-hai commander who kills Boromir, doesn’t exist in the books at all. Jackson said they created him because they wanted to give a face to the enemy.
Lurtz was played by Lawrence Makoare, a 6’4″ Maori stuntman who auditioned for the part. Transforming Makoare into Lurtz required 11 hours of makeup and prosthetics work each day. The team would start at 9pm to have him ready for filming at 8am the following morning. Makoare later said: “I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”
58. Sean Astin was injured during the finale
Before filming the scene at the end of the film where Sam wades into the water to follow Frodo, divers were sent in to check for sharp objects and clear the riverbed. They gave the all-clear. Despite this, Sean Astin stepped on a piece of glass that went clean through his foot from bottom to top. He couldn’t film, and a helicopter had to be called in to get him to the nearest hospital.
59. The first trailer set a record
New Line were so confident in what they had that they held no test screenings for The Fellowship of the Ring. Instead, their marketing team went straight into launching a major online campaign, contacting 400 Tolkien influencers around the world and building up a network of people driving interest in the film. The first trailer set an all-time record for number of downloads for a movie trailer.
60. The film was 2001’s second-highest grossing movie
From a production budget of $93 million (one third of the total cost for the trilogy), The Fellowship of the Ring grossed $889.5 million worldwide, making it 2001’s second-highest grossing film behind Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A mega return on investment for New Line.
Today, on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critics approval rating of 92% and a massive 95% from audiences. On IMDb, it sits with a rating of 8.9 out of 10, making it number 8 in the all-time top 250. One place below Schindler’s List and one above Pulp Fiction. It remains the opening part of one of the most beloved movie trilogies ever made.
And you’ve reached the end: 60 huge facts about The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.
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