Heres Why Lord Of The Rings Was So Hard To Film
The Lord of the Rings trilogy has made about $2.9 billion in the box office collectively. But that isn't the price of all the hard work, and literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into making the films over only just a three-year period. There were a lot of challenges in making the films, and even near-death experiences. But in the end, we got one of the best trilogies in the world.
There were so many aspects of Lord of the Rings movies that could have gone wrong, and a lot of the times it did. When Peter Jackson picked up the books J.R.R. Tolkien penned nearly 50 years before, he knew he had to try and adapt them into movies. The problem was how.
Firstly, Jackson knew he couldn't go to Disney to make the film, because Tolkien had made a clause that Disney was not to make his books into movies. But he went Harvey Weinstein's Miramax, which was owned by Disney anyway. Jackson's original plan was to make The Hobbit first, the prequel to Lord of the Rings, and then make the trilogy of books into just two movies. This couldn't be done, costs were going up and Jackson was then almost persuaded to make only one film. In the end Miramax was thrown out the window, and Jackson got the backing from New Line instead.
The trilogy, by the time everything started to get on schedule, was the biggest movie production ever being filmed consecutively, with a huge cast of some of the best actors, an impossible amount of extras, props, and outfits, all shot on some of the most outrageous onsite locations. It's crazy to think that Jackson was in charge of it all.
Jackson told Variety, "I had to create the most believable world I could. The decision was to make it feel very historical, with the levels of detail creating the illusion that the viewers were immersing themselves in a real world."
Jackson also had a hard time with one of his leading heroes, Aragorn. Stuart Townsend was supposed to play the part but was replaced about three weeks into shooting. Jackson had to then scramble around trying to find a new Strider, and luckily found Viggo Mortensen, who by the wish of his son, took the job. They couldn't have found a better fit for the role. Mortensen turned out to be the best swordsman and horseback rider.
On the other hand, even with his cast in place and ready to go, Jackson had to cope with Sean Bean's phobia of flying in helicopters. The actor would climb the steam mountains they were filming on in full Boromir garb just to avoid them.
But this was nothing to all the near-death experiences the rest of the cast endured. Sean Astin cut open his foot walking into a river during the filming of the ending of Fellowship of the Ring. He managed to step on a splinter of glass that went all the way up through his prosthetic Hobbit foot.
"We were a good hour, hour and a half's drive out of town. It was a long way, it was quite remote. We called for a chopper, we needed to get him to a hospital very quickly because there was a lot of bleeding," Jackson said in a behind-the-scenes documentary.
Mortensen also had an injury while filming, along with a brush with death. During a scene in Two Towers, Mortensen kicked an Orc helmet and accidentally broke two of his toes.
"So he boots this helmet and then he let out this scream," Jackson said. "I thought, 'Wow, this is strong. I mean this is like Aragorn is just in total grief at what's happened to Merry and Pippin. This is really cool.' He didn't say anything to us but we found out that Viggo had actually broken two toes with that last kick. And normally an actor would say, 'Cut, cut. I've hurt myself'...I mean Viggo actually, feeling that pain, he actually turned that into a performance. He stayed in the character of Aragorn. He was letting that pain feed and drive his performance."
Then in another scene, where Aragorn floats down the river after being thrown off a cliff, Mortensen almost drowned. He performed most of his stunts himself and this scene was no different. But the river's rapids were tough that day and Mortensen almost got sucked under.
"They had the safety guys, you know, the river rafting guys do it in wet suits and they floated down and figured out how it'd work," Mortensen said in the same documentary. "What they couldn't calculate was the weight of all the stuff, you know, there's just things that changed the way it was for me, I guess, floating down. The sword, the boots, the wool cloak. It got wet and it was just like an anchor. So in any case, I didn't float to exactly the same spot they had and I hit this spot where the current hit this rock and went straight down. And before I knew it, I was on the bottom...I must've eventually kicked against the wall or the rock and got just out of where this current was pushing down."
Orlando Bloom also broke a rib falling off a horse and John Rhys Davies almost drowned in a canoe, and even Dominic Monaghan got a wooden splinter in the foot. But other than that they came out alive.
Besides the horrible injuries, the movies faced tons of script rewrites, and reshoots, especially on the second two movies. In the end, the movies turned out to be total blockbusters and won a total of 17 Academy Awards together, Return of the King taking away 11 of them alone. It is also the most awarded film series of cinematic history. Not bad for the little hobbits of Middle Earth.
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