The story behind The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy that turns 25, was filmed in 438 consecutive days and will have a new movie

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would soon celebrate his one hundred and eleventh birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much comment and excitement in Hobbiton,” he wrote. JRR Tolkien on the first page of The Lord of the rings. Little did I know that 45 years later, a New Zealander named Peter Jackson was going to direct the enormous adaptation, nor that the three films required 438 consecutive days of filming, with more than 150 locations and more than 20,000 extras, nor that it was a critical and international commercial success.

How was such a feat achieved, adapting a work with Tolkienian essence, with just a total budget of 300 million dollars, in six years? The question arises 25 after the premiere of the first installment and days after the announcement of the continuation of The Lord of the ringsco-written by Stephen Colbert and located 14 years after the trilogy.

The writer’s work, published in 1954 and 1955, gradually but intensely forged a cult following over the years. Like the magnetism of the One Ring itself, legions of fans were captivated by the books that chronicle the odyssey of Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship of the Ring to destroy the object that keeps the Dark Lord of Middle-earth in power.

One of those readers was Peter Jacksonwho after horror movies (Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, Braindead) and critically acclaimed works (heavenly creatures) dreamed of bringing the fantastic trilogy to the big screen.

Already in 1967 Stanley Kubrick was contacted by The Beatles to make an unusual and ultimately unfinished adaptation. Years later, cartoonist Ralph Bakshi He embarked on an animated adaptation, but only made a single film that adapted half of the work. Separate chapter for the low-budget Soviet version of 1991. But it was only in 1995, while the director was working on his next film, The Frightenerswhich had the idea of ​​bringing the fantasy trilogy to the big screen.

Tolkien’s work, composed of four books published during his life and more than twenty posthumously, contains a universe of almost infinite proportions: the story of Arda, an Earth before being Earth, born by the work of the god Ilúvatar and mutated over time by the hand of gods, inhabited by elves, orcs, ents, dwarves, men, and crossed by languages, legends, songs and cultures.

In that sense, the script developed by Peter Jackson together with his wife and colleague, Fran Walsh (with whom he had already worked on almost all of his films) and together with a newcomer Philipa Boyens, faced the enormous task of capturing the essence of the books and managing to transmute it to the cinematographic medium.

The work was so meticulous and perfectionist that rewrites continued even during filming, with scenes retouched and sent to the actors shortly before being filmed. And always omnipresent, the source material: “I would see Peter first thing in the morning, with his characteristic shorts and messy hair, absorbed in reading Tolkien,” testified Ian McKellen (Gandalf) in the interviews conducted for the extensive behind-the-scenes of the films.

To establish the aesthetics of the films, Peter Jackson used the vision of the two most famous illustrators of Tolkien’s workAlan Lee and John Howe. Its conceptual design was then turned to the designers of Weta Workshop, the company designated to create the makeup, prosthetics, props, miniatures, models and effects. In short, those in charge of bringing Middle Earth itself to materiality. And Jackson was very clear with his objective: “I want us to think that The Lord of the rings “It is real, it was really history, that these events happened,” he commented that he conveyed to the team.

Thus, the map drawn by Tolkien overlapped with that of New Zealand, from the placid Hobbiton in Matamata, surrounded by vegetation and flowers planted some time before filming began, to the extensive plains of Rohan, in Mount Sunday; from the pristine Rivendell, integrated into the nature of Kaitoke Regional Park, to the bombastic Minas Tirith, composed of a main model, a 1/14 miniature and large-scale sections, 1/12 and 1/8.

More than 120 technicians worked in Weta’s six departments, producing the raw materials of Middle-earth. “We design and manufacture 48,000 pieces of armor and We had four people making chain mail ten hours a day. We also produced 2,000 weapons (rubber, although they look like iron), including swords, spears, pikes and maces, bows, crossbows, daggers, knives and axes,” said director Richard Taylor.

Filming began in early October 1999 and spanned more than 150 New Zealand locations, and for an unprecedented 15 consecutive months with, at times, 7 units filming simultaneously. “If we had just had one unit filming everything that needed to be filmed, it probably would have taken six or seven years,” Peter Jackson said.

When faced with the challenge of filming hobbits with actors of average height, it was decided to use not only shorter doubles, but also traditional film techniques such as forced perspective. In this way, two sets were filmed at different distances and then put together so that the viewer saw only one. “In the smallest one, I, as a normal-sized person, could seem huge, because everything in The Shire was small,” explained Ian McKellen. But the most classic techniques coexisted with the most innovative, using an innovative motion capture system for Andy Serkis’ incarnation as Gollum.

The cast had to travel to remote locations, which could only be accessed by helicopter, and they carried supplies and tents with them in case they got stuck in the mountains. There were extreme situations, such as the cold that the hobbits had to endure when crossing the swamps of Kepler Mire where Moscagua would be located, or the injury caused to Sean Astin’s (Sam) foot as a result of a huge glass that sank in, or the broken teeth and the fractured toes of an intense Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) committed to his role.

It was one of those unique occasions in the history of cinema in which the casting generated bonds as strong as those of their characterizations. From the friendly rivalry that John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) and Orlando Bloom (Legolas) had between their characters, to the protective role that Sean Astin (Sam) took on Elijah Wood (Frodo), it seemed as if the fiction was moving into their own lives.

Wood’s last filmed sequence, where he finishes writing Bilbo’s Red Book with his own story, was filmed by Peter Jackson over and over again. Even when it wasn’t necessary, take after take was repeated because he didn’t want to finish filming. Until it was over, and both Peter and Elijah hugged each other through tears. “I’ll never forget it, it’s imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life…I burst into tears and just said ‘thank you’ over and over again,” Wood recalled.

Each film had a year of post-production until its release date. In the process, everything from the digital effects carried out by Weta Digital, which had to shape entire beings such as the Balrog, the Eye of Sauron, trolls, Treebeard and Gollum himself, to the sound design, which included the recording of a crowd at halftime of a cricket match between New Zealand and England, where the trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring was projected and Jackson led the crowd in shouts, whispers, and chants in the Black Language, which would later be used in the Battle of Helm’s Deep..

Howard Shoreknown for his work in films such as The Fly or The Silence of the Lambs, was in charge of constructing the music of Middle Earth. Immersed in the project from the early stages of production, he conceived leitmotifs that evolved along with the plot, both for the Fellowship, the One Ring itself and Sauron, as well as for the elves, the hobbits, the Gondorians or the Rohirrims. “Howard sees this as the opportunity of a lifetime to basically create an opera,” Peter Jackson explained.

The more than 1,000 pages of the work were finally transmuted into an exorbitant amount of 1,300 hours of material, which went through a complex and arduous assembly. The films released in cinemas in 2001, 2002 and 2003 were followed by extended versions on DVD, which were recently screened in Argentina.

The releases achieved resounding critical and box office success, with a total collection of almost 3,000 million dollars and with 11 Oscars for the third installmentbecoming one of the films with the most statuettes in history.

In January, the four hobbits interpreters along with Ian McKellen were photographed in a session for The Empire magazine for the 25 years of The Fellowship of the Ring. In the images, the five radiate smiles and point at each other with a playful gesture, perhaps remembering the intense filming they experienced together. The Community never separated.

The saga of The Lord of the rings will return to the big screen with the announcement of a new movie that took fans by surprise. Under the working title of “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past”, this new installment will be written by none other than Stephen Colbert, the renowned host of The Late Show and devoted Tolkien expert, along with his son Peter McGee and franchise veteran Philippa Boyens.

The film will function as a technical sequel and, at the same time, as a piece that rescues chapters from the original book that were never seen in the 2001 trilogy.

The announcement was made this March 24, 2026 by Peter Jackson himself.