How The Lord of the Rings Films Were Made in New Zealand

For decades The Lord of the Rings was thought to be unfilmable. It was too long, too strange and too full of creatures that no camera could show. Then a director from New Zealand filmed all three parts at once, in his own country, and made one of the most successful film series ever.

The making of Peter Jackson's trilogy is a story in its own right: fourteen months of filming, a special-effects industry built almost from scratch, and a sheep farm that became the most famous village in fantasy.

Three films at once

Most film series are made one film at a time, with each sequel depending on the success of the last. Jackson's films were shot together. Principal photography ran from 11 October 1999 to 22 December 2000, with additional filming in each of the following years before each release.

Filming everything at once was a huge gamble for New Line Cinema, which produced and distributed the films with Jackson's company, WingNut Films. The total budget for the three was about $281 million. If the first film had failed, the other two would already have been made.

One book, three films

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as a single novel, published in three volumes, which is why it is so often called a trilogy. Our piece on why The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy explains the difference.

The films followed the familiar three-part shape: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002 and The Return of the King in 2003. Each was released in a longer extended edition on home video a year after it reached cinemas.

Finding the Shire

New Zealand's landscapes stood in for Middle-earth throughout, and the most famous location is the Shire. In 1998, during an aerial search for locations, Jackson found the Alexander family's farm in the Waikato region, near the town of Matamata, with rolling green hills.

Construction began in March 1999. The original Hobbiton set was built from temporary materials, and much of it was taken down after filming. It was rebuilt in permanent form around 2010 for The Hobbit films, and it is pictured at the top of this page.

A village that stayed

Guided tours of the set began in 2002 and now run every day across about five and a half hectares. Visitors can see 44 hobbit holes, most of them only doors and windows set into the hillside, though two furnished interiors opened to the public in December 2023.

The Green Dragon inn was rebuilt as a working inn in 2012, and the set welcomed its 500,000th visitor in 2013. Matamata, where the tour buses leave, has grown into a tourist town on the strength of a film set. Hogwarts locations have a similar pull, as our guide to where Hogwarts was filmed shows.

Weta and the creatures

The films needed armour, weapons, makeup, creatures and miniatures on an enormous scale. Most of it came from Weta Workshop, led by Richard Taylor, in Wellington. Its sister company, Weta Digital, created the digital effects, including software called MASSIVE that let thousands of computer-generated soldiers fight independently in the battle scenes.

The most famous creation was Gollum. The actor Andy Serkis performed the role, and motion capture recorded his movements so that the digital character could be built on his performance. It changed how films use actors for computer-generated characters.

The reward

The gamble paid off. The three films earned about $2.99 billion worldwide, making them among the highest-grossing film series of all time and the highest-grossing films in New Zealand's cinema history.

They also won 17 Academy Awards from 30 nominations. The Return of the King won Best Picture, a rare honour for a fantasy film and recognition for the whole project.

Why shooting together mattered

Making the three films at once was not only a financial risk; it also gave them a rare consistency. The same cast, sets, costumes and crews served the whole story, so the films look and feel like one long work rather than three sequels made years apart.

It also meant the story could be planned as a whole. Changes to the first film could be matched in the others, and the additional filming carried out before each release let the team adjust each part as the series came together. Many fans treat the three extended editions, watched back to back, as the definitive version of the story.

What the films changed

Before Jackson's trilogy, big fantasy films were rare and often not taken seriously. Afterwards, studios saw that audiences would follow long, complex fantasy stories, and adaptations of fantasy books multiplied on film and television.

Middle-earth itself has returned to the screen, first in Jackson's Hobbit films and then in Amazon's series set thousands of years earlier, which we cover in The Rings of Power explained. But for many viewers, Jackson's three films remain what Middle-earth looks like.