Source: New Line

In December 19 2001, was released one classic movie of all time, ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’. The movie is about a meek Hobbit from the Shire and eight companions, who set out on a journey to destroy the powerful One Ring and save Middle-earth from the Dark Lord Sauron.

Stars: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen
Director: Peter Jackson

To celebrate the 20th anniversary, here are some of the curiosities about this movie.

  • Sir Christopher Lee (Saruman) read “The Lord of the Rings” once a year until his death in 2015, and had done so since the year it was published. He was also the only member of the cast and crew ever to have met J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • Director Peter Jackson gave one of the rings used in the movies to Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis as a gift when the shoot was finished. They both thought they had the only one.
  • Gandalf’s painful encounter with a ceiling beam in Bilbo’s hobbit-hole was not in the script. Sir Ian McKellen banged his forehead against the beam accidentally. Peter Jackson thought McKellen did a great job “acting through” the mistake, and kept it in.
  • Despite playing a dwarf, John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) is the tallest of the actors who play members of the Fellowship. He is 6′ 1″.
  • The Elvish language lines spoken in this movie are not just quotes from the book, they were derived from J.R.R. Tolkien’s own limited dictionary of that language. Dialect coach Andrew Jack used recordings of Tolkien reading his books to guide the actors’ and actresses’ pronunciations.
  • Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn), who is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Danish, requested the script be revised, to let Aragorn speak more of his lines in Elvish.
  • Orlando Bloom landed the role of Legolas two days before he finished drama school.
  • Hobbiton was made a year before production began to make it look like it was a natural, lived-in place, complete with real vegetable patches. The greens department regulated the length of the grass by having sheep eat it.
  • The hobbits needed to appear about three to four feet tall, tiny compared with the seven-foot Gandalf. This was often accomplished using forced perspective, placing Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) consistently closer to the camera than Elijah Wood, in order to trick the eye into thinking McKellen is towering. In some cases, the camera would be moving, something that would normally break the effect, so special props and sets were designed to maintain the illusion in-camera.
  • It is estimated that filming of the trilogy pumped about $200 million into the New Zealand economy. The New Zealand government even created a Minister for Lord of the Rings, whose remit was to exploit all the economic opportunities the movies represented.
  • The different colors of blue for the elves’ eyes revealed what race they were. The Lothlorien elves had light blue eyes, and the Rivendell elves’ eyes were dark blue.
  • Wherever possible, costume designer Ngila Dickson followed J.R.R. Tolkien’s descriptions of the characters’ clothing to the letter. One such example is Bilbo Baggins’ waistcoat, which sports brass buttons, as referenced in “The Hobbit”.

Source: Imdb