January 2026

Imagining Middle-Earth for The Lord of the Rings

This piece on the making of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring first appeared in American Cinematographer's December 2001 issue. For full access to our archive, which includes more than 105 years of essential motion-picture production coverage, become a subscriber today. Bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the screen was almost as perilous a saga as Frodo’s journey into Mordor. New Zealand director Peter Jackson, whose oeuvre ranges from the disturbing drama Heavenly Creatures to the zombie comedy Dead Alive, says he began to contemplate the enormity of the task after New Line gave him the green light to make the trilogy. “We had developed the project as two movies for Miramax, but they put it into turnaround...more