Given how successful the Lord Of The Rings trilogy became, it’s hard to think back now to how much of a risk the whole thing was – all three films shot in one gigantic production, a fantasy epic on a scale un-hitherto seen on screen, all wrangled by Peter Jackson, the New Zealand splatter fanatic behind Braindead. Against all the odds, the films proved to be game-changing, groundbreaking, and Oscar-conquering.
25 years later, speaking to Empire for our epic celebration of the trilogy, Jackson himself can’t quite fathom how he and his collaborators – chiefly, writer-producer Fran Walsh and co-writer Philippa Boyens – pulled it all off. “What the hell were we thinking?” he says. “I mean, I would hesitate to even think that we could do anything like that now. It’s almost overwhelming to think back on. I was younger, we were all younger, and enthusiastic and naive.” For Boyens, a Tolkien diehard, her life changed forever on a job that she thought might be a quick in-and-out. “I thought I’d be lucky if I got maybe three months’ work out of it,” she laughs. As it turned out, it lasted a lot longer, under Jackson’s visionary eye. “There were moments that he absolutely saw because that’s how his brain works,” she recalls. “You know, following Gandalf over the edge, fighting the Balrog.”
It was a mammoth feat – the cinematic equivalent of going there and back again to Mount Doom. For Jackson, it remains a grand adventure firmly in the rear view. “I don’t miss those days,” he admits, “because there’s no point missing them; they came and they went, and life goes on and I’ve done quite a few things since. But I’m certainly proud of the films.” Time to dig the Extended Editions out again, then.
Read Empire’s full interview with Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens – looking back on the making of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, 25 years later – in the March 2026 issue, on sale Thursday January 15.
