‘The Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson: OCD or Just Cray ?

DF @ Digital Bucket says:

Over the years countless stories have emerged highlighting certain film directors obsession with the most minute details.  Details which often add great expense to accomplish but which are – aside from a few members of the crew – largely lost on the film going public which may never notice or appreciate them.

For example in The Shinning, Stanley Kubrick made his own secretary spend months typing up individually unique pages for the scene in which Shelley Duvall goes through the novel Jack Nicholson is writing and reads page after page of, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

In The Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson had the costume department make six miles of chain mail by hand, link by link. Furthermore, because the mail is what the actors wore under their armor only a few inches of is visible even if you freeze-frame on an individual soldier. Working non-stop, 32,000 feet of chain mail took over two years to create. You didn’t see most of it because the chain mail was used in a massive crowd and the entire scene was filmed at night in the rain.

But Jackson’s obsession didn’t stop there. When making the first Lord of the Rings movie he had over 48,000 detailed pieces of armor painstakingly crafted including 10,000 hand-forged Orcish belt buckles that are virtually impossible to see in the middle of a sprawling CGI-enhanced melee.

So if you ever wondered how a movie could cost over $200 million to make, look very carefully deep into the shadows for the answers.