How did the notion of adapting Tolkien's work come to you?

Fran Walsh - who co-wrote the script with myself and Philippa Boyens - and I were in the middle of shooting "The Frighteners", in October '95, and we were thinking about what we were going to do next. I don't know where it came from, but the concept of "Lord of the Rings" just popped into our heads. I guess you start by thinking, Why hasn't it been made? And who's got the rights?

Did you always conceive of it as three films?

We originally thought about dividing it into two films, and still tell the story. In our meeting with New Line, they said "Why would you want to make it into two films? It's three books." They completely embraced the idea of three films. Hollywood's instinct would be to press it all into one movie. Anybody who attempts to do that... it just can't be done. The story is too well known, the characters too well loved. You would lose so much about what people loved about the book. That's why it never happened.

You've shot all three movies back-to-back. How did that work?

We basically set about making one big, long movie. We haven't really divided the film into three parts that much in our minds. We obviously have the three parts to release one year apart from each other, so in post-production we are separating parts one, two, and three quite clearly. Shooting it was 14 months of continuous shooting. Like any movie, we shot out of sequence. One day, we'd be shooting a scene from part three, and the next day a scene from part one. That's the way it went. It was like shooting one big, long seven-hour movie.

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