Why It Was 'Unfilmable': The fantasy epic against which all other fantasy epics are measured, The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books by J.R.R. Tolkien is a sweeping, mythical troika with a large cast of characters and a detailed intrinsic history spread across every page. Putting such a trilogy onto film would require great financial input and a cast and crew of hundreds, maybe thousands. But with dozens of different magical races and their many tribes, dense backstories, whole invented languages and a varied ecosystem ranging from snowy mountain ranges to hellish volcanic kingdoms, it seemed no amount of money would ever really do justice to Middle-Earth. How It Got Made: After the studio gave a $281 million budget to the largely untested (in the field of major blockbusters, anyway) Peter Jackson, and the screenplays for all three films had boiled Tolkien's story down into a more manageable narrative, Jackson went to work. Filming took more than a year, production starting in October 1999 and finally ending in December 2000. The real coup - aside from nailing the difficult casting - was the location Jackson chose to stand in for Middle-Earth: his native New Zealand. A largely untouched land with its own diverse geography, filming everything in New Zealand allowed Jackson to film for much cheaper than the usual blockbuster. Innovative, state-of-the-art CGI then filled in the gaps and recreated the worlds of Tolkien almost seamlessly.