What prompted the decision to film all three Lord of the Rings books at once?
Peter Jackson: Just the economics and the way that we wanted to release them. New Line were prepared to take the risk to fund the filming of all three because that’s what was going to be so much cheaper for them. We’d build sets once. We’d just shoot the set, which — some of the sets appeared in all three films, a few of them, some appeared in two films — and you’re done. And you also have the actors on a deal, so that they can’t — you don’t make one movie — because often what happens with franchises is you make one movie, the first one is very successful, and then the actors come back and they want twice the amount of money now because they’re in a successful film. Fair enough. There’s nothing wrong with that, but this was a danger for this project with three movies. New Line had the actors contracted as one — they’re basically as one big job, and we knew it was three movies, but it was like getting paid for a job, and they’re getting paid at the rate they were at that time. So l
