Here are compulsed all the little "stories" that happened before, during, and after the Lord Of The Rings' filming. We have also filled these pages with little facts you may ignored until now. ;-)

The three hunters chasing the band of Uruk-Hai is, according to Peter Jackson, one of his favourites. So, he was very excited to shoot it. Problem was, when the day came to do it, he had a Gimli with a dislocated knee, a Aragorn with two broken foot toes and a Legolas with a cracked rib (the walking wounded, as he called them). As they had little time on that location, the actors agreed to shoot it anyway.

In the wide shots of the three hunters running, Viggo and Orlando got in to a bit of competition about their racing. A friendly, funny thing. Bret (Gimli's double), being shorter than them, didn't found that very amusing.
For the Rohirrim, several female riders extras were hired to play Rohan men. According to Dominic's gossip, Viggo was quite taken by one of the bearded Rohan 'man'. Mortensen makes no comments.

Talking about romance, Viggo's relationship with the horse that plays Brego in the movie, was quite famous too. Besides the 'kiss' we see on screen, Viggo went as far as sleeping in the stables, near the horse he ended up buying, to gain the animal's trust.

In the extend version, when Gríma is expelled from Edoras, he spits on the hand that Aragorn offers him to get up. In reality, Brad Dourif 'tried' to spit on Viggo's hand, but the wind was so strong, the spit ended up being blown away before it ever touched Aragorn.

Talking about the wind, Peter Jackson lost a pair of glasses in Edoras. The wind was so strong that it just ripped the glasses of his face. He could do nothing but see them tumbling to the ground, way, way down bellow.

During the shooting of Helm's Deep, Viggo and some of the stunt teams developed what Elijah calls 'spontaneous violent love'. They would head but each other as a greeting. One night, at a bar, Viggo, ever the practical joker, persuaded Sala Baker to share their greeting with Orlando. Sala, big guy that he is, was very not sure about that being a good idea, but ended up agreeing. He went to Orlando, said hello and BANG ! Head butted him. To this day, Bloom says, he still sees a white light every time he looks at the stuntman. As for Sala, he was in trouble with the make up artist the following day, when the story's main elf showed up with a red dot on his forehead.

The voice we hear when Gandalf returns is actually a composition of both Ian Mckellen (trying to sound like Saruman) and Christopher Lee (trying to sound like Gandalf). At one point, we actually see Lee's eyes on Gandalf's face, to further drive the illusion.

The voice of Saruman is also heard coming out of Bernard Hill/Théoden's mouth, in the scene where Gandalf frees the mind of the king.

John Rhys-Davies gives his voice to Treebeard. The effect of it actually sounding like something tree-sounding, was accomplished by filtering his voice through a series of card boxes maze, and re-recording it in the end.

We all know that Viggo was the last to arrive to New Zeland. His reception by Bob Anderson though, is something we've only learned now. As soon as he arrived, very jet-lagged Viggo was told to go and meet Anderson where he was training all the stunt team. When he got to this open space where they were, he saw a bunch of huge guys, facing a wall, humming. Bob approached him, placed a sword in his hands and was off, leaving Viggo with absolutely no idea of what was going on. The sword masters yells 'GO !' and all the stunt team, weapons at hand, started racing and screaming towards Viggo. The actor, sword in hand had no idea of what they had in mind, but stood his ground and waited. They stopped inches from him. And Bob Anderson started laughing.

Arwen was initially in Helm's Deep, during the battle. It was her that greeted Aragorn when he returned from the Warg attack (not Legolas), she was there next to Legolas when he drops the rope to pull Aragorn and Gimli and it was her that Aragorn ran to aid, when we see him going to Haldir's side. In the end, the idea of making of her a princess warrior didn't seat well with anyone, including Liv, and Arwen was painted out of the Deep.

Knowing that Peter Jackson was one of the founders of Weta Digital, its ironic to find out that the director has a problem with wetas (big, nasty looking NZ bug). In one of the scenes between Treebeard, Merry and Pippin, the all shot went downhill, because a weta had found its way in to Peter's shorts and he started screaming and jumping all around.

J.R.R. Tolkien's great grandson appears in The Return Of The King as a Gondorian soldier. Ananova.com reports that Mr Tolkien said : "I was just blown away when Peter Jackson came up with the idea of putting a Tolkien into the film and to be a Gondorian Ranger is a huge privilege."

Visual Effects Supervisor Jim Rygiel explains : "The technology developed over the course of making these films, and expectations got higher. Further complications came with input from Jackson. A lot of things got pushed along without any input from him, so when we finally started showing him things, he'd say, 'That's all wrong.' Over the years, We pretty much looked at everything and said, 'We're going to have to start from scratch.'"

A prototype for Shelob had to be found : "It was the one spider [Peter Jackson] hated through his life. They're fairly harmless, but they're huge and look creepy." [...] "It's quite a process to get it [into the computer], because it isn't as straightforward as it seems. Although it was relatively easy to laser-scan the model into the computer to create a 3-D image, the process of giving Shelob a skeleton was painstaking work. You have to rig the muscles to move correctly. The work is in making it animatable." [...] "We wanted [the abdomen] to be this gelatinous sac that squished around as he moved and compressed correctly when he shoved himself into the tunnel."

The Return Of The King has got the longest credits ever, with 9 minutes and 33 seconds.

Tolkien's Elves don't blink their eyes, and Peter Jackson followed the rule in the Trilogy. There isn't a single shot, in all of the three movies, where an Elf is seen blinking. The actors had to be careful during the filming. Peter Jackson, however, felt like adding a wink of his own to the fans and broke that rule once. At the end of The Return Of The King, there is a shot of Aragorn and his companions watching Barad-Dûr falling down. When legolas' face appears in a close-up, he blinks ! Only something as big as Sauron's defeat could make an Elf blink...

The Return Of The King won all 11 trophies for which it had been nominated, entering the Academy Awards' history. Only Ben Hur and Titanic had reached that score. Live TV coverage of the Oscar triumph for The Return Of The King has recorded a US audience of 43.5 million - up 32% from the year before.

Like many of the actors, Andy Serkis had not read the book when he was offered the part of Gollum. It was his wife who convinced him it would be a great part.

Andy Serkis knew how to do Gollum's voice when he watched (and listened) his cat "Diz" vomiting.

Every evening, the whole cast met in the little cinema of their hotel to watch the shot scenes of the past day.

To feel how Sméagol had lost his identity, Andy Serkis cut off his hair, because Sméagol had lost his hair. He even weared a pair of Hobbit-feet that had been used by Sean Astin.

Andy Serkis was first meant to be Gollum's voice only. The idea of letting him play all the scenes so that we could see his own work on screen developed step by step. The more this idea grew, the more the look of Gollum changed. In the end, it became very close to Andy's face.

During the shooting, Andy Serkis did a lot of freetime action, like rafting, free climbing and other sports. Once he spend three days alone in a canoe.

To avoid loosing his voice, Andy Serkis mixed a special "Gollum-juice" consisting of lemon, honey, ginger and hot water.

Andy Serkis and Fran Walsh got many ideas for Gollum's character while looking at their children, because he embodies the difference between the innocence of children and the loss of that innocence. Actually Andy Serkis thought that his son really looked like Sméagol when he was born.

Andy Serkis thought a lot about Gollum and so about question wether he was already born with an evil character or he became evil because of the power of the Ring. He thought about it especially when he saw his daughter biting her little brother again and again, even though she was punished by her parents.

Andy Serkis was just shooting the transformation from Sméagol into Gollum when his daughter visited him at the set. Her only comment to her father's look was : "Strange Daddy !"

During his time on the set, Andy Serkis did shootings with Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Thomans Robbins and David Wenham only. He did not work with any other actor.

After years of living as a vegetarian, Andy Serkis started to eat fish again after the filming of The Lord Of The Rings.