Where to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

Trivia & production notes

• Alan Lee's 1:35 scale Helm's Deep miniature, based on his own earlier book illustration, was featured in a 45-minute video that convinced New Line Cinema to fund the entire project.
• Director Peter Jackson used 40,000 toy soldiers with the Helm's Deep miniature to choreograph the battle sequences before filming.
• John Howe designed a special crossbow for the Uruk-hai that required no external tools to rearm, a significant innovation for the character design.
• Each Rohirrim sword took 3 to 6 days to forge by hand, with most designs created by John Howe and forged by Peter Lyon.
• The exterior of Edoras on Mount Sunday took six months to build and served double duty as offices and lunch halls for the crew.
• Viggo Mortensen broke two toes kicking an Orc helmet during filming, with the incident captured in the final film.
• The Battle of Helm's Deep filming took approximately three months, with 500 extras who improvised dialogue in Māori and ad-libbed movements like stamping their spears.
• Gollum's CGI model was redesigned in 2001 and all previous shots were reanimated within two months over the Christmas period to reflect Andy Serkis's casting as the younger Sméagol.
• Gollum's realistic skin tones took four hours per frame to render, with his face animated manually while his body movements were primarily captured from Serkis's motion capture performance.
• Treebeard required 28 to 48 hours per frame to render, and a 14-foot puppet was built with Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd sitting on hidden bicycle seats in its hands during scenes with Merry and Pippin.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.