The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers premiered on the 5th of December 2002 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, and what audiences saw that night was something cinema had not quite done before. A digital creature called Gollum spoke to himself in two voices, arguing over loyalty and betrayal, and reviewers would later call it perhaps the most celebrated scene in the entire film. By the time the picture finished its run, it had earned $923 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 2002 and, at the time, the third-highest-grossing film in all of cinema history.

  But the numbers only hint at what made this film matter. Peter Jackson was working simultaneously on three films, filmed across a single continuous shoot between the 11th of October 1999 and the 22nd of December 2000. He was adapting a novel that many readers considered unfilmable. And he was doing it not in Hollywood but in his native New Zealand, financed by American studio New Line Cinema from the other side of the world.

  The questions this documentary will explore are the ones that made The Two Towers a distinct achievement: How did a digital character become more emotionally convincing than most actors? What choices did the filmmakers make that departed from the book, and why? How did a crew build a medieval world from scratch in a quarry and on a mountaintop? And how did a film about orcs and wizards become, in the words of one critic, a reflection of "the global unease of the world in the first years of the 21st century"?

• 2. Building Middle-earth

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  Alan Lee joined the project in late 1997, and the first structure he was asked to design was Helm's Deep. That choice says something about the film's priorities. Helm's Deep was not a set piece. It was the film's climax, its moral and physical test, and it had to be imagined years before a single scene was shot.

  Lee's initial design drew from an illustration he had already done for Tolkien's book. The curved wall that appears in the film was proposed by fellow illustrator and designer John Howe, who would go on to design most of the evil forces of Middle-earth, including the Uruk-hai army. The physical Helm's Deep set was built at Dry Creek Quarry, with a gate, a ramp, and a wall that included a removable section. A miniature version at 1:4 scale ran fifty feet wide and was used for forced perspective shots and the major explosion sequence. A separate miniature at 1:35 scale had already been built early in production and was part of the forty-five-minute video that sold the entire project to New Line Cinema.

  Jackson used that same small-scale Helm's Deep to plan the battle itself, deploying forty thousand toy soldiers to work out the sequence of events. The filming of the actual battle took approximately three months, with most of the nighttime shots handled by John Mahaffie.

  Elsewhere in New Zealand, the exterior of Edoras, the Rohirrim capital, took six months to build on Mount Sunday. Its thatched roofs were constructed from scratch. The interior of the Hall of Edoras was filmed at Stone Street Studios, where Lee designed the tapestries and Théoden's wooden throne was partly built by his own daughter. John Howe described the design of Barad-dûr as a mockery of Gothic Cathedrals, and his collaboration with Lee on the Black Gate produced an unexpected complication: a typo in the script caused the miniature to be built as two gates instead of one. The ruined city of Osgiliath was designed to evoke London during the Blitz or Berlin in 1945, with its set built around a bridge and reusing elements from the Moria sequences in the first film.

  Rohan's visual identity came from Germanic and Anglo-Saxon patterns. Two hundred and fifty suits of armour were made for the Rohirrim. Each sword took between three and six days to forge, with most weapons designed by Howe and made by Peter Lyon.

• 3. The Creation of Gollum

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  Weta Digital began animating Gollum in late 1998, before principal photography had even started, because the studio needed to convince New Line Cinema the effect was achievable. What they produced over the following years was not just a technical landmark. It was a new kind of performance.

  Andy Serkis won the role of Gollum after Jackson was impressed by his audition tape. Originally, Gollum was planned as a purely computer-generated character, with Serkis providing only his voice. That plan changed once filming began. The crew discovered that the other actors performed better in takes where Serkis was physically present. So every scene involving Gollum was filmed twice: once with Serkis on set acting alongside his co-stars, and once without him. In the end, the CGI Gollum was rotoscoped and animated on top of the scenes that included Serkis, preserving the chemistry those takes created.

  Gollum's CGI model was redesigned in 2001 after Serkis was also cast as Sméagol, Gollum's former self, so the digital character would appear to be a physical transformation of the same person. The original model can still be briefly seen in The Fellowship of the Ring. Over Christmas 2001, the crew reanimated all previous shots to reflect the new design, completing the work within two months.

  Serkis's motion capture was used primarily to animate Gollum's body, though certain shots, such as Gollum crawling upside down, required different techniques. Gollum's face was animated manually, with recordings of Serkis used as a guide. Realistic skin tones were supervised by Gino Acevedo and took four hours per frame to render. Treebeard, by comparison, took between twenty-eight and forty-eight hours per frame.

  The split-personality scene, in which the childlike Sméagol and the malicious Gollum argue with each other, was written and directed by Fran Walsh. Jackson has called it one of his favorite scenes. The two personas were differentiated through contrasting camera angles and by Serkis altering his voice and physical bearing for each. Critic Nev Pierce, writing for the BBC, described Gollum as "the first believable CG character"; the 2003 MTV Movie Awards gave Serkis a Best Virtual Performance prize, the first of its kind.

• 4. Adapting the Book

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  The screenwriters did not originally conceive The Two Towers as a standalone film. The Lord of the Rings was initially written as a two-part series to be produced by Miramax, with sections of The Two Towers serving as the conclusion to The Fellowship of the Ring.

  When the project moved to New Line and became a trilogy, the writers had to decide how to separate and restructure the material. Some changes were minor. Aragorn's fall over a cliff during the Warg attack was added entirely by Jackson to generate tension; nothing like it appears in Tolkien's text.

  A larger change was planned, then partially reversed. Writers originally scripted Arwen accompanying an army of Elves to Helm's Deep to fight alongside Aragorn. This version was filmed, but poor fan reaction during production led the team to revise the sequence. The script was reworked so that Arwen departs for Valinor, and one scene, already filmed, was edited into a flashback of a conversation in Rivendell the night before the Fellowship left. A conversation between Elrond and Galadriel was altered to become a telepathic exchange. The Elven warriors at Helm's Deep remained, however, because that element had already been shot and could not be reversed. Jackson and co-writer Philippa Boyens justified the change by pointing to the Appendices of The Return of the King, where Galadriel's forces and those of Thranduil of Mirkwood fought armies from Dol Guldur during the same period.

  The most debated change concerned Faramir. In Tolkien's novel, Faramir quickly recognises the One Ring as a danger and releases Frodo and Sam without hesitation. In the film, he initially resolves to deliver the Ring to his father Denethor, taking his captives to the Battle of Osgiliath before being moved to release them. Boyens argued the change was necessary to keep the Ring threatening throughout. David Wenham, who played Faramir, later said he had not read the book before working from the script and only discovered the difference afterward. When he raised it with the writers, they explained that if Faramir said the line from the novel, "I would not pick that thing up even if it lay by the wayside," it would strip the Ring of all corruptive power.

  Even the meaning of the title shifted. Tolkien identified the two towers of the title as Minas Morgul and Orthanc. Jackson's film names them as Orthanc and Barad-dûr, making the towers symbolic of the evil alliance that drives the film's central conflict.

• 5. Injury, Improvisation, and the Set

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  Viggo Mortensen broke two toes kicking an Orc helmet during the scene where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli find what they believe to be the remains of Merry and Pippin. That scene, filmed as written, is in the final cut. His reaction in the shot was real pain.

  Mortensen was not alone. During the Rohan sequences, Orlando Bloom fell from his horse and cracked three ribs. John Rhys-Davies's stunt double, Brett Beattie, dislocated his knee. Those three injuries meant that Mortensen, Bloom, and Beattie were all recovering simultaneously during the running sequences in the first act of the film. Jackson referred to them collectively as "The Walking Wounded."

  The three-month shoot for the Battle of Helm's Deep added to the toll. Mortensen chipped a tooth during the sequence, and Bernard Hill had his ear slashed. The battle also featured five hundred extras who, left to their own devices, improvised the Uruk-hai stamping their spears before the charge began. Those same extras reportedly insulted each other in Maori during takes. Mortensen, who had developed a close bond with the stunt team, marked that respect by headbutting them, a traditional gesture.

  Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were joined by Andy Serkis on set on the 13th of April 2000. Brad Dourif, playing Gríma Wormtongue, spent considerable time developing a British accent for the role, a convention in fantasy cinema for characters placed in medieval settings.

  Off camera, the puppet built for Treebeard stood fourteen feet tall and moved on a wheel for scenes where the Ent interacts with Merry and Pippin. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd sat on concealed bicycle seats inside the puppet's hands. During breaks, they were left there alone.

• 6. Music and the Score

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  Howard Shore composed, orchestrated, and conducted the score for The Two Towers, as he did for the other two films in the trilogy. The scores for both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King won Academy Awards for Best Score. The Two Towers soundtrack was not nominated, though the reason was procedural: a rule applying to sequel scores initially raised eligibility questions before the Academy declared the score eligible.

  The music was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Voices, and the London Oratory School Schola. Soloists included soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and Irish fiddler and violinist Dermot Crehan, who also played the Hardanger fiddle. Crehan's instrument is heard in the Rohan themes throughout the film. The entire soundtrack was recorded at Abbey Road Studios.

  The funeral song sung by Éowyn at her cousin Théodred's burial, which appears in the extended edition, was written to sound like a traditional song of the Rohirrim people. Its lyrics are in Rohirric, represented in the film by Old English. The text was written by screenwriter Philippa Boyens, not by Tolkien, and was translated into Old English by David Salo. The melody draws on the Icelandic folk tradition of rímur.

  Shore's score for The Two Towers won the Grammy Award for Best Score, a distinction the Academy Awards did not grant it.

• 7. Box Office and Critical Legacy

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  The Two Towers opened in the United States on the 18th of December 2002. Its opening day gross of $26 million made it the second-highest opening Wednesday in cinema history at that point, behind Star Wars: Episode I. Its five-day opening totalled $101.5 million in North America.

  Internationally, the film set opening-day records in Germany, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, and Norway. It also set opening-weekend records in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Mexico, Denmark, Germany, and South Korea. The combined worldwide opening weekend of $189.9 million was the highest in history at that time, a record that held until The Matrix Reloaded in 2003.

  By the end of its original theatrical run, the film had grossed $923 million worldwide against a production budget of $94 million. Box Office Mojo estimated over 57 million tickets sold in the United States alone.

  Critical response was strong. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 288 reviews. Metacritic assigned it a score of 87 out of 100, indicating universal acclaim. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an "A", one grade higher than the "A-" earned by The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, calling it "one of the most spectacular swashbucklers ever made" while arguing it was not fully faithful to the spirit of Tolkien's books. Writing for The Observer, Philip French placed the film's visual style in a lineage running through Caspar David Friedrich, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Victorian visionary John Martin. Alexander Walker, reviewing for the Evening Standard, wrote that the Battle of Helm's Deep was "probably the greatest battlepiece composed for the screen since Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible."

  At the 75th Academy Awards, the film received six nominations, winning for Best Visual Effects, claimed by Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Randall William Cook, and Alex Funke, and for Best Sound Editing. Gollum was ranked as the third favourite computer-generated film character by Entertainment Weekly in 2007. In 2025, the film ranked at number 43 on The New York Times readers' choice list of the one hundred best films of the twenty-first century.