The portraits of Bilbo's parents over the mantlepiece in Bag End are modelled on Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh.

Peter Jackson bought the Bag End set and put it in storage, and plans one day to put it in the side of a hill.

The Barad-Dur miniature was about 15ft tall. This is why Weta started calling the durn things "bigatures".

In The Silmarilion, Sauron has an even scarier, even more powerful boss called Morgoth.

Andy Serkis voices the Black Rider who asks after "Baggins" in the Shire.

That really is Elijah Wood leaping from the jetty onto the Buckleberry Ferry, not a stuntman.

The bigature of Orthanc filled an entire car park.

Since molten metal is hard to fake, the goblin forges of Orthanc were built in a real foundry and filled with real molten metal. Those are foundry workers dressed as goblins.

In his Fellowship cameo, Peter Jackson is holding a carrot because the pipe he tried to smoke made him feel sick.

When Saruman's goblins uproot a tree in Fellowship, no real trees were harmed; that one's fake and shot from several angles. Please send your tree-hugging jokes to P. Jackson, New Zealand.

The scene where the Black Riders chase Arwen and Frodo was interrupted by Queenstown flooding. The cast, including Liv Tyler, went to help sandbag the town against the floods while filming was suspended.

Sean Bean's lengthy "One does not simply walk into Mordor" speech was given to him to learn only the night before shooting. And the man made it a meme! Big props to the former Sharpe!

The Ringwraiths' screams are based on Fran Walsh screaming through a throat infection.

Bree was built on a World War II army barracks, with Middle Earth facades on existing buildings.

The reason the eagles don't just fly everyone to Mount Doom because "the eagles are their own race and do things for their own reasons". Also, Tolkien didn't like them to be seen as "Middle-Earth taxis"...

...Also, the Nazgul would have totally killed them.