Peter Jackson reveals his favourite scene from the 'Lord of the Rings' movies

Peter Jackson has revealed the scene that he still loves revisiting from his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy.

And it's none of the major battle scenes, nor is it lingering, soft focus Hobbit cuddling in the final moments of Return of the King.

In fact, it's a much darker part of the movies, the moment when we see the full mania of Andy Serkis's Gollum.

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Speaking in an interview with Lord of the Rings superfan Stephen Colbert at his studio in New Zealand, Jackson explained the pull of this particular moment, which he says 'captures a lot of the spirit' of the movie.

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“A key thing with Gollum, as most people know, is that he’s Smeagol and he’s Gollum; it’s like a split,” Jackson says. “We hadn’t gotten a scene where you really got the idea, ‘This guy is two people.’ So, we knew that we needed it.”

But they soon realised that there was no room in the movie's production schedule to make such vital character development happen, so with his partner Fran Walsh, also producer of the trilogy, they worked out a way of doing it without needing the likes of Elijah Wood and Sean Astin on set.

“So Fran wrote a scene where Sam and Frodo are asleep – so they can be just lumps in the bed, [and] we don’t have to have Elijah [Wood] and Sean [Astin] – and a little set,” Jackson went on.

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“And we didn’t have anyone to direct it, so I said to Fran, ‘Well you wrote it, you should go and shoot it.’ So she went in there for a day, and she wrote and directed the scene, which has become kind of pretty famous now. We just realized that we needed it to really sell the idea to the audience of who this guy is.”

You can check out the interview here...

It's 19 years since that first movie, released in the UK on December 10, 2001.

The trilogy would go on to make almost $3 billion at the worldwide box office, hauling a staggering 17 Oscars from 30 nominations.

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