Almost Every Line From THE LORD OF THE RINGS Had to Be Re-Recorded by the Actors in Post
The Lord of the Rings is an epic masterpiece, but it turns out that creating it was even more painstaking than fans could have imagined. Not only were the sets, makeup, costumes, and story itself incredibly extensive, but many of the performances were only caught visually the first time around.
In most movies, especially ones of this scope and scale, actors have to return to the studio to apply Automated dialogue replacement, or ADR as it's most commonly shortened to. Actors do voiceover recordings on their own performances where the audio was contaminated or too quiet when the scene was being filmed. This is typical for parts of a movie, but in LOTR, nearly every line in the whole movie had to be redone!
As reported by /Film, The One Ring fan forum quotes sound recorder Hammond Peek recalling in an issue of The Lord of the Rings Fan Club Official Movie Magazine that much of the shooting was subject to the sounds of the planes from nearby Wellington airport. He says:
"A lot of the time we would stop and wait until the plane flew over that particular studio. But 'The Lord of the Rings' was such a big production that, often, time was money and it became a money equation. If we spend so much of a day waiting for planes, then that represents so many dollars for such a huge crew and operation and gear hire. It is a lot cheaper just to look at post-syncing those lines [recording them again later in a studio]."
Dialogue editor Ray Beentjes explained in the magazine Sound & Picture how this process can be heartbreakingly disappointing in regards to an actor's original performance:
"An actor could have delivered a stellar performance on location, but the audio would often be unusable... They would then have to spend hours in a dubbing room re-recording their lines, and due to the complexity of the production, they might be covering what was six months' worth of filming in a two-day ADR session. That often makes it very difficult to create the same mood again."
Luckily, some actors weren’t phased by the workload. Sir Ian McKellan, who played Gandalf in the films, told Empire magazine that "ADR is fun" and "a technical challenge that sometimes can improve original readings."
Whatever they had to do to make those movies ended up being totally worth it. They are beautiful pieces of art that will go down in history as some of the best movies ever made.