By Davan 
Why was the Lord of the Rings trilogy filmed entirely in New Zealand and not in the USA that were produced and distributed by the Americans?
Filming in New Zealand was how Peter Jackson got to be director in the first place. It was a package deal. The movies were very expensive by the standards of the time. Three studios had too pool resources in order to make them and a flop could put one or more of them out of business. Jackson’s pitch was that filming in his native New Zealand would be cheaper. There was a favorable exchange rate so every US dollar was worth at least 1.60 in NZ Dollars. They already had a budding film industry catering to fantasy productions thanks to the long-running syndicated series Xena and Hercules. New Zealand is sparsely populated with lots of mountains, rivers, and plains that made it easy to film on location. And those spots are fairly close together. Also, New Zealand had Weta Workshop and Weta Digital which were leading prop and CGi shops respectively. People associated with Weta Digital had recently developed Massive which allows easy creation of CGI crowd scenes. Jackson has claimed that filming the Lord of the Rings in the US would have cost three times as much as filming in New Zealand.
