In 1997 director Peter Jackson began storyboarding the Lord of the Rings films and asked his team to make Middle-earth as plausible and believable as possible, thinking of it in a historical manner. Alan Lee and John Howe, who had previously illustrated the books, became the primary conceptual designers. Lee shaped places such as Rivendell, Isengard, Moria and Lothlorien, giving Elven architecture Art Nouveau influences and Dwarven designs a geometric style. Howe focused on the characters' armour, having studied it his whole life. Costume designer Ngila Dickson joined in April 1999 and led 40 seamstresses in creating thousands of costumes, which were aged deliberately to look worn. Filming took place at many locations across New Zealand, and the score by Howard Shore was performed by several orchestras and choirs, with Enya contributing two original songs.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.