Lord of the Rings Black Gate bombing range
by Professional Portal ☀️: Karl Urban
During the filming of the Black Gate battle in *The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King* (2003), the production used a New Zealand military bombing range as the location. The cast was explicitly told not to touch any unexploded ordnance. Karl Urban later recalled, "You look down and sure enough, there's the fins of a bomb sticking out in" the ground. The full story is available at
Transcript (en)
The first day that we showed up there to shoot, we were taken into this big tent. This is a bomb. This is a rocket. All these things you might find out here. Don't touch them. Fins of a bomb sticking out on the ground. And we were filming right in the middle of it, doing a battle sequence. Yeah, but I said, does that mean that inside this tape we're fine? No, but there's less bombs. where you are than on the other side of that table.
