Sir Ian McKellen recently released something he is calling the The Grey Book and The White Book, which is his journal about his time as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film Trilogy and beyond.
The Lord of the Rings flim trilogy blew my mind when I saw them all in the theaters nearly twenty years ago. I read each of the books in the lead up to the film being released. Beyond the cultural impact of the stories themselves and how they were able to come alive on screen it is worth pointing that they laid the ground work for future film franchises. Filiming all three at once, the advances made in effects, the sheer length of the flims, all impact films released since. Without LotR what would the Harry Potter films or the Marvel Film Universe look like?
While I am still reading through the Grey and White book here is a good summary of some of the entries. I find peaks behind the curtain of creative minds to be fascinating in both their boredom and their genius. It reveals the mindset of McKellen during an undertaking of this magnitude and also the very real human impacts between jet lag, love for the horses on set, and props he has kept.