Excerpted from:

"Floaty Acting", Golf Balls, the Language of Love and Other Revelations

Billy Boyd

An Extremely Random Interview with a Mischievous Hobbit

by Margie Libling

[...]

What was the hardest or most difficult part of filming LOTR?

Definitely the time and energy. A low budget movie normally takes about six weeks to film, whereas a high-budget film will take about twelve weeks. It took a year and a half to film the three movies. We worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day, six or seven days a weeks. We would sleep on set and in our dressing rooms. Every time we would start feeling down, Richard Taylor, the head of WETA, would remind us that it was the Lord of the Rings we were making and that put everything back into perspective. We were all physically and mentally exhausted, and there were certainly times when it got to us. Dom Monaghan [Merry] and I were getting ready to film a scene and Dom was totally drained. The crew used spikes with golf balls on them as markers in the ground where the cameras would be. He noticed the golf balls and started picking them up, saying how fabulous it was finding golf balls all over the place. I thought it was hilarious, but the crew wasn't too happy. They had to go back and set the markers up all over again.

http://www.ink19.com/issues/december2003/interviews/billyBoyd.html