Peter Jackson has frequently been asked what his favorite The Lord of the Rings movie is. But rarely has he been asked what his favorite scene from the fantasy epics he shot is. So of course only extreme Lord of the Rings nerd Stephen Colbert could think to ask that question, and to score the director in a parody of the fantasy series made on the very sets and locations where Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films were shot.

Stephen Colbert is living his Lord of the Rings fanboy dreams, making a trip to New Zealand and managing to rope in Lord of the Rings and Hobbit director Peter Jackson into his crazy schemes. But it paid off in a few new pieces of Lord of the Rings trivia we didn’t know, and in a pretty funny parody video that sees Colbert reprising his role as the Lake-town spy, aka “Aragorn’s slightly hotter twin brother Darrylgorn.”

Apart from the (expensive) parody video that Colbert shot on the Hobbiton sets and using several of the Lord of the Rings costume designers and crew, courtesy of Jackson, Colbert also got to sit down with Jackson to grill him about the making of The Lord of the Rings. And through that Q&A, we learned that Jackson’s favorite scene in The Lord of the Rings trilogy isn’t actually one that he wrote or shot himself — it written by his filmmaking partner and Lord of the Rings screenwriter Fran Walsh:

“We were shooting Two Towers and it was introducing Gollum. A key thing with Gollum is that most people know he’s Sméagol and he’s Gollum, it’s like a split. But we hadn’t got a scene where you really got the idea of, ‘This guy is two people.’ So we knew that we needed it but we had no time to shoot it. So Fran wrote a scene where Sam and Frodo are asleep, so they can be just lumps in the bed, we don’t even have to have Elijah and Sean. We didn’t have anyone to direct it, so I said to Fran, ‘You wrote it, you should shoot it.’ So she went in for a day and she wrote and directed a scene which has become pretty famous now.”

The scene is indeed very famous, becoming an instant point of the pop culture zeitgeist which has been praised and parodied ever since. Jackson’s full answer (in which he also gives special mention to the mines of Moria sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring) as well as the scene in question is in the video below.

Also be sure to check out Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings parody, in which Jackson makes an appearance as a character named “Gratuitous Cameo,” in a nod to the director’s tendency to make quick cameos in his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films.

The post ‘The Lord of the Rings’: Peter Jackson Reveals His Favorite Movie Scene, Makes a “Gratuitous Cameo” in Stephen Colbert’s Parody appeared first on /Film.