There’s a decent article on MSNBC / Newsweek–an interview with Miranda Rivers, who cast the Lord of the Rings. My favorite part is where she describes her on-sight classification system:
“We would walk down the street, and people were not people, they were types: I’d be going, ‘Hobbit!’ ‘Elf!’ ‘Uruk-hai!’ ‘Rohan!’ I got a lot of elves off the street.”
I find it interesting how similar that is to the typing system (man, hobbit, dwarf, elf) Randy Waterhouse defines in Cryptonomicon.