Peter Jackson Quotes

I think there's still a little bit of that 9 year-old in me and I'm pretty happy.

I watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.

To some degree, I was very dubious of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' idea - taking a theme park ride and turning into a film - even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.

I want to make movies just like "King Kong." You know, dinosaurs, big gorillas - it's everything that a nine year-old boy would fall in love with.

No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore's music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life.

I love collaborating with people.

Forty-eight frames per second is a way, way better way to look at 3D. It's so much more comfortable on the eyes.

It's all about his determination. You never, ever, give up once you start something, once you're on the trail of something you don't stop and that's what you have to go through when you're making a movie too. Once the train's rolling, you have to stick with it.

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s.

You shouldn't think of these movies as being 'The Lord of the Rings.' The Lord of the Rings is, and always will be, a wonderful book - one of the greatest ever written. Any films will only ever be an INTERPRETATION of the book. In this case my interpretation.

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

Motion-capture is not a genre. Motion-capture is a tool and technique and what we tried to do was to really use both motion-capture and traditional animation to build a system.

New Zealand is not used to wealth. In America wealth is kind of a thing of pride. Here it's the opposite. The more you've got, the bigger the target you are.

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.

If I'm lucky enough to be involved in the Academy Awards in the future, I'll just let people make up their decision without being involved in any politics. Because it shouldn't involve that.

To get an Oscar would be an incredible moment in my career, there is no doubt about that. But the 'Lord of the Rings' films are not made for Oscars, they are made for the audience.

I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.

We've all forgotten how to be original.

Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.

I want to make a series of movies that run together, so if any crazy lunatic wants to watch them all in a row, there will be a consistency of tone.

Being honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame alongside the names of some of my childhood heroes is slightly surreal and incredibly awesome.

Two of the actors, Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom, have been caught between two landslides and are now trapped in a tiny town in the middle of the South Island. They have been taken in by a kindly woman who has offered them food and a bed. They were last reported to be cooking spaghetti and cracking into a bottle of red wine.

The one thing with 3D presentations is I think that 3D itself, whether it's 24 or 48, is at a very interesting point in time.

I love writing, and I love postproduction. That's great, because you start to reassemble the film, and you sit there, and you start to really put the film together, finally. The shooting of it is the most stressful part of the process.

Once the film is out and a lot of people are seeing it, it becomes almost owned by the cinemagoers of the world.

Elijah can register such subtle emotion on his face that I loved doing close-ups on him. He really brings a superb emotional level to Frodo's scenes and although he is a very instinctive actor, we discussed the character thoroughly.

It's not going to be too much longer before Xbox Live produces programming.

Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.

I think we're going to enter a phase where there's less interest in the CGI and there's a demand for story again. I think we've dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we've played with.

Once you go down a road, you take it through to the end.

One of the first movies I ever saw was 'Batman,' based on the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward.

While you're finding evidence of innocence, you also find evidence that points to other people.

I don't think that because you die and move on to somewhere else that you lose your sense of humor.

There are a couple of locations in 'The Hobbit' that are shared with 'Lord of the Rings.'

My dad always told me that the principal reason he chose New Zealand to emigrate to after World War II was the high regard his father had for the Kiwis he encountered at Gallipoli.

I always have had a slightly jaundiced view about people who promote books about themselves.

For me, utter failure is to make a film that people pay their money to go see and they don't like.

I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli, and it seems to work.

I wanted people to believe that there could still be this little undiscovered piece of the world that survives still on Skull Island.

Stem cell therapy has the potential to treat a multitude of diseases and illnesses, which up until now have been labelled 'incurable.'

When you're casting a movie and when you're shooting a film, the eyes are the most important feature of any performer, really. Any great actor literally knows exactly how to use their eyes, and even as a filmmaker I love shooting huge close-ups because it's those eyes that mean so much to me.

'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love - fantasy and historical epic.

The director has to win, because you should never force a director to shoot something they don't believe in.

The music in a film like this is as critical as anything because Kong is mute. He doesn't talk.

When you're directing, you're right at the coal face, always exhausted, often emotional - and I'll enjoy being a couple of steps back from that and simply helping where I can.

I'm not going to head off and do a Marvel film. So if I don't do a Marvel film, I don't have any other choice - I've got to go make a small New Zealand movie!

If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to that third chapter, and the third chapter is what justifies what's come before.

Second movies are great because you can drop into them, and it doesn't really have a beginning on it, particularly in a traditional way. You can just tear into it.

Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school - you're always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.

There are perennial stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Sherlock Holmes' and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and 'Frankenstein' is another one. They're perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years, and that's OK.

'The Lord of the Rings,' published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.

To his ex-wife in court, he said I lost interest in you when the Botox lost its effect and you looked like a plastic doll that escaped from a fire.

New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.

The first day I start shooting, I start having a recurring nightmare that every single night that I am lying in bed, and there is a film crew surrounding the bed, waiting for me to tell them what to do, and I don't quite know what movie I am supposed to be making.

Every time you do something, people are going to like it, people are going to hate it. You tend to make the movies on the basis you are making them for the people who are going to like them and not worrying too much about people who don't like them.

[While shooting close-ups] you study real eyes, you study how the light reflects in them, you study the back of the eye, you study the way irises reflect emotion. You go into great scientific detail.

There's a generation of children who don't like black and white movies. There's a level of impatience or intolerance now.

When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script.

48 frames per second is something you have to get used to. I've got absolute belief and faith in 48 frames ... it's something that could have ramifications for the entire industry. 'The Hobbit' really is the test of that.

I'm always embarrassed by those rugby player autobiographies which get written by journalists.

I want to put everything I think I've learned about filmmaking and storytelling and put it to the test in other areas.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five second delay won't do anything with

If you take 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' as books, one is written for children, and one is an adult's book.

The theatrical versions are the definitive versions. I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.

I never wanted to do 'The Hobbit' in the first place.

I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.

The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late '60s, the film rights.

I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats ... I want audiences to be transported.

If you're an only child, you spend a lot of time by yourself, and you develop a strong ability to entertain yourself, to conjure up fantasy.

Actors will never be replaced. The thought that somehow a computer version of a character is going to be something people prefer to look at is a ludicrous idea.

So many film makers are scared of visual effects - which is no crime.

There is a lot of 'Halo' movie material no one has ever seen in New Zealand.

I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.

The entertainment options for young people are a lot broader now, and the quality of films is slumping a little bit.

I just think that we're living in a world where the technology is advancing so rapidly. You're having cameras that are capable of more and more - the resolution on cameras is jumping up.

In the old days, you cut out a scene that might've been a really great scene, and no one was ever going to see it ever again. Now, with DVD, you can obviously ... there's a lot of possibilities for scenes that are good scenes.

In an ideal world the script is written lean and tight and therefore there are no scenes left on the cuttring room floor and therefore no extended edition.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

I find that in the process of making a film you're constantly discovering things that you never even imagined would work at the beginning. Actors come into the film and do things you never even imagined. Production designers come in, the director of photography lights it in a way that you never imagined. So, it's always evolving, always exciting.

Writing a screen play with a group of collaborators is like the Lennon McCartney collaboration ... sometimes one or two people do more than others on certain parts of the process and vice versa.

'Heavenly Creatures' was really the idea of Fran Walsh. It was a very famous New Zealand murder case, but not one that people knew much about.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.

'The Return Of The King' has a conclusion.

If you work at love, you will find love at work.

Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.

The industry has to have the audience in order to make these films. So it's a serious thing - how do you get people to leave their houses and go to the theater?

I like to keep an open mind, but I do think there is some form of energy that exists separate to our flesh and blood. I do think that there's some kind of an energy that leaves the body when it dies, but I certainly don't have religious beliefs particularly.

With the right movie, 3D can enhance the experience. Absolutely, it can make a good film a great film. It can make a great film a really amazing film to see .

In every house, when the curtains are drawn, there's a story going on, and you never get to hear ... You get the public side of things, the happy, smiling, social activities.

The producers of 'The Hobbit' take the welfare of all animals very seriously and have always pursued the highest standard of care for animals in their charge.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

There's a very go-to kind of attitude in New Zealand that stems from that psyche of being quite isolated and not being able to rely on the rest of the world's infrastructure.

I remember when I was - I must've been 17 or 18 years old - I remember 'The Empire Strikes Back' had a big cliffhanger ending, and it was, like, three years before the next one came out.

To me, fantasy should be as real as possible. I don't buy into the notion that because it's fantastic, it should be unrealistic, because I think you have to have a sense of believing the world that you're going into.

When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

There was a great magazine in the '80s called 'Cinemagic' for home moviemakers who liked to do monster and special effects movies. It was like a magazine written just for me.