I love collaborating with people.
— Peter Jackson
The entertainment options for young people are a lot broader now, and the quality of films is slumping a little bit.
'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.
The idea of an animated film is you always kind of get a little bit daunted by it as a filmmaker because it feels like a lot of your communication is going to be with computer artists, and you're going to have to kind of channel the movie through extra pairs of hands.
To be an original is probably the hardest quality to find if you're a young filmmaker.
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.
You never make movies for Oscars.
I've always been happy to take a gamble on myself.
It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.
When I worked as a newspaper photo engraver in the only job I ever had, many years ago, I'd get the train home to Pukerua Bay where I was staying with my parents. An hour ride, 16 stops, and almost always, I'd have automatic wake-up, seconds before we pulled into my station.
Pre-preproduction is the tenuous time before a project is greenlit; before the studio commits to spending real money. This is the most vulnerable period for any film because it's the time when your project is most likely to be put into turnaround. That's film-speak for killed off.
I don't really want to make a stylized film or anything too surreal.
I hope one day that I'll get to make another horror film; I'd love to.
People regard CGI as a gimmick; they almost blame CGI for a bad story or a bad script. They talk about CGI as if it's responsible for a drop in standards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once upon a time, sound was new technology.
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.
There are a couple of locations in 'The Hobbit' that are shared with 'Lord of the Rings.'
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 make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.
While you're finding evidence of innocence, you also find evidence that points to other people.
We're human beings, and we want stories. We're always going to be entertained and have our emotions touched by humanity and by things that we recognize in our own lives. So whilst every now and again we'll be happy to watch a bubblegum film, it's never gonna be the only things that get made.
The Beatles once approached Stanley Kubrick to do 'The Lord Of The Rings.' This was before Tolkien sold the rights. They approached him, and he said, 'No.'
'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.
There is a lot of 'Halo' movie material no one has ever seen in New Zealand.
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.
I don't quite know what an auteur is.
It's not going to be too much longer before Xbox Live produces programming.
'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love - fantasy and historical epic.
The cameo I did in 'Fellowship of the Ring' was I was in the street of Bree, and I was eating a carrot.
When you look at the original 'Paradise Lost' film, you see three kids who can't defend themselves, being persecuted in a medieval way - witchcraft, satanic worship. It was kind of primitive.
Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.
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.
'Bad Taste' was - it was, in many respects, my sort of, my, I guess, my single-minded desire to want to break into the film industry when New Zealand didn't really have a film industry to break into.
I don't think that because you die and move on to somewhere else that you lose your sense of humor.
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.
I never dreamed in a million years that 'The Lord of the Rings' would be nominated for an Oscar. Those types of fantasy movies never got nominations.
If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.
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.
I want to put everything I think I've learned about filmmaking and storytelling and put it to the test in other areas.
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.
I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.
I think everything that you do, you're learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that's one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking.
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.
In the case of 'The Lovely Bones,' I felt that it was subject matter not often dealt with in film, and with a tone that is also rare.
I don't have an anti-Hollywood feeling. It's just I'm a New Zealander. I was born in New Zealand, and it's where my house is, and my family goes to school there. My interest is to remain in my homeland and make films. I don't really want to relocate myself to other countries in the world to work.
I have a million questions about my granddad and no one to talk to.
