Peter Jackson Quotations

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

Everybody's life has these moments, where one thing leads to another. Some are big and obvious and some are small and seemingly insignificant.

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

The big-budget blockbuster is becoming one of the most dependable forms of filmmaking.

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

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.

Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.

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

I've always been happy to take a gamble on myself.

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.

If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.

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

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

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.

What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.

For a lot of my childhood, I didn't want to direct movies because I didn't really know what directing was.

I didn't want my kids having to pass through an airport named after their father.

I was bullied and regarded as little bit of an oddball myself.

I mean, I didn't have a huge upbringing with movies, I guess.

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

The only thing about 3-D is the dullness of the image.

The vast majority of the CGI budget is labor.

I think that George Lucas' 'Star Wars' films are fantastic. What he's done, which I admire, is he has taken all the money and profit from those films and poured it into developing digital sound and surround sound, which we are using today.

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.

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

As a filmmaker, you want nothing more than to have people say, 'I love your movie.'

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

Continuing advances in stem cell medicine will change all of our lives for the better.

Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film.

Filmmakers have to commit to making 3-D films properly like Jim Cameron did and not do cheap conversions at the tail end of the process.

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

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

'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.

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

I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.

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.

I don't quite know what an auteur is.

I don't really want to make a stylized film or anything too surreal.

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

I have a million questions about my granddad and no one to talk to.

I hope one day that I'll get to make another horror film; I'd love to.

I love Bilbo Baggins. I relate really well to Bilbo!

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

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.

I never overtly analyse my own movies, I don't think that's my job to do that. I just muddle through and do what I think is best for the movie.

Strategically, horror films are a good way to start your career. You can get a lot of impact with very little.

I think it's important that filmmakers look at the technology and figure out how to make the theatrical experience a little more exciting.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

It's not a happy time when a film drops dead on your doorstep.

It's one thing to support your kid, but if you have an interest in what your child is doing, it makes it a whole lot easier.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

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

Once upon a time, sound was new technology.

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

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

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.

'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.

'The Return Of The King' has a conclusion.

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

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.

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

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

To be an original is probably the hardest quality to find if you're a young filmmaker.

We are living in an age where teenagers are not going to the movies.

We had to get past the mechanical film age to be able to explore other things, but it will be interesting.

What I think is remarkable about my mum and dad is they had no interest in films, really. None.

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

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

You can't always look at life as a miserable thing.

You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.

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.

As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I'm just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what's happening onscreen.

'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.

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 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 feel very lucky to be able to make movies in New Zealand, and I will always be grateful for the support I have received from so many New Zealanders.

I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.

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 have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

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 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.

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.

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 thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after 'Lord of the Rings.' I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.