Peter Jackson
Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.
I watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.
Once you go down a road, you take it through to the end.
As a filmmaker, you want nothing more than to have people say, 'I love your movie.'
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.
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.
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.
I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.
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.
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.
There is a lot of 'Halo' movie material no one has ever seen in New Zealand.
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 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 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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
I've always been happy to take a gamble on myself.
If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.
While you're finding evidence of innocence, you also find evidence that points to other people.
You never make movies for Oscars.
I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.
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.
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.
To be an original is probably the hardest quality to find if you're a young filmmaker.
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.'
'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 like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.
The entertainment options for young people are a lot broader now, and the quality of films is slumping a little bit.
Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.
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.
I love collaborating with people.
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.
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.
You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.
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.
When I was about 14, I got a splicing kit, which means you could chop up the film into little pieces and switch the order around and glue it together.
Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.
Strategically, horror films are a good way to start your career. You can get a lot of impact with very little.
Obviously, movies, you're often on location, out in the rain or the sun, in a real place where the trees and the cars are real. But when you're on stage, as an actor you're imagining the environment that you're in.
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 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.
'The Return Of The King' has a conclusion.
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.
I love Bilbo Baggins. I relate really well to Bilbo!
I never wanted to do 'The Hobbit' in the first place.
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.