The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
Peter Jackson
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.
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.
Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.
What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.
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.
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.'
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.
I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.
One of the best things about growing up in New Zealand is that if you are prepared to work hard and have faith in yourself, truly anything is possible.
Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.
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 make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.
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.
If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love - fantasy and historical epic.
I'm not a regret guy.
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.
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 think 'Jaws' is a remarkable film.
The cameo I did in 'Fellowship of the Ring' was I was in the street of Bree, and I was eating a carrot.
We've all forgotten how to be original.
For a lot of my childhood, I didn't want to direct movies because I didn't really know what directing was.
For me, utter failure is to make a film that people pay their money to go see and they don't like.
Obviously, with a CGI character, you're building a character in much the same way as a real creature is built. You build the bones, the skeletons, the muscles. You put layers of fat on. You put a layer of skin on which has to have a translucency, depending on what the character is.
Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.
The big-budget blockbuster is becoming one of the most dependable forms of filmmaking.
Rivalry doesn't help anybody.
Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating.
It's not going to be too much longer before Xbox Live produces programming.
One of the first movies I ever saw was 'Batman,' based on the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward.
You never make movies for Oscars.
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 don't think that because you die and move on to somewhere else that you lose your sense of humor.
There's a generation of children who don't like black and white movies. There's a level of impatience or intolerance now.
I've always been happy to take a gamble on myself.
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.
'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 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'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.
