Top 70 Peter Jackson Quotes

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

I didn’t want people to sit there and watch 10 minutes of film,and all they write about is 48 frames.

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t got a real job.

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.

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.

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

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 love Bilbo Baggins. I relate really well to Bilbo!

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

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.

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.

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

I’m not a regret guy.

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’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!

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.

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

I think ‘Jaws’ is a remarkable film.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Once upon a time, sound was new technology.

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

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

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.

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.

The cameo I did in ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ was I was in the street of Bree, and I was eating a carrot.

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.

Too often, you see film makers from other countries who have made interesting, original films, and then they come here and get homogenized into being hack Hollywood directors. I don’t want to fall into that.

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

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

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

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

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.

‘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 never wanted to do ‘The Hobbit’ in the first place.

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.

‘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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.’

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.

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

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.