Peter Jackson quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

I used to send away for eight-minute Super 8 movies of various Ray Harryhausen scenes advertised on the back of 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' magazine.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

48 frames per second is something you have to get used to. I've got absolute belief and faith in 48 frames... it's something that could have ramifications for the entire industry. 'The Hobbit' really is the test of that.

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.

Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love - fantasy and historical epic.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

The Return Of The King' has a conclusion.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

Aragorn: Gentlemen! We do not stop 'til nightfall. Pippin: But what about breakfast? Aragorn: You've already had it. Pippin: We've had one, yes. But what about second breakfast? [Aragorn stares at him, then walks off.] Merry: Don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip. Pippin: What about elevensies? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn't he? Merry: I wouldn't count on it Pip.

A pregnant woman is like a beautiful flowering tree, but take care when it comes time for the harvest that you do not shake or bruise the tree, for in doing so, you may harm both the tree and its fruit.

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

When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

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

I don't like putting glasses on and watching 3D. I don't mind wearing glasses, but it's the dimness of the light and the fact that you're filtering the light. Whatever 3D process is being used is a filtration of light, which means it's blocking some of the light.

Elijah can register such subtle emotion on his face that I loved doing close-ups on him. He really brings a superb emotional level to Frodo's scenes and although he is a very instinctive actor, we discussed the character thoroughly.

With the right movie, 3D can enhance the experience. Absolutely, it can make a good film a great film. It can make a great film a really amazing film to see .

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.

One does not simply walk into Mordor

It's all about his determination. You never, ever, give up once you start something, once you're on the trail of something you don't stop and that's what you have to go through when you're making a movie too. Once the train's rolling, you have to stick with it.

Two of the actors, Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom, have been caught between two landslides and are now trapped in a tiny town in the middle of the South Island. They have been taken in by a kindly woman who has offered them food and a bed. They were last reported to be cooking spaghetti and cracking into a bottle of red wine.

Remember, pain is temporary; film is forever.

Rivalry doesn't help anybody.

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.

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

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

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.

The first day I start shooting, I start having a recurring nightmare that every single night that I am lying in bed, and there is a film crew surrounding the bed, waiting for me to tell them what to do, and I don't quite know what movie I am supposed to be making.

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.

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.

Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating.

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

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.

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

So many film makers are scared of visual effects - which is no crime.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

We've all forgotten how to be original.

100 years ago, movies were black-and-white, silent, and 16 frames a second. So 100 years from now, what are they going to be?

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

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.'

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

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.

[While shooting close-ups] you study real eyes, you study how the light reflects in them, you study the back of the eye, you study the way irises reflect emotion. You go into great scientific detail.

A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.

And so I look back on not just the last ten years but everything that I've done as being sort of an ongoing growing continual film school. I mean I don't think I've got to a point where I've achieved anything that feels like, a particular milestone, but there's still a lot more to learn and hopefully a lot more films to make.

As a filmmaker, you are going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work.

As human beings, we always have resistance against things that are different and there's always suspicion.

Defeat is always momentary.

Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school - you're always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.

Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five second delay won't do anything with

He who must search a haystack for a needle is likely to end up with the attitude that the needle is not worth the search.

I adore physical miniatures and try to use them as much as I can and have a bit of a fetish about that.

I am a big Dragon fan. I've said it before- And I was fortunate enough to be born a Dragon in the Chinese Horocope...

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

I don't believe in the concept that 3D should be shot separately. I mean, every director has their own style, sure, but I don't think any of that is really an issue with 3D.

I find that in the process of making a film you're constantly discovering things that you never even imagined would work at the beginning.

I find that in the process of making a film you're constantly discovering things that you never even imagined would work at the beginning. Actors come into the film and do things you never even imagined. Production designers come in, the director of photography lights it in a way that you never imagined. So, it's always evolving, always exciting.

I just got to the point where I literally didn't want anyone else to do it.