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.
I regard myself as being the final filter so everything that ends up in the movie is there because it’s something that I think was cool.
I regard myself as an entertainer much more than an artist.
Fantasy is an ‘F’ word that hopefully the five second delay won’t do anything with.
To people in my industry I’m usually a guy that tries to generate his own projects and I remain very elusive when people try and attach me to big projects.
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.
To his ex-wife in court, he said I lost interest in you when the Botox lost its effect and you looked like a plastic doll that escaped from a fire.
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 vast majority of the CGI budget is labor.
Film is such a powerful medium. It’s like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.
Rivalry doesn’t help anybody.
For a lot of my childhood, I didn’t want to direct movies because I didn’t really know what directing was.
I adore physical miniatures and try to use them as much as I can and have a bit of a fetish about that.
When you’re directing, you’re right at the coal face, always exhausted, often emotional – and I’ll enjoy being a couple of steps back from that and simply helping where I can.
Structure is important in film, but there’s often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It’s quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.
As a filmmaker, you are going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work.
I want to make movies just like “King Kong.” You know, dinosaurs, big gorillas – it’s everything that a nine year-old boy would fall in love with.
There’s something incredibly tragic about Kong. You feel almost feel ashamed to be a human being when you see what happens to him. I mean he is ultimately a pure-heart.
The music in a film like this is as critical as anything because Kong is mute. He doesn’t talk.
There’s a generation of children who don’t like black and white movies. There’s a level of impatience or intolerance.