Top 207 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Jackson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a New Zealander director Peter Jackson.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
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 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.
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 big-budget blockbuster is becoming one of the most dependable forms of filmmaking.
Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.
'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.
I don't really want to make a stylized film or anything too surreal.
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 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.
I was bullied and regarded as little bit of an oddball myself.
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 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.
Rivalry doesn't help anybody.
I watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.
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.
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.
One of the first movies I ever saw was 'Batman,' based on the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward.
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.
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.
Once upon a time, sound was new technology.
Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film.
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.
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.
What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.
We've all forgotten how to be original.
New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.
I love collaborating with people.
Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.
I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.
I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.
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.
The vast majority of the CGI budget is labor.
I never wanted to do 'The Hobbit' in the first place.
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.
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 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 didn't want my kids having to pass through an airport named after their father.
When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script.
I mean, I didn't have a huge upbringing with movies, I guess.
I think 'Jaws' is a remarkable film.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.
The only thing about 3-D is the dullness of the image.
Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating.
Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.
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.
For a lot of my childhood, I didn't want to direct movies because I didn't really know what directing was.
Over 55% of all shots using animals in 'The Hobbit' are in fact computer generated; this includes horses, ponies, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, deer, elk, mice, wild boars and wolves.
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 thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after 'Lord of the Rings.' I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.
The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
As a filmmaker, you want nothing more than to have people say, 'I love your movie.'
Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.
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.
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.
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