Quotes

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

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

On Meet the Feebles (1989): I have a moronic sense of humour.

On horror: I don't take stuff seriously. I saw Hellraiser III the other day at Cannes; it's okay, it's a good film, I didn't hate it or anything. I thought it was quite good, but it was all just so serious. Some guy walking round with pins sticking out of his face. I just can't sit there and think, "This is really scary." If I made a Hellraiser film, I'd like Pinhead to be whacked against a wall and have all the pins flattened into his face. I immediately start thinking of funny things and gags - that's just the way I am. I doubt I could ever control myself sufficiently to make a serious horror film.

[on "The Lord of the Rings"]: This is a giant undertaking, but I consider this a personal film. It's my film of a lifetime. I read the book when I was 18 years old and thought then, "I can't wait till the movie comes out." Twenty years later, no one had done it - so I got impatient.

Return of the King is the most enjoyable because in the structure of the movies, it is nothing other than pay-off, there is no more setting up to do, no more exposition, no more introducing characters. The pay-off is very character-based. It is action-orientated as well, but all of our characters have been pushed to a point where their life and death depends on what happens in the third movie. It is very emotional, and from an actors point of view it is very enjoyable to work on, because they were able to play some pretty intense drama. From my point of view it was always great, because we were heading toward an ending, a climax which we never had in the other two.

On making "The Lord of the Rings": Looking back, I think we were a bit naive. At the beginning, I don't think anybody had any idea how difficult or complicated it would be. We somehow went into it thinking we could do it. And then we've stumbled along just taking each day at a time.

I think that George Lucas's 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. He got ILM started and they developed all the computer technology we use. George Lucas is incredible. He has made a huge difference to the way films are made now. And he has used his money on things that benefit every filmmaker who gets films produced. I respect that a lot.

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 always trusted him. If there was a way that I had seen something and he had seen it differently, I would... trust his vision. We were in brilliant hands. -- Elijah Wood on filming "The Lord of the Rings", December 14, 2003.

We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of our own politics, our own messages or our own themes into these movies. What we were trying to do was to analyze what was important to Tolkien and to try to honor that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves.

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself. The worst type is dictated by demographics or what is hip or what kids are into. Kong isn't driven by that. No way would a studio think this is the year that people want to see a big gorilla movie. I've come to realize that, as much as anything, I am making this for the 9-year-old Peter.

Don't worry. Gollum isn't going to be another Jar Jar Binks.

(on the remake of King Kong (1976)): I was 15 when that film came out. I took the day off school, went into Wellington and was first in line to see it. It was a disappointment because I wanted it to have stop-motion animation, dinosaurs and the Empire State Building. I didn't like the updating of it, and it has dated very badly. I watched it again a year or so ago. I thought Jeff Bridges was excellent, John Barry's score was very good, and Rick Baker did a sterling job in that very heavy monkey suit he was wearing. But it was kind of kitsch and it wasn't the Kong that I saw when I was nine.

I don't quite know what an auteur is. I've never quite understood that term, because filmmaking is such a huge team effort, you - I mean, I regard myself as being sort of the final filter, so everything that ends up in the movie is there, because it's something that I'd think was cool if I saw the film that somebody else had made. I'm very much trying to make the film that I've enjoyed, but I'm open to ideas, I need a huge team of people to help me, everybody contributes and I try to encourage people to contribute as much as possible. I think that's the job of a director really, is to sort of funnel all the creative into one centralized point of view. And the marketing is sort of something that really happens with other people, it's not something that I'm at all an expert in, and I regard my job at the end of the day as to make the best possible film I can, and that's really where my job stops and marketing people take over after that.

No film has captivated my imagination more than King Kong (1933). I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old. It has been my sustained dream to reinterpret this classic story for a new age.

Regarding his spat with New Line: We have a great many friends at New Line and utmost respect for the risk they took with us and it hurts to be hit with the level of venom directed at us from individuals in that company. It's been a lot more nasty behind the scenes than what's been made public. It's just an accounting dispute at the end of the day, but it makes you wonder what they have to hide.

[on the aborted Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) movie] Well, Microsoft has a whole strategy with the Halo property, and when the rights expired with the two studios, that sort of ended my involvement with the project. That fell apart because of internal politics at Fox and Universal. It had nothing to do with the budget or anything else. In fact, we hadn't even been greenlit at all at that point.

I think that's one of the most depressing things about the film industry generally today. The writers and directors should be blamed just as much as the studios because really everything seems to be a remake or adapting a 1970s TV show that was never particularly good. Why anyone thinks that it would be a good feature film now, you know, goodness knows why. I guess it's easy to say it's security that you know a studio is only prepared to put $150 million or $200 million into something if it's a known quantity, but at the same time I'm also aware that audiences are getting fed up with the lack of original ideas and original stories. Everything in the film business tends to be cyclic and hopefully this all drains itself out in a couple years and we'll be back into original stories again.

There's one area of directing that I'd love to improve upon. I tend to get involved in big movies that take two or three years of your life and I see what Clint Eastwood does and what Ridley Scott does, and they're able to do those films and also mix it up with these in-n-out, seven- or eight-month films. I think that's a real skill and talent. I'd love to learn how to do that. So not everything took three years for one project. I'd love to reinvent the way I work, to some degree.

[on his earlier and more controversial movies] - I call them splat-stick. To me, they were a joke. We enjoyed being crazy and anarchic and upsetting the people we wanted to upset in those days. But, big puppets having sex? It's harmless, surely. The Saw movies, well... I don't want to be casting moral judgments, but I don't like those films.

[on The Lovely Bones (2009)] - It's not a murder film and I wanted kids to be able to go and see it. Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor. There are some people who might enjoy watching a 14-year-old girl getting killed, a small minority maybe, but how could you live with yourself in providing that titillation? I wouldn't want the movie defined by that.

[on The Lovely Bones (2009)] - It's a film about how love never really dies and how time heals.

When I drive to the studio, I usually feel nervous, and the day seems daunting. 100 people are about to look to me to find out what our first shot is, what lens I want to use, and how many set-ups it's going to take to get the scene finished. Some of the time I have a plan, and some of the time I wing it. It helps to rehearse with the actors, and the ideas, hopefully good ones, start flowing. It's always better once we break the ice and start shooting.

I've always been completely into genre directors: Stuart Gordon, George Romero, Sam Raimi. I like [Stanley] Kubrick - not that I could ever make a film like him. On The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), where we had an 18-month shoot, I got so exhausted and when that happens your brain stops sparking and your imagination stops fizzing the way you'd like it to. I got to a point where, on my day off, I'd put on a DVD of Goodfellas (1990) or Casino (1995) and say, "Okay, I know what I've got to try and do now." I couldn't do it as good as [Martin] Scorsese, but it inspired and reenergized me, telling me what my job is: to come up with interesting ways to shoot scenes, interesting camera moves, and interesting ways to show the performance. I used to do that as a therapeutic thing when I was in a state of exhaustion.

The weird thing about being a director of films that have a certain popularity and a following is that you are forced to have to deal with things that you have no interest in but they become part of your life. Like you have to deal with increased security. You have to deal with privacy issues. A lot of things that really don't have anything to do with filmmaking. You have to have a team around you, assistants, and people that look after you. I never imagined that sort of filmmaking when I was young. I never thought I'd find myself in this place. There's the actual craft of directing and then there's this other baggage that comes the more successful you are as a director. Your craft is still there but all this other stuff kind of starts to build up around you.

The way I look on something like Tintin, as a period movie set in the '40s or '50s, really to a kid that's no different to a science fiction or fantasy film. If kids can watch something set on another planet or a fantasy film in some middle-age landscape, in its own way Tintin has a fantastical aspect to it - it's a world that doesn't exist today, it's a world that's outside of your experience. Escapism is all about that, taking that journey to places that are exotic and romantic. And Tintin is fantastic escapism, it has been for 75 years now.

[on filming the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasies] I am a lifelong Buster Keaton fan. I am not saying I am approaching his genius, but we are able to make things exciting and provide bits of visual humour as we do.

(On Toy Story (1995)) It lifted the bar! And that's what any good film should do.

(On Christopher Lee) In every sense, a man of the world; well versed in art, politics, literature, history and science. Scholar, a singer, an extraordinary raconteur and of course, a marvellous actor ... There will never be another Christopher Lee, He has a unique place in the history of cinema and in the hearts of millions of fans around the world. The world will be a lesser place without him in it... Rest in peace, Chris. An icon of cinema has passed into legend.

I don't think anyone's watching Marvel movies to get a lesson about politics. But escapist films tend to be most popular in times of uncertainty.