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.

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

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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

As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I'm just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what's happening onscreen.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.