Peter Jackson Quotes

Filmmaking is a thousand choices a day, and it's important to just let those choices potentially be informed by something deeper.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied... That's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.

When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.

What's great about making movies is the sort of additive process of bringing people together and having an idea and watching the idea be added to and at the end you have this thing.

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.

I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!

Films can make you dream. They allow you to imagine a different world. It's why I decided to become a filmmaker. I wanted that even though it seemed impossible.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

Making a movie is casting a spell.

...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.

Whenever I'm making a film, it has to be timeless.

Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it.

I don't know anything about directing, but if you love actors, know your story and hire a great company, then anyone can direct a film.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it. And it's pretty irritating to get a movie on. So to complicate it by having more irritation as a director, I don't really need it. And because I direct a great deal still, but in the theater, I kind of get that anyway. Which is not at all to say I would never do it again, or it would never happen again.

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.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise, etc. Even if you do, sometimes there's a side of things that don't necessarily gel the way people intend. So there a bit of a mystical entity, film.

Oliver Stone will never be happy with the first take. He wants more than that. When you’re delivering your lines, he’ll stop you and tell you some kind of riddle about the character and you have to go away and figure that out. If you’re hoping for him to give you all the answers, then you’re in for a long day.

I usually know what kind of song I'm after. I know what I'm trying to do when I start. I don't always get there. But I try to visualize what it's actually going to be.

When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.

It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.

The maxims tell you to aim at perfection, which is well; but it's unattainable, all the same.

The only way I know as a director is to figure out what the film is about. And out of the theme and the sense of what the film is about, all those decisions start to make sense. But to find that truth within it, you have to limit your possibilities and limit your choices. That's where this visual language grows out of.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.