Peter Jackson Quotes (1961-)

“When Russell T Davies relaunched the show in 2005, I watched it from the start. I thought it was fantastic. If there's any secret to its resurgence, it's due to the show's complete lack of cynicism. Both Davies and Steven Moffat are lifelong Doctor Who fans and the love shines through every episode.”

“We had so much stuff. Honestly, 600 hours of sound and 100 hours of footage. There is probably five or six films of this sort that could be made from that archive … Give me two and a half hours and sure, the nurses would have been there. You need to do something focused and intensely and do it justice, or you kind of spread yourself too thin. It was a decision I had to make.”

“I wonder how could he have been able to invent all this stuff. It feels more like Tolkien discovered some sort of long-lost scrolls.”

“I don't take stuff seriously. I saw 'Hellraiser 3' the other day at Cannes; it's OK, 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.”

“Q. I heard you actually referred back to the original's storyboards? A. Well there's actually a story to that. Warner Bros have just released a beautifully restored version of King Kong on DVD in the US. While we were making our King Kong, we also got our visual effects technicians to build stop-motion animation spiders and crabs and octopus creatures, copying photos that we had from the original film. We re-created the spider scene using stop-motion animation, black and white film, travelling mattes, rear projection – all the old techniques – so that we provided a speculation on what that original spider scene could be like. So when they released this DVD about three weeks ago we had this separate little chapter that we were involved in where we recreated the 1933 spider scene which we almost did concurrently when we were filming our own one. It was a little bit insane for a while! Q. You play up the 'Beauty & Beast' relationship in the film. Was that deliberate? A. It was not so much deliberate going in, but the relationships between Ann Darrow in the original movie and Jessica Lange in the second film and what Naomi does now – they're actually three different relationships. It's the same story, but three different types of things going on. Certainly with Fay and her character it was a case of an unwilling kidnap victim. She never really felt comfortable being with Kong, was always terrified of him and always screaming. There was never really a sense, in the original movie, that she really connected or understood Kong. The Jessica Lange one was kind of a weird 70s sexual innuendo. They camped up the sexuality of it more than anything, which we didn't want to do. So we created our one with a foot in neither camp, really. To me, the most interesting thing about a story like King Kong when you're thinking about it at the beginning, writing it before anything has really happened, the most interesting doorway to go through is the reality door. It's to say 'okay, if you were on this island and you got kidnapped by this gorilla who is intent on killing you, how would you actually respond?'. There's not a lot you can do. You're in his hand, you can't get out, your options are very few. How would you feel, and what would you do if a little window of opportunity came up where you may be able to survive – it's not even surviving, it's staying in his hand. If you can keep him curious, if you can engage him on some level, that stops you getting squashed then you've got a little, minute opportunity of staying alive that you can work on and develop that. Then you can flip that around, because the other interesting thing is if you're a gorilla who has lived his entire life on this island, lonely, he has no parents, they've probably been killed by the dinosaurs, his siblings have been killed, he's the last one of his species, he's never empathised with a living creature, ever. His entire instincts are to kill and survive – to be the king of this jungle and to be the dominant species, which is what gorillas naturally want to be anyway. Then suddenly Ann Darrow comes into his life, who he's expecting to kill but doesn't, he starts to become curious. To me, the relationship develops from Kong's point of view to one where he wants to protect her. It's a dangerous relationship for anybody else – for Adrien's character or anyone else. It's like an animal protecting its child. In a way, Kong's relationship with Ann is like that. I love the complexity of the story of Kong. We obviously come to learn a little bit about Kong's heart. He's pure, unspoilt – he doesn't operate on the same moral values as humans do. It's instinctive. He does what his heart tells him to do and he feels this empathy and this curiosity towards Ann. But if anybody comes anywhere close to taking Ann away from him he will kill them. He will kill them very quickly. And that includes our guys that we've met and learnt are trying to save her. I love the complexity of that story. There's no villains, there's no monsters. It's actually just this quite interestingly complex story of people doing what they need to do to survive and Kong behaving in a way which is perfectly natural and normal. You can't judge him for it.”

“Being half the man Christopher Lee is, is more than I could ever hope for. He was a true gentleman, in an era that no longer values gentlemen.”

“He was amazing. You see a lot of work from young film-makers and this kid was the real thing. It was stunning, frightening how clever he was at that age.”