I want to bust the stigma attached to alcoholism in our country. Women particularly are discouraged from seeking help because it's a matter of shame for the family. We don't share our pain or frailties; we cover our weaknesses, and it becomes a cancer.

If you are not willing to be a lone wolf, keep your truth to yourself. If you want acceptance and your truths to be spoken, it is a slippery slope.

I need a combination of attitude, sensuality, and vulnerability. I need a new kind of heroine. After Bipasha Basu and Sunny Leone, India now needs an even more unique fantasy figure.

I always have had a slightly jaundiced view about people who promote books about themselves.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

Too often, you see film makers from other countries who have made interesting, original films, and then they come here and get homogenized into being hack Hollywood directors. I don't want to fall into that.

We had to get past the mechanical film age to be able to explore other things, but it will be interesting.

I never wanted to do 'The Hobbit' in the first place.

I love Bilbo Baggins. I relate really well to Bilbo!

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 never overtly analyse my own movies, I don't think that's my job to do that. I just muddle through and do what I think is best for the movie.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

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

Obviously, movies, you're often on location, out in the rain or the sun, in a real place where the trees and the cars are real. But when you're on stage, as an actor you're imagining the environment that you're in.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.

Filmmakers have to commit to making 3-D films properly like Jim Cameron did and not do cheap conversions at the tail end of the process.

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.

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.

I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.

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.

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 watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.

Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.