To some degree, I was very dubious of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' idea - taking a theme park ride and turning into a film - even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.

I'm not a regret guy.

Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.

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.

'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love - fantasy and historical epic.

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.

As a filmmaker, you want nothing more than to have people say, 'I love your movie.'

I think we're going to enter a phase where there's less interest in the CGI and there's a demand for story again. I think we've dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we've played with.

Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating.

If you're a filmmaker, and every time you finish a film, you just naturally go, 'Oh, I could have done so much better,' that's not much fun, is it, really? You might as well go pick another profession if that really is how you derive satisfaction from it.

I just think that we're living in a world where the technology is advancing so rapidly. You're having cameras that are capable of more and more - the resolution on cameras is jumping up.

I remember when I was - I must've been 17 or 18 years old - I remember 'The Empire Strikes Back' had a big cliffhanger ending, and it was, like, three years before the next one came out.

Every time you do something, people are going to like it, people are going to hate it. You tend to make the movies on the basis you are making them for the people who are going to like them and not worrying too much about people who don't like them.

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.

In every house, when the curtains are drawn, there's a story going on, and you never get to hear... You get the public side of things, the happy, smiling, social activities.

We've all forgotten how to be original.

I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.

Pre-preproduction is the tenuous time before a project is greenlit; before the studio commits to spending real money. This is the most vulnerable period for any film because it's the time when your project is most likely to be put into turnaround. That's film-speak for killed off.

If you're an only child, you spend a lot of time by yourself, and you develop a strong ability to entertain yourself, to conjure up fantasy.

The Beatles once approached Stanley Kubrick to do 'The Lord Of The Rings.' This was before Tolkien sold the rights. They approached him, and he said, 'No.'

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.

I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.

I think that George Lucas' '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.