Defeat is always momentary.

I want to make movies just like "King Kong." You know, dinosaurs, big gorillas - it's everything that a nine year-old boy would fall in love with.

I think that's the job of a director really, to sort of funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.

To me, fantasy should be as real as possible. I don't buy into the notion that because it's fantastic, it should be unrealistic, because I think you have to have a sense of believing the world that you're going into.

When you're casting a movie and when you're shooting a film, the eyes are the most important feature of any performer, really. Any great actor literally knows exactly how to use their eyes, and even as a filmmaker I love shooting huge close-ups because it's those eyes that mean so much to me.

For a lot of my childhood, I didn't want to direct movies because I didn't really know what directing was.

New Zealand is not used to wealth. In America wealth is kind of a thing of pride. Here it's the opposite. The more you've got, the bigger the target you are.