Director Quotes

What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.

I was bullied and regarded as little bit of an oddball myself.

To get an Oscar would be an incredible moment in my career, there is no doubt about that. But the 'Lord of the Rings' films are not made for Oscars, they are made for the audience.

That's why I never became a director. I never had patience with people.

So our films had a lot more to them than entertainment value, and I'm glad that a lot of people recognize that now. People realize now the value of them as educational.

Many times I felt like I'd do better than what the director did, but some of them got a little discouraged because they didn't have full charge of making the film, and sometimes there'd be battles of egos.

I was very limited in what I could do with flying saucers, because they're just a metal disc. I had to try and put character in as if they were intelligently guided.

I was never restricted. I was never told what to do.

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

I prefer to work alone and do everything alone, even today.

I know pretty well in the broad sense what I'm going to do, because I have to know that when we shoot the live-action, so that it'll synchronize. Then I know pretty well when I get to the animation stage, what that scene requires.

I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see eighty people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself.

I brought in the stories many times. I don't just do animation.

What I learned most was how to tell a story in 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 60 seconds - to have some kind of goal of what to try to do and make it happen in that time.

This was in '79. I got pretty restless there, sitting around with a lot of people sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking about films, but nobody really doing anything.

There were a lot of people dreaming about making films, and they would finance maybe 6 films a year. Because they were funded by the government, the films sort-of had to deal with serious social issues - and, as a result, nobody went to see those films.

Several times we were stranded in strange places without any money and with our credit cards cancelled - trapped in a hotel that we couldn't check out of because we had no money to check out.

My very, very first professional job was when I was 19 years old - I got a job doing an educational industrial film on Shell Motor Oil's oil products. I really put my heart into it - I wrote a script for it, I did a lot of research.

It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It's still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early '80s.

In Finland, getting a university degree is the first thing that you expect your kids to do.

I've continued to always keep in mind having a healthy does of that in Hollywood, now that I am part of the system and obviously have to follow the way the system works - you still have to have that crazy determination.

I went out to some advertising agencies and asked if I could do anything.

I was making films when I was about 12 years old - Super-8 films.

I think the reason why we were able to actually get it made was that we were so extremely naive - we had no experience at all here. We didn't even know that you were supposed to have an agent. We didn't even have a lawyer. We didn't know one soul.

I loved movies and went to see every movie I could in Finland.

I loved cutting together simple commercials about margarine or soft drinks - all kinds of silly products - but I tried to make the commercials different.

I learned a lot about how to shoot and how to put together sequences.

I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here.

I decided that, somehow, I had to get out of there and go to Hollywood. I had never been to America.

I became a real Shell Motor Oil expert, and I did this 25-minute film. It turned out really well and, as a result, they offered me more work and lots of commercials to direct.