Why did you choose to make The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand?

First and foremost, Peter Jackson has a commitment to New Zealand, both as a home and as a filmmaking centre. But having made the films, it's clear one couldn't have made them anywhere else even if Peter didn't have that commitment. The variation of geography, the quality of the crew base, all the various economic incentives but mostly just the artistry of the place. You can recreate a place like Middle-earth, and it doesn't look like you went somewhere to film it - it looks like you went to Middle-earth to film it.

I think it's an amazing filmmaking environment. The crew base in New Zealand was already terrific, but since The Lord of the Rings you have literally thousands of people who were already incredibly skilled, but now have experience on a big-budget Hollywood movie, which is a whole different skill-set they can now add to their resume. It's going to be an amazing pool of talent. I would go back and shoot there in a minute.


How did you find New Zealand in terms of its level of creativity?

What's great about New Zealand is that it's such a remote country that everybody is very self-reliant - when New Zealanders come up against a problem, their initial instinct is not to cry out for help but to solve it themselves. So there's this great sense of innovation. Richard Taylor, who runs WETA Workshop, grew up on a farm in New Zealand; when he had to make chain-mail that wouldn't be too heavy for the actors, he took irrigation pipe that only he would know about because of where he grew up, and invented a guillotine that cut it into rings which were then electromagnetically plated. It sounds like a small thing, but things like that happened every day on this movie, and only happened because of the self-reliant nature of the Kiwi crew.