I have a hard time getting my head around the idea of playing 'The Perfect Kiss' in my 50s. I can't quite get there.

When you've travelled for 34 years as a musician, you do all the culture stuff when you're young and full of energy. In the middle stage, you indulge too much and are scared of daylight. Then, in the final stage, you've seen it all, so you tend to take things a lot easier.

I must confess that over my career, I've actually downplayed the importance of DJs. It's such a different art form. Then all of a sudden you try it, and you think, 'Good God, these guys do work.' I used to be very cynical and very blase about it. I can only apologize.

I play a lot of hard, uncompromising dance music; it can be anything from dance to rock to reggae.

One of the great things about education is that it should stop you making mistakes - and I have made a lot of mistakes.

When I'm not playing music, certainly the last thing I want to do is listen to music!

Accept what you did do, and live with it.

The interesting thing is that New Order finished on an okay note. It was only after we split that things got worse.

In the late '70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer.

When you're fat and comfortable, your music is going to sound fat and comfortable.

Bootleggers quake in fear of me ringing them on a Sunday afternoon. I call after dinner, usually.

My big frustration in New Order was that they played the same tracks all the time.

We loved country songs in New Order. That's our big secret!

There are keyboard terrorists everywhere who hide behind a veil of anonymity to pursue their vicious slanders.

My father was always Labour, and my mother was always Conservative, so I tended to sort of go in the middle.

I always do try to encourage my children to vote and at least exercise their right.

Great music seems to come from a lot of angst, and that angst is from great musicians getting together with intense chemistry. When that chemistry isn't there, people tend not to write great music.

When you get the right people together, writing music becomes very effortless.

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.

New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.

Everybody's life has these moments, where one thing leads to another. Some are big and obvious and some are small and seemingly insignificant.

No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.

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

In the case of 'The Lovely Bones,' I felt that it was subject matter not often dealt with in film, and with a tone that is also rare.

As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I'm just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what's happening onscreen.

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.

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

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

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

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.'

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.

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.

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

We've all forgotten how to be original.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I'm not a regret guy.

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.

It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.