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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for storytelling over visual effects in filmmaking.
Peter Jackson reflects on the shifting priorities in cinema, suggesting that while technological advancements like CGI have greatly enhanced visual storytelling, there is a growing desire for more compelling narratives. He implies that an overemphasis on special effects may have led to neglecting the foundational element of film: a well-crafted story.
In practice
In a film class, discussing the balance between special effects and story.
We're human beings, and we want stories. We're always going to be entertained and have our emotions touched by humanity and by things that we recognize in our own lives. So whilst every now and again we'll be happy to watch a bubblegum film, it's never gonna be the only things that get made.
I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
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.
The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.
We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation.
Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist.
Beauty without expression is boring.
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