December 2002 : About not winning an Oscar for The Fellowship Of The Ring : "I went to the Oscars not expecting to win because it was fairly obvious at that point that A Beautiful Mind had enough momentum under it that it was going to take the main awards. So I was just cheering crazily when special effects director Richard Taylor and composer Howard Shore won."

E! Online, December 2002 : "We didn't actually differentiate the first, second and third film that much. We just went to work and shot scenes wherever they fit into this epic, long story. We've just sort of chopped it into three pieces. Now, it's not quite that simple. Obviously, we based each of the three movies on one of Tolkien's books because he did write the trilogy of books, and we did this for him. They have a beginning, middle and an end. We were making them with an overall structure, and this is the middle episode. It's the episode in which the pressure really comes on our heroes. The forces of evil are closing in. It's getting harder for them, harder than it was in the first one."

E! Online, December 2002 : About the end of The return of The King : "It's happy/sad. The third film makes me cry. It's really emotional. It's very, very emotional."

Interview, not dated :
"We always wanted to make more than one film. For starters, we made a decision at the very beginning that you could never do Lord of the Rings as one film, which a lot of people have tried to do. I think that's one of the reasons why it hasn't been made for 50 years, because there have been scripts written and there have been filmmakers who have sort of dabbled with the project over the years that have tried to put it into one script and have failed, so we thought, we're definitely not gonna make one."[...] "We were gonna make two, and Miramax was developing the project with us for 18 months as two films. And then ultimately when New Line came on board it was New Line's idea to make three. That was perfect for us, because obviously it's like the three books."

Peter Jackson approached the movie "by deliberately trying to avoid that by making a conscious decision at the very beginning of our project, when we were starting to get our team together, we set ourselves the job of making more of an historical than a fantasy film, because I just thought that would be interesting, to treat fantasy as history, as if it had a degree of reality to it. So everything we did in the movie we tried to make feel real and just tried to avoid an over-designed sort of film and tried to make it more earthy and organic."

"I certainly hope that audiences are going into the Fellowship of the Ring realizing that it's the first of a trilogy; I don't want people going into it thinking that this is one movie, because I certainly don't want to surprise people in that way, but we've tried to make the ending of the Fellowship of the Ring emotionally climactic. We couldn't end the story, because obviously Frodo doesn't get to Mount Doom with the ring in the Fellowship, so we're definitely dealing with the fact that the story does not end, but we have done everything we possibly can to try to create a satisfying ending so that you feel that you've seen the end of this episode of the story and it feels that Frodo's completed an emotional journey and hopefully leaving people looking forward to what's going to happen next."

"I didn't want to be a totally slavish Tolkien interpreter and I didn't feel that was my primary job. I mean there was a lot of money at stake, and I wanted very much to make a film that you could walk in off the street where you knew nothing about Tolkien, having never read the Lord of the Rings, and still enjoy the film. The book is regarded as being very, you know, it's famous for being incredibly dense and detailed and rich, which is why it has such a huge fan following and I've tried to catch the feeling of Tolkien for the people that like the book but simplify it to the extent that you don't have to have read the book to enjoy the film, so, it's a fine line. You cannot please everyone, and I'm sure that we haven't, but you can only ultimately, I think, make the best film that I could."