Peter Jackson joined Jonathan Ross at the UK premiere of The Return Of The King to look back at the years he's spent crafting the trilogy.

Congratulations on the movie. Can you cast your mind back to when you got the go-ahead to make the films, how did that feel?

It was amazing because we thought the film had died at that point. We'd been working on it for 18 months and, until Bob Shaye [of production company New Line Cinema] agreed to do the three movies, we were literally convinced that it wasn't going to happen. I was actually meeting other studios to talk about doing other movies and suddenly Bob said, "Let's just do three of them." And it was kind of "whoah!"

Probably the best decision he's ever made, though. The special effects have become consistently better over the three movies. Is this a learning curve or technology just catching up with your ideas?

Mainly it's a learning curve. It's a group of people that struggled on the first movie, figured out more on the second and on this one they're really flying. It's just getting better at what you are doing. On the third one I was also a bit more deliberately trying to have the effects seem a bit more integrated into the movie. I was using handheld cameras more with all the CG creatures, and trying to not design shots so they felt self-consciously like effect shots.

One of the challenges is to make a series of films that work for people who haven't read the books but didn't disappoint the fans who know every detail. How do you deal with those conflicting needs?

We mainly tried to get the story as clear as possible, because even people who have read the book probably read it ten or 20 years ago and are a little vague about the storyline. So we concentrated on trying to make it simple... we tried to reduce it down to Frodo going to Mordor and a bunch of other people doing stuff to help him. And we were always aware that we had a responsibility as filmmakers, not as faithful Tolkien archivists. We had to make an entertaining film. They are amazing books, my respect for them has grown and grown while we've been making the movies.

Your actors were together for a long period of time, far from home. Was their getting along together a consideration in the casting? Did you choose the personalities with that in mind?

We actually did, yeah. We were aware that we were taking actors to New Zealand for 15 months, which was sort of a lifestyle decision more than just a career decision. So it sounds very simplistic but we chose nice people. We met everybody, had dinner with them, we interacted with them and ended up picking the nicest actors we could find.

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