Peter Jackson’s favourite Martin Scorsese movie: “What great directing is all about”

Posted On March 4, 2025March 4, 2025

Even if Peter Jackson had only made his three Lord of the Rings movies, he would still be regarded as one of the best directors to have ever lived. As it stands, he’s also turned out a King Kong remake, The Lovely Bones, a few cult horror classics, and a Beatles documentary that completely redefined the greatest band of all time. All in all, the boy from Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, has done quite well for himself. 

Considering he brought a seemingly unfilmable novel to the big screen – and did so in a fashion that made millions of dollars and won a billion Oscars – Jackson’s opinion on directing should be taken very seriously. Some would call him an auteur, though he himself has always shunned that term. When asked by Rotten Tomatoes to name his five favourite films, he wasted no time in mentioning a man who is most definitely an auteur; one of his idols, Martin Scorsese.

“I’m a huge fan of his,” the Kiwi said. He admitted that several Scorsese pictures could have been featured in his list but decided that Goodfellas was the one he wanted to include. “That’s a movie that I always see when I feel that my imagination is kind of stuck and trapped, and I can’t think of a way forward,” he said. “I watch Goodfellas and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.”

Jackson is far from the only famous filmmaker to have singled out Scorsese’s 1990 mobster masterpiece as one of their favourites. The famously troubled production stands up there with the director’s very best: a tense, gripping narrative with all-time career performances from Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, and many more. Its iconic opening sequence, made possible through the magic of the Steadicam, should be framed and put in a museum. 

Scorsese isn’t just one of Jackson’s idols, he also directly influenced the making of his opus. “On The Lord of the Rings, where we had an 18-month shoot, I got so exhausted, and when that happens, your brain stops sparking, and your imagination stops fizzing the way you’d like it to,” he told the Directors Guild of America. “I got to a point where, on my day off, I’d put on a DVD of Goodfellas or Casino and say, ‘OK, I know what I’ve got to try and do now.’ I couldn’t do it as good as Scorsese, but it inspired and re-energized me, telling me what my job is: to come up with interesting ways to shoot scenes, interesting camera moves, and interesting ways to show the performance. I used to do that as a therapeutic thing when I was in a state of exhaustion.”

This would come full circle in 2003. At that year’s Oscars ceremony, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was nominated in the ‘Best Picture’ category alongside Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York. Luckily for Jackson, he didn’t have to awkwardly defeat his icon, as both movies lost out to Chicago.

You wouldn’t immediately put Jackson and Scorsese in the same category, but all sorts of things influence directors, not just works in the same genre that they’re working on. A great movie is a great movie, regardless of whether or not the protagonist is a bloodthirsty gangster or a humble Hobbit on an epic quest. 

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