It has taken no end of imagination for Sir Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning—and, not incidentally, knighted—director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, to produce his entire body of cinematic work. It’s a quality Jackson has had since he was a small child, when he would conjure up visions of the future. “When I was a kid [I dreamed of] personal jet packs and flying cars and things,” Jackson said in a recent conversation with TIME. “One of those other things I always dreamed of was to be able to bring back extinct species.”
