Peter Jackson once considered hypnosis so he could forget Lord of the Rings

Have you ever wanted to forget your favourite movie or TV series so that you could watch it all over again with fresh eyes? I’m sure we’ve all been there, and it turns out that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson feels the same about his own creation.

While speaking with THR, Peter Jackson said that he even once seriously considered using hypnosis to try and forget the Lord of the Rings movies so that he could experience them like the rest of us did.

When we did the Lord of the Rings movies, I always felt I was the unlucky person who never got to see [them] as a coming-out-of-the-blue film. By the time they were screening, I was immersed in it for five or six years. It was such a loss for me not be able to see them like everyone else.

Peter Jackson continued, “I actually did seriously consider going to some hypnotherapy guy to hypnotize me to make me forget about the films and the work I had done over the last six or seven years so I could sit and enjoy them. I didn’t follow through with it, but I did talk to [British mentalist] Derren Brown about that and he thought he could do it.” While Peter Jackson may not have wiped his year’s worth of Lord of the Rings memories, he will get to experience Amazon Prime Video’s upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series with fresh eyes. Jackson was originally asked to be involved with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, but Amazon never sent him any of the scripts they had promised.

The official synopsis of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:

Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will debut on Prime Video on September 2, 2022. What movie or TV show would you like to wipe from your memory to watch all over again?