Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has recently stated that he wishes he could forget the process of filming one of the most influential fantasy series ever made. And it’s not for the reason you might think.

Filming of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King took place over the course of 438 days between 1999 and 2000, and additional photography was carried out between 2001 to 2003. A whopping 150 sets were scattered across Aotearoa (New Zealand), and due to the inaccessibility of some locations, crew were equipped with survival kits should an accident occur and emergency services were unable to reach the patient in time.

With a total of 2,400 people all hauling together to transform Tolkien’s written word to epic live-action, Jackson once said the level of organisation was akin to the army. As someone who is continually saying “sorry I totally meant to reply to your text,” the experience sounds intensely gruelling. Yet, this isn’t why Jackson went as far as diving into hypnosis in order to forget his involvement in The Lord of the Rings films.

“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,” explained the director in The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast this week.

“By the time they were screening, I was immersed in it for five or six years. It was such a loss for me to not be able to see them like everyone else. I actually did seriously consider going to some hypnotherapy guy to hypnotise 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,” said Jackson. I’d probably try to do this with Princess Mononoke. Not that I was at all involved with the making of that film, because I was one year old. I just like it enough that I wish I could see it with new eyes again.