In the 2004 New Year Honours (New Zealand), Taylor was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to design and the film industry. In the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours, Taylor was promoted to Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to film.
[referring to his work on The Lord of the Rings] "One of the most
important things to me was that we generated a very strong feeling of
culture. Culture, I believe, is based in details. It's based in
generations of characters, of people, of species, building on top of
the past generation's work."
