Cannes: Peter Jackson

by Elisa Giudici 

Peter Jackson. Photo by Elisa Giudici

At the end of the ’80s Peter Jackson arrived in Cannes for the first time as a self-taught splatter filmmaker from New Zealand and immediately got thrown out of the Palais for wearing shorts. Nearly four decades later, he returns to the Croisette as the director behind one of the most successful trilogies in cinema history. The director is still talking about movies with the enthusiasm of somebody who never stopped being the kid borrowing his parents’ Super 8 camera to film homemade monsters. Across an unusually relaxed and funny conversation at the festival, Jackson moved freely from King Kong to The Beatles, from Andy Serkis to artificial intelligence, from Tintin 2 to the collapse of DVD culture. What emerges most clearly is how little of his career feels planned in retrospect. Again and again Jackson describes cinema as a chain of accidents, obsessions, and strange coincidences somehow turning into films...

The movie that changed his life

When I was growing up in New Zealand in the mid-1960s, my parents had just bought a television. The first thing I completely fell in love with was Thunderbirds, the Gerry Anderson series. Looking back now, I realise what fascinated me wasn’t simply the show itself but the idea of escapism. I loved stories that transported you somewhere beyond ordinary reality… science fiction, fantasy, horror, anything that allowed you to leave the real world behind for a while. Then, when I was around eight or nine years old, New Zealand television screened the original King Kong one Friday night. Back then there was no internet, no easy access to information. You just saw a title in the TV listings and thought: ‘A movie about a giant ape? Sounds interesting.’ But watching King Kong genuinely changed my life. That was the moment I realised I wanted to make films.

How Cannes transformed him from photo-engraver into filmmaker

When I made Bad Taste, I was still working as a photo-engraver during the week and making the film on weekends. Suddenly I went from being a photo-engraver in New Zealand to arriving at Cannes. I had absolutely no experience in the professional film industry. I’d never made a film within any kind of system. Everything was homemade. So suddenly arriving at Cannes felt like stepping onto another planet. An incredibly exciting planet, but still completely surreal. At the same time, films like Bad Taste often came to the market and simply disappeared. Many never sold. The filmmakers would just go back home and vanish into obscurity. So it could easily have happened that I returned to New Zealand after Cannes and went straight back to being a photo-engraver. But fortunately Bad Taste sold. I left New Zealand as a photo-engraver and returned home as a filmmaker.

The first thing Cannes ever did was throw him out

One funny memory from my first trip to Cannes: I arrived from New Zealand having carefully filled out all the accreditation paperwork. I was incredibly excited to collect my badge at the Palais because it felt like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. I got halfway toward the counter before a security guard stopped me and threw me out because I was wearing shorts. So technically, the very first thing that ever happened to me at Cannes was getting expelled from the Palais.

Why Heavenly Creatures was never really fantasy

In truth, I probably shouldn’t take too much credit for Heavenly Creatures because the project really began with Fran Walsh. She had helped me on earlier films like Meet the Feebles and Braindead, but she was becoming tired of pure splatter comedy. She told me about this real New Zealand murder case from the 1950s - the Parker-Hulme case - which she had been fascinated by since she was young. The central question for us was simply: how could something like that happen? So we approached the project almost like detectives. We travelled to Christchurch and interviewed everyone we could find who had been connected to the case: surviving relatives, police officers, lawyers, witnesses, even the two women themselves. Everything in Heavenly Creatures comes from real research. Even the fantasy sequences are based directly on reality.

Why he considers The Lord of the Rings the work of his life

I don’t mind calling it that. I’m almost certainly never going to make another film as commercially successful as The Lord of the Rings, and honestly I’m perfectly fine with that. Very few filmmakers get the opportunity to make something on that scale and have it connect with audiences around the world the way those films did. I’m incredibly proud of them. Once a film exists, it becomes this solid object that remains in the world. Whether it continues living depends on whether audiences embrace it. Films survive because people continue loving them, not because critics decide they are important, but because audiences keep returning to them.

Why he made The Lord of the Rings in the first place

At the time we had just finished The Frighteners, and during that production we had built a visual effects company in New Zealand — what eventually became Weta Digital. We suddenly had all this infrastructure and a growing team of visual effects artists, and we realised that if we didn’t keep making ambitious films, we would lose all those people. So Fran and I started thinking about fantasy stories because we wanted a project that would continue pushing visual effects technology. Eventually we realised we should simply find out who owned the rights to The Lord of the Rings.

Directing through panic

The hardest moments were often the mornings. I’d drive from my house to the studio at seven in the morning, knowing there was a huge scene waiting for me, and during that ten-minute drive I would panic because I genuinely didn’t know how I was going to shoot it. Then I’d arrive on set and everyone would look at me expecting leadership and certainty. So I’d pretend I knew exactly what I was doing. The actors and crew would start offering ideas, and I’d quietly steal their suggestions while pretending they’d been my plan all along. That’s really what directing is sometimes: collaboration disguised as confidence.

The accidental creation of motion capture acting

When we first cast Andy Serkis, we only intended to use him as the voice of Gollum. We imagined Gollum would simply be an animated creature. But once Andy arrived in New Zealand, we realised Elijah Wood and Sean Astin needed somebody physically present to act against. So Andy started performing the scenes on set with them, crouching around and physically embodying Gollum so the actors had real eyelines and interaction. That slowly evolved into motion capture. We realised: “Wait a second, perhaps we can actually preserve parts of Andy’s physical performance digitally.” So the technology developed organically during production. It wasn’t some grand master plan from the beginning.

His favourite Oscar memory involves his son crying

Across the trilogy we’d already won Oscars for things like music and visual effects, but there was definitely a feeling that the Academy was holding back from fully rewarding the films until the final chapter. Then suddenly, on the Oscar night for The Return of the King, everything changed. The film ended up winning all 13 Academy Awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director. It became this surreal clean sweep where every envelope seemed to go our way.

One of my favourite memories from that night actually involves my son Billy, who was about six years old at the time. They were in New Zealand watching the ceremony live in the middle of the day because of the time difference. By the time they finally got to Best Picture, Return of the King had already won award after award all night long, and it was becoming obvious the film was sweeping everything.

Then Steven Spielberg opened the envelope for Best Picture and said: “It’s a clean sweep.” But Billy misunderstood and thought Spielberg had announced a film called Clean Sweep as the winner. He burst into tears because he thought Lord of the Rings had lost. I told Spielberg that story afterwards and he was horrified.

The King Kong cameo that never happened

While making King Kong, one thing that fascinated me about the original 1933 film was that people always describe it as this great tragic love story between Kong and Ann Darrow, Fay Wray’s character. But when you actually watch the movie, she spends most of the time absolutely terrified of him and screaming. So in our version I wanted to push the emotional connection much further. I wanted Ann to genuinely empathise with Kong and emotionally reach toward him. Because of that, I also wanted a direct connection back to the original film itself. I wanted Fay Wray, the actress who played Ann Darrow in the 1933 King Kong — to appear in our ending. I had arranged for her to deliver the famous final line: ‘It was beauty killed the beast.’ She was ninety-eight years old at the time and initially hesitant about doing it, but after meeting several times she finally agreed. We planned to film her in New York against a green screen so the process would be easy for her physically. But sadly she passed away shortly before we were due to shoot the scene. It was heartbreaking.

Why he reluctantly took over The Hobbit

Guillermo del Toro had spent years developing The Hobbit with us in New Zeland, but the delays just kept getting longer and longer because the studio wouldn’t fully commit and officially greenlight the films. At a certain point Guillermo understandably reached the limit of how long he could put his life and career on hold waiting for the project to move forward. He basically said: “I can’t sit here forever. There are other films I want to make.” So he left, which was genuinely sad for everybody involved because we’d all invested years into building that version of the film together. And honestly, I never really intended to direct The Hobbit myself. After spending so many years making The Lord of the Rings, I felt like I’d already explored Middle-earth creatively and said what I wanted to say in that world. But once Guillermo left, I eventually started feeling responsible for keeping the project alive. Too many people had already devoted years of work to it for the films to simply collapse completely. So in the end I stepped in.

The funniest Hobbit review he ever received

I once had a very funny experience in England while receiving an Amazon delivery. The delivery driver recognised me and said: “You’re the bloke who made Lord of the Rings, right? Those films were amazing.” I thanked him, and then as he walked back to his van he turned around and said: “They really should’ve got you to direct those Hobbit movies though, because they were crap.” And I just stood there thinking: “Mate… I did direct them.”

Why Andy Serkis should direct The Hunt for Gollum

The story they’re telling is extremely personal to Gollum, psychologically speaking. It’s really about addiction, fractured identity and this constant internal conflict between the different parts of his personality. And honestly, nobody understands Gollum better than Andy Serkis. Andy didn’t just play the character technically. He lived with him for years and understands the emotional and psychological side of Gollum in a very deep way. So very early on I felt the most exciting and truthful version of that film would probably be one directed by Andy himself. He instinctively understands where the humanity inside Gollum exists, which is important because despite everything, Gollum has always been tragic to me more than monstrous. I’m involved if Andy wants advice or help, of course, but I’m also deliberately trying not to interfere too much because I want him to have the freedom to make the best version of the film possible.

How They Shall Not Grow Old became an attempt to “bring the soldiers back to life”

They Shall Not Grow Old actually began as a commission from the Imperial War Museum in London for the centenary of World War I. They approached me asking if I’d be interested in doing something with their archival footage. At first I honestly wasn’t sure what I could possibly add, because everybody had already seen those images countless times: black-and-white footage of soldiers in trenches, scratched film moving in jerky slow motion.

But then I started thinking about the fact that those people had once been real human beings. They weren’t born in black and white. They didn’t move like silent movie ghosts. They were alive, with normal faces, normal voices and natural movement. So I became obsessed with the idea of stripping away a century of technological decay and restoring their humanity.

The biggest breakthrough was actually correcting the movement itself. Those cameras were hand-cranked during the war, often by soldiers, so every shot had slightly different frame rates. Sometimes ten frames per second, sometimes twelve, fifteen or eighteen. We developed software capable of analysing the original footage and generating entirely new in-between frames digitally so the movement could become fluid and natural again. And once that happened, the emotional effect was extraordinary. Suddenly those soldiers no longer looked like distant historical artefacts trapped inside old footage. They started feeling like recognisable human beings standing right in front of you.

How Get Back ended up changing even the Beatles’ own memories of themselves

When Apple Corps first approached me about The Beatles: Get Back, I hesitated because the entire historical narrative surrounding those January 1969 sessions was incredibly negative. Everybody believed it had been this miserable experience where the Beatles were basically collapsing in front of the cameras while the band slowly fell apart.

That idea had become almost accepted historical truth over the decades. But once I actually started watching the footage myself, I found the experience completely different from what I expected. I kept laughing constantly. Yes, there’s tension at certain moments (George Harrison temporarily leaves the band at one point) but most of the time they’re actually funny, collaborative and clearly enjoying each other’s company. The reality inside the footage felt very different from the mythology people had built around it afterward.

What became really fascinating to me was realising that even the Beatles themselves had eventually started remembering that period incorrectly because the breakup that followed in 1970 emotionally contaminated their memories of those sessions. Paul McCartney actually told me very early on: “I’m not going to enjoy watching this.” But as I slowly assembled sequences over several years and sent material to him little by little, he started writing back saying things like: “That’s hilarious. I don’t remember it being like that at all.” In a strange way, the project became an attempt not just to restore the footage technically, but to restore historical truth emotionally, even for the Beatles themselves.

Tintin sequel is really happening

Yes, we’re currently writing the next Tintin film now. Steven Spielberg directed the first movie, and for years he’s been incredibly gracious about the fact that we still hadn’t made the sequel. He never pressured me or pushed me about it. But I always felt that if we were going to go back to Tintin, we needed to make sure we had the right story first rather than rushing into it just because people expected another film.

Tintin is very important to both Steven and me, so we’ve always wanted to approach it carefully. In fact, I was literally working on the script in my hotel room here in Cannes a few days ago. So yes, after all this time, we are finally moving forward with it.

His take on AI 

To me, AI is fundamentally just another tool. I tend to see it as another evolution of special effects technology rather than something completely separate from filmmaking history. People are understandably nervous about it right now, but cinema has always evolved through new technology. We went from silent films to sound, from black-and-white to colour, from practical effects to digital effects. AI feels to me like part of that same technological progression.

The critical issue is rights and consent. You cannot ethically use somebody’s face, voice or likeness without permission. That’s where the real danger exists. If you want to digitally recreate somebody - whether it’s an actor, a performer or even a historical figure - then the rights need to be properly licensed from that person or from their estate. To me it’s no different from adapting a novel. You can’t simply take someone’s book and turn it into a movie without obtaining the rights first. The exact same principle should apply to AI-generated material. So I don’t think the problem is the technology itself.

Why Peter Jackson genuinely mourns the death of DVD culture

There was a wonderful period in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s when films would come out on DVD maybe six months after their theatrical release, and audiences genuinely wanted to immerse themselves in every aspect of how those movies had been made. People didn’t just want the film itself. They wanted hours and hours of behind-the-scenes documentaries, production diaries, deleted scenes, commentaries and technical breakdowns. There was this huge curiosity about the filmmaking process itself.

For us on The Lord of the Rings, we embraced that completely. We documented almost everything because we knew there was an audience genuinely interested in understanding how these films were being created. And I honestly think that culture had an enormous educational value. So many younger filmmakers have told me over the years that they became obsessed with cinema specifically because they watched those making-of documentaries repeatedly. That material taught people how movies were actually put together.

Now studios increasingly claim that market no longer exists. Disney, for example, has largely moved away from physical media releases altogether, which also kills the possibility of these huge extended collector editions with extensive bonus material. I think that’s genuinely sad, because we’re losing not just physical objects but an entire culture of curiosity around filmmaking itself.

His version of The Lovely Bones casting controversy 

I never want to blame actors in those situations because ultimately the responsibility belongs to the filmmakers. If recasting happens, it usually means we didn’t fully understand the chemistry correctly in the first place. Ryan Gosling is a fantastic actor. If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean somebody failed. It simply means the combination wasn’t right for that particular film.