Cannes: Peter Jackson
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 8:00PM 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...