Peter Jackson: "The Lord of the Rings? I'll never make a film that big again, and that's fine with me"

In the late 1980s, Peter Jackson arrived in Cannes as a complete outsider: a self-taught New Zealand director who shot splatter films on weekends while still working as a photo-engraver during the week. His first contact with the Festival was traumatic and perfectly consistent with the legend he would become: he was kicked out of the Palais for wearing shorts that were too informal.

Almost forty years later, Jackson returns to the Croisette as an auteur who redefined the modern blockbuster, transforming The Lord of the Rings into one of the most influential and awarded cinematic operations of all time. 

During a long conversation as the recipient of this Cannes Film Festival's honorary Palme d'Or, the director retraced his entire career: his early splatter horrors, the emotional trauma of Heavenly Creatures, the creative chaos behind The Lord of the Rings, Andy Serkis and the birth of motion capture, his relationship with the Beatles, the future of Tintin, and even his opinion on artificial intelligence.

What does receiving an honorary Palme d'Or mean to you?

Peter Jackson – Honestly, I never imagined receiving a Palme d'Or. It's not something I ever dreamed of, in the same way I never dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer or an Olympic jumper. Some things just seem impossible, so you don't even allow yourself to imagine them. So no, I haven't spent my life thinking: "One day I'd like to win a Palme d'Or." But of course, it's wonderful. And in a way, I guess I've even made a Palme d'Or film. At least I like to think I have.

Today, genre cinema is welcomed by major festivals and important awards. Do you feel that directors like you have helped change this perception?

Peter Jackson – When I made Bad Taste, I was deeply inspired by directors like Sam Raimi, George Romero, and Stuart Gordon. I watched those films constantly and tried to absorb everything I could.

Young directors often start with horror because horror allows you to make films even without great resources. When you don't have money, professional actors, or perfect screenplays, horror still offers you a way to create something powerful. You can compensate with imagination, energy, and blood. The more exaggerated and over-the-top it becomes, the more impact it can have. For me, horror has always been linked to comedy. The films I loved were so excessive that at some point the audience couldn't help but laugh. Bad Taste and Braindead are fundamentally slapstick comedies covered in blood.

When did you decide to make films, having started at a very young age?

Peter Jackson – When I was growing up in New Zealand in the mid-sixties, my parents had just bought a television. The first thing I completely fell in love with was Thunderbirds. Watching it today, I realize that what fascinated me wasn't simply the series itself, but the idea of escapism. I loved stories that transported you beyond ordinary reality. Science fiction, fantasy, horror: anything that allowed you to leave the real world behind for a while.

Then, when I was eight or nine, New Zealand television broadcast the original King Kong one Friday night. At the time, there was no internet, no immediate access to information. You just read the title in the TV guide and thought: "A movie about a giant ape? Sounds interesting."

But watching King Kong really changed my life. It was the moment I realized I wanted to make films. Watching it, I suddenly thought: "I want to create films like this." My parents had a Super 8 camera for family home movies, and almost immediately I started borrowing it to make little short films: rudimentary animations, models, special effects. They weren't even real films with a beginning and an end; they were experiments. But that's where it all began.

You even recreated the biplane cameo from the original film in your version of King Kong.

Peter Jackson – In the 1933 King Kong, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack appear as the pilot and gunner of the plane that attacks Kong in the finale. So, when I made my version, I wanted to pay homage to that tradition. Rick Baker, who played Kong in the 1976 film, came to New Zealand and played the pilot of our biplane, while I was the gunner next to him. It seemed like the perfect way to connect all the different generations of King Kong.

You've launched many careers, from Elijah Wood onwards. But how do you discover an unknown destined to become a star?

Peter Jackson – Finding the actresses for Heavenly Creatures was one of the most beautiful experiences of my career. We went to England looking for the actress who would play Juliet Hulme and found Kate Winslet, who was seventeen and had never made a film before. The moment we saw the audition, it was clear she was extraordinary.

Finding Pauline Parker was much more difficult. We auditioned countless actresses across New Zealand without being able to find the right person. We were getting dangerously close to the start of filming without one of the two protagonists. So Fran and another person from the team literally drove across New Zealand visiting schools. They would call ahead asking if any female students wanted to audition. Eventually, they arrived at a school in Palmerston North, where a fifteen-year-old girl named Melanie Lynskey raised her hand. That was her first audition. And she got the part.

Helping to launch the careers of actresses like Kate and Melanie remains one of the most gratifying things I've ever experienced as a director.

Were Heavenly Creatures and The Lovely Bones connected for you in some way?

Peter Jackson – Yes, I think so. After Heavenly Creatures, The Lovely Bones is probably the project closest emotionally and thematically to that kind of story. Again, Fran was the first to read the book and suggest we think about an adaptation. Although not directly based on a true story like Heavenly Creatures, it belonged to a very similar emotional space.

In general, however, Fran and I prefer to create original films when possible. The Lord of the Rings was obviously the definitive exception: there is probably no greater literary adaptation one could attempt.

Do you consider The Lord of the Rings your life's work?

Peter Jackson – Yes, I have no problem calling it that. I will almost certainly never make another commercially successful film comparable to The Lord of the Rings, and honestly, I'm perfectly fine with that. Very few directors have the opportunity to achieve something of that magnitude and see audiences around the world connect with those films in that way. I am incredibly proud of it. I haven't actually rewatched the trilogy in about twenty years, but apparently people still love it, and that's good.

When you started working on The Lord of the Rings, did you imagine that adventure would still be alive twenty-five years later?

Peter Jackson – Not really. But one of the things I love about cinema is that films become permanent in a very strange way. We continue to watch and love films from the 1930s, and I personally still adore silent comedies from the 1920s. Once a film exists, it becomes a kind of solid object that remains in the world. The fact that it continues to live depends on the audience. Films survive because people continue to love them, not because critics decide they are important, but because audiences keep coming back to them. If people continue to find meaning and pleasure in a film, then it can potentially survive for centuries.

Was Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord of the Rings an inspiration for your adaptation?

Peter Jackson – I had seen Bakshi's film when it came out, and I think it probably prompted me to read Tolkien. My teenage copy of The Lord of the Rings even had illustrations from the animated film on the cover. But the real reason we ended up making those films was actually much more practical. At the time, we had just finished The Frighteners, and during that production, we had built a visual effects company in New Zealand, which would later become Weta Digital.

Suddenly we had all this infrastructure and a growing team of visual effects artists, and we realized that if we didn't continue to make 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 to push visual effects technology forward. We tried to invent original fantasy ideas, but each time we ended up saying to ourselves: "Wait, Tolkien has already done something similar." Eventually, we realized we would simply have to find out who owned the rights to The Lord of the Rings.

At the time, they belonged to Saul Zaentz, who had also produced Bakshi's animated film. We had been warned that he was a difficult person and not particularly interested in returning to Tolkien. And that's where Harvey Weinstein comes in. At the time, we had a deal with Miramax, and Harvey had just helped save The English Patient, which Zaentz had produced. So Harvey essentially told us: "Saul owes me a favor." And that favor ended up being one of the reasons Miramax managed to get the rights. Cinema is often built on absurd chains of relationships and coincidences.

What made Tolkien so difficult to adapt for cinema?

Peter Jackson – One of the great difficulties is that the story truly concludes only at the end of the third part. So the question becomes: how do you structure the films so that each one feels emotionally complete while being part of a much larger narrative?

Fortunately, Tolkien had already solved the problem himself, because The Lord of the Rings was originally published in three separate books. Each volume has its own internal rhythm, its own climax, and its own emotional resolution. That structure became our model.

You said that technology had finally caught up with Tolkien's imagination. Could these films have existed without digital effects and motion capture?

Peter Jackson – Technically, you could make The Lord of the Rings even without digital technology. You could even do it with hand-animated puppets, if you wanted to. The Beatles actually tried to develop a version in the late sixties and approached Stanley Kubrick because they thought he was the only director capable of handling that visual scale after 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But for us, realism was essential. We never approached The Lord of the Rings primarily as fantasy. We approached it as if it were historical cinema. In our minds, Middle-earth was a real civilization from the distant past. We tried to treat it as you would treat a film about Henry VIII or William the Conqueror, rooting everything in matter, history, and physical reality rather than an abstract fantasy aesthetic. Modern visual effects finally allowed us to represent Tolkien's world with that level of realism.

Did you ever have moments of doubt during filming?

Peter Jackson – The most difficult moments were often the mornings.

I would drive from home to the studio at seven in the morning knowing that a gigantic scene awaited me, and during those ten minutes of travel, I would panic because I honestly didn't know how I was going to shoot that scene. Then I would arrive on set, and everyone would look at me expecting leadership and confidence. So I would pretend to know exactly what I was doing. The actors and crew would start suggesting ideas, and I would silently steal their suggestions, pretending they had been my plan all along. Sometimes directing is simply that: collaboration disguised as confidence.

I also have to say this about Elijah Wood: he brought incredible energy to the production. No matter how exhausted everyone was, Elijah was tirelessly cheerful every single day. He was never there to impose his ego or turn the film into "his" film. He was totally focused on helping all of us make the best possible version of The Lord of the Rings. That optimism greatly helped the crew during the toughest moments of filming.

How did it feel to win all those Oscars for The Return of the King?

Peter Jackson – Technically, it was thirteen Oscars, not eleven.

It was surreal. Over the course of the trilogy, we had already won awards for music and visual effects, but there was clearly a sense that the Academy was waiting for the final film before truly rewarding us fully. Then suddenly The Return of the King won everything.

One of my favorite memories of that night involves my son Billy, who was about six at the time. We were in New Zealand watching the ceremony live. When they got to the Best Picture award, The Return of the King had already won award after award all night. Steven Spielberg opened the envelope 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 believed The Lord of the Rings had lost. Later I told the story to Spielberg, and he was distraught.

After all you've accomplished, what continues to motivate you creatively? Are there still stories you dream of telling?

Peter Jackson – I don't really have a rigid five-year plan. I tend to follow what truly excites me. For a long time, I've wanted to make a film about the Dambusters raid during World War II. It's one of those situations where the real story is much more fascinating than fiction. Much of the technology involved in that operation remained secret for decades under the Official Secrets Act, so even the famous 1950s film about the raid didn't really tell everything that happened.

What interests me is the process of invention and problem-solving: people trying to overcome seemingly impossible technical obstacles to achieve a goal. But honestly, projects emerge unpredictably. Fran and I talk constantly, read books, exchange ideas, and sometimes a story suddenly appears that we didn't even know existed the day before. That unpredictability is part of the joy of filmmaking.