The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson will receive an honorary Palme d’Or in recognition of his life’s work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Cannes announced the honor on Thursday, praising the New Zealand filmmaker for “a body of work that blends Hollywood blockbusters and films d’auteur with extraordinary artistic vision and technological audacity.”
Jackson has never had a film in official selection in Cannes, but his connection to the Cannes market goes back to 1988, when he brought his first feature, Bad Taste, to the Marche, securing global distribution for the low-budget splatter horror classic. In 2001, Jackson screened 26 minutes of promo footage from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, winning over sceptical international distributors.
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The rest is history. Jackson’s LOTR franchise went on to gross $3 billion at the box office worldwide, collecting a total of 17 Oscars, with 11, including best picture, for the final opus: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (His prequel Hobbit trilogy, though snubbed by the Academy, was a similar box office phenomenon, earning just under $3 billion globally.)
“To be honoured with an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes is one of the greatest privileges of my career,” Jackson said. “This festival has always celebrated bold, visionary cinema, and I’m incredibly grateful to the Festival de Cannes for being recognised among the filmmakers and the artists whose work continues to inspire me.”
Jackson will be honored at the opening ceremony of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 12.
“For its 79th year, the festival welcomes and thanks a filmmaker of boundless creativity who has brought prestige to the heroic fantasy genre,” said Cannes festival president Iris Knobloch.
“[There is] clearly a before and an after Peter Jackson,” added Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux. “Larger-than-life cinema is his trademark, and his all-encompassing art of entertainment is particularly ambitious. He has permanently transformed Hollywood cinema and its conception of the spectacle. But Peter Jackson is not only a great technician; he is above all a tremendous storyteller. And an unpredictable artist: what will his next universe be?”
Jackson followed up his trio of “naughty” low-budget cult features — Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles (1989), and Dead Alive (1992) — with Heavenly Creatures (1994), a true-crime tale of two New Zealand teenagers whose obsessive friendship led to murder. Featuring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey in breakout roles, the film landed an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for Jackson and partner Fran Walsh. Post-LOTR, Jackson tackled a big-budget remake of King Kong (2005) and literary adaptation The Lovely Bones (2009).
More recently, he’s focused on grand-scale documentaries, including They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which restored and colorized more than 100 hours of original World War I footage, syncing it with hundreds of hours of interviews. His 2001 miniseries The Beatles: Get Back was compiled from 60 hours of previously unseen footage from the recording of the album Let It Be in early 1969. In a strange bit of synchronicity, the Beatles, that same year, had pitched The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien on their own LOTR adaptation, with Stanley Kubrick to direct, Paul McCartney as Frodo, John Lennon as Gollum, George Harrison as Gandalf and Ringo Starr as Sam.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival runs May 12-23. This year’s official lineup will be announced April 9.
