The 79th Cannes Film Festival opened with conversations on politics, artificial intelligence and the shifting priorities of Hollywood. Acclaimed director and screenwriter Peter Jackson, who has directed the Lord of the Rings films, held a talk ahead of his honorary tribute at the festival. The director has been selected for the honorary Palme d’Or this year.
What Peter Jackson said about AI at Cannes
At Cannes, Peter Jackson spoke about a topic that’s already dominated conversation at this year’s festival. That is AI. Peter said, “AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool. But like anything, it’s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person, you know, feeding the instructions into the AI program.”
He continued, “Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative? Has it been stitched together well to make a narrative, a story? Some people will make really, really great films, and some people will do the exact same process, and their film will be crap — just like normal films.”
All about Peter Jackson’s career
Peter Jackson, best known for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is one of the most successful and acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century. His films have broken box-office records and won awards. The New Zealand-born filmmaker began his journey in films in the 1980s with Bad Taste, a Kiwi fashion splatter comedy which took years to make. The film was eventually released in 1987. He found mainstream success in 1994 with the acclaimed film Heavenly Creatures, followed by the mockumentary Forgotten Silver (1995).
The success of these films brought him to Hollywood with The Frighteners, his first big-budget Hollywood film. In 1997, he won the rights to adapt Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for the big screen. The trilogy, which released from 2001-03, earned close to $3 billion and won 17 Oscars. Jackson has since directed King Kong and The Hobbit films, prequels to LOTR.
More on Cannes
On the opening day of the festival, main competition jury member Demi Moore also shared her views on AI. She said, “AI is here, and so to fight it is to, in a sense, to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it, I think, is a more valuable path. Are we doing enough to protect ourselves? I don’t know. My inclination would be to say probably not.”
Park Chan-wook, the South Korean filmmaker of Oldboy and No Other Choice, is the jury president this year. New films from Pedro Almodovar (Bitter Christmas), James Gray (Paper Tiger), Na Hong-jin (Hope), Pawel Pawlikowski (Fatherland) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden) are set to premiere at Cannes this year.