10 Things to Know About Peter Jackson, Honorary Palme d’or at the Festival de Cannes

In addition to both holding Oscar records, Peter Jackson and James Cameron also share a link with Kate Winslet, the iconic actress from Titanic. In Heavenly Creatures, released in 1994, the New Zealand director entrusts her with her very first screen performance.

The film is inspired by the Parker-Hulme affair, a well-known New Zealand news story that took place in the 1950s. Kate Winslet plays Juliet, an audacious high schooler, who is infatuated with her best friend Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), as they plan the murder of Pauline’s mom.

Before becoming the third best-grossing director of all times (close to 6.5 billion dollars of accumulated box office receipts), Peter Jackson dwelled with zombies and dabbled in the realm of cannibalism starting in the late 1980s.

With Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989), and Braindead (1992), he delivers three feature films replete with gory and nutty humor and makes his first forays into fantasy film.

If Alfred Hitchcock is famous for making brief appearances in his own movies, Peter Jackson is happy to follow in his footsteps.

Attentive viewers will spot the filmmaker in almost all his movies, that is if he’s not properly cast. In addition, each installment of the two trilogies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit contains an easter egg: we can see him as a traveler eating a carrot or assisting a Corsair of Umbar captain, who gets killed by Legolas.

Since meeting in the 1980s during the post-production of Bad Taste, Peter Jackson and his spouse Frances Walsh form a tight team, both in life and on set.

Indeed, the latter has been co-screenwriter on all his recent films, and sometimes even a co-producer, in particular on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. A third person completes their duo, Philippa Boyens, who has been working on Peter Jackson’s screenplays since 2001, when The Fellowship of the Ring was released.

In 1995, New Zealand television audiences discovered in a documentary that one of their own, a man called Collin McKenzie, had been the forgotten inventor of most of the techniques that revolutionized cinema.

Described in detail through testimonies of several participants, these innovations range from talking pictures to the color movie, including the invention of the close-up and the tracking shot. It’s only a few days after airing that Jackson and his co-director Costa Botes reveal to stunned audiences that it was all a complete hoax.

Peter Jackson makes it a point of honor to shoot exclusively in New Zealand, where the head office of his production company, WingNut Films, is located.

With close to three billion dollars of box office revenue earned from his three films that were entirely shot on location, the universe of The Lord of the Rings according to Peter Jackson has conquered audiences worldwide. The effect? A considerable boost for local tourism, approximately 40% of additional visitors were registered between 2000 and 2005, all curious to discover the bucolic vistas surrounding The Shire, or the vast plains of Gondor.

At eight years old, it’s the 1933 King Kong directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, which makes young Peter Jackson dream of cinema.

A few years later, he reenacts the mythical final act in the family garden using a Super 8 camera, with a model of the Empire State Building, a King Kong action figure and some plastic toys.

In 1996, when Hollywood offers him several adaptation projects, including King Kong and The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson chooses his childhood love. However, the project is ultimately abandoned, and it’s only in 2005, after the global success of his Tolkien adaptation that he can fulfill his childhood dream.

Peter Jackson is the sole director of the two trilogies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but this was not always meant to be.

Originally, Guillermo del Toro was supposed to direct The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson as producer and co-screenwriter, since he feared he wouldn’t be able to match the unanimous success of the first three films. But in 2010, due to the studio’s numerous delays and financial issues, del Toro withdraws from the project while remaining a co-screenwriter. Ultimately, Peter Jackson takes over the project’s direction and shooting starts in March of 2011.

As of 2017, Peter Jackson, a Beatles fan, throws himself into a vast documentary project using 60 hours of raw rushes from the group, shot in the studio while recording the album Let It Be in 1969.

Whereas the images made him happy, the sound, which was very hard to mix given the poor quality of the track, was a different story. After several trials, he and his team finally developed software capable of identifying and isolating each sound bite aided by artificial intelligence, to be able to restore and rebalance the soundtrack.

For each of its trilogies, Jackson is able to coordinate shooting the three parts simultaneously.

Therefore, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) were shot between October 1999 and December 2000, that is to say more than one year of continuous filming.

Likewise, the three movies from The Hobbit trilogy were filmed between March 2011 and July 2012.

A successful feat, showcasing a remarkable esthetic and narrative consistency.