Peter Jackson said Wednesday morning at the Cannes Film Festival that artificial intelligence, used properly, is no different from any other filmmaking tool, and that what it produces depends on the imagination of the person giving it instructions.
Jackson, who accepted an honorary Palme d'Or at the festival’s opening ceremony on Tuesday night, told a packed talk session inside the Palais des Festivals that the real question is not the technology itself but whether the result is interesting, funny, imaginative and stitched together into a story that works.
“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” Jackson said. “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 added: “Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative? Has it been stitched together well to make a narrative, a story?”
The comparison was vintage Jackson. He likened AI to the stop-motion methods used on the original King Kong and in Ray Harryhausen films, saying, “Those were done with stop-motion by a person moving a rubber creature.” He then asked, “Why shouldn’t somebody on a computer using AI software be able to create their own imagery?”
The remarks came as Jackson outlined the next stretch of a career that has already covered splatter comedies, fantasy epics and documentary work. He discussed upcoming narrative features, including Tintin and WWII projects, while also looking back at the making of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead, and revisiting The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies as well as The Beatles: Get Back.
Elijah Wood was among those in the room, sitting with a few hundred fans inside the Palais. Jackson used the moment to praise the actor’s role in the long Lord of the Rings shoot, saying Wood was “relentlessly cheerful every single day” and “always there to help me make the movie I wanted to make.”
The setting matters because Cannes was honoring Jackson while also giving him a platform to sketch out what comes next. His comments placed him firmly on the side of using new tools rather than fearing them, even as the industry keeps debating how far AI should be allowed into film production. Andy Serkis’ forthcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum also hovered in the background of the conversation, a sign that Middle-earth still has more chapters to come. For Jackson, the answer to whether AI belongs in filmmaking was plain: yes, if the person behind it knows how to turn it into a story worth watching.
