It was a “Lord of the Rings” reunion at Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night time as Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson acquired an honorary Palme d’Or from Elijah Wood, who performed Frodo Baggins within the fantasy franchise.
In his speech, Wooden recalled assembly Jackson for the primary time at 18 after sending in an audition video. “He had seen a VHS tape I’d made with friends in the woods of Griffith Park, and now they wanted to meet the young man who had sent it,” Wooden stated. “And when a little while later the call came that I was going to be Frodo Baggins, I sat down on the floor of my bedroom and I understood with the whole of my being my life had just been divided into before and after. And I know I’m far from the only person who has had their life changed by Peter Jackson.”
Accepting the award from Wooden with a hug, Jackson commented that he’s “grown a little bit of facial hair” because the first time they met 27 years in the past. “If someone does a remake of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ it could be your role,” Jackson joked. He then delivered a heartfelt speech about how Cannes helped to save lots of “The Lord of the Rings” franchise after a time of unhealthy press throughout the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger.
“We had shot ‘Lord of the Rings’ over three years, and we shot all three films at the same time,” he recalled. “And the press was sort of weird, it was a strange time because Warners was being sold — what goes around, comes around — and so all the press was sort of talking about this great folly. What happens if the first film fails? What are they going to do about films two and three because they’re already made? It was a huge gamble, but all the media was talking about that the gamble was going to fail.”
However New Line Cinema founder Bob Shaye had a plan. He determined to display screen 20 minutes of the primary movie, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” on the 2001 competition to try to rewrite the narrative.
“Bob Shaye rolled the dice and so we had to quickly finish 20 minutes of the film. We brought that 20 minutes here in 2001 in May, and we did some press in that castle up on the hill and had a party there, and Bob’s great gamble really changed the perception of the film,” Jackson stated. “And for me obviously, it was a life-changing thing. So by the time the film came out there was an anticipation that there wouldn’t have been if not for Cannes.”
Twenty-five years later, “Lord of the Rings” remains to be going sturdy. Jackson govt produced the animated installment “The War of the Rohirrim” in 2024, Gollum actor Andy Serkis is stepping behind the digicam to direct 2027’s “Hunt for Gollum” and in March Jackson introduced that Stephen Colbert and his son Peter are growing the following chapter within the franchise, titled “Shadows of the Past.”
Jackson joins a prestigious record of earlier Cannes honorary Palme recipients, together with Agnès Varda, Marco Bellocchio, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Tom Cruise.
The 2026 Cannes Movie Pageant runs by way of Could 23.
