Peter Jackson Talks Upcoming Projects, AI’s Role in Filmmaking: “It’s Just a Tool Like Any Other”
Filmmaker Peter Jackson, a VFX visionary as much as a master storyteller, says he’s not particularly concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence tools on the future of filmmaking.
“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” Jackson said Wednesday morning at the Cannes Film Festival. “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.”
“Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative? Has it been stitched together well to make a narrative, a story?” Jackson continued. “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.”
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Jackson compared AI to the early stop-motion technology used to create the original King Kong and the Ray Harryhausen movies — pioneering examples of fantasy filmmaking that he famously adores — suggesting that he’s agnostic about the tools, provided the results are imaginative.
“Those were done with stop-motion by a person moving a rubber creature,” he added. “Why shouldn’t somebody on a computer using AI software be able to create their own imagery?”
Jackson brought his lovably rumpled personage to the Côte d’Azur to accept an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival’s glitzy opening ceremony Tuesday night. He took part in a wide-ranging talk session the next morning, where he discussed the making of his early splatter classics (Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead), the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, and his recent documentary projects, including The Beatles: Get Back. As at Tuesday’s ceremony, the legendary Kiwi director was supported by his Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood at the talk session, with the actor sitting among a few hundred adoring fans inside Cannes’ Palais des Festivals.
Jackson gave a sweet shoutout to Wood from the stage while discussing the most high-stakes phase of his career — when he agreed to direct three big-budget fantasy films in a row at a scale of budget and technical complexity never remotely attempted by the New Zealand film industry. He recalled being in a state of despair during the drive from his home to the set each morning, full of doubts about how he would tackle the day’s scenes.
“I gotta say, the one thing with Elijah, beyond any of the other actors, is that I would show up on set and he would be relentlessly cheerful every single day,” Jackson said, pointing to his friend and former leading man in the audience. “He was, like, ‘Okay, let’s get this done! What are we going to do?'”
“He was always there to help me make the movie I wanted to make,” Jackson continued. “Some actors, they do sort of show up and they’ve got this whole idea of what they want to make, but Elijah just was there to collaborate, and he’s got this optimistic energy. So, no matter how down I would feel when I arrived and got out of the car, he would be there, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going!’ Having somebody there who was that insanely cheerful was very, very helpful.”
Jackson also gave updates during the talk on his long-gestating Tintin feature film project, Andy Serkis’ upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum movie and a possible World War II feature he hopes to make about the Dambusters Raid.
“We’re actually writing the next Tintin film now,” he said. “The deal was that Steven [Spielberg] directs one and I direct another. So Steven did his film, and then for 15 years I haven’t made mine.”
“I feel very awkward about that,” he continued. “Steven’s gracious enough not to sort of push me, but I know that I want to make it right. So I’ve been working with Fran [Walsh] on another Tintin script. I was writing it in the hotel room here just a couple of days ago.”
On Serkis’ The Hunt for Gollum, Jackson said he was happy to step aside and let the legendary motion-capture performer — who famously originated the role of Gollum in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy — direct the spinoff feature himself.
“I thought, well, this story would actually be more interesting if Gollum himself directed it — and Andy is about as close as you can get,” Jackson said. “The film is very much an internal story about Gollum’s psychology and his sort of addiction. It’s a very personal story to Gollum the character. And so I thought, well, Andy knows this guy better than anybody.”
“I didn’t really think much about the idea of me doing it at all,” he continued. “I thought the most exciting version of this movie is going to be if Andy Serkis makes it, because he’s going to put a Gollum psychology on screen that you cannot imagine.”
“I mean, I’m there to help when I can help,” he added. “If I can be of assistance at certain times and answer questions, I’m there. But I don’t interfere.”
Jackson said he also hopes to soon make a World War II feature about Operation Chastise, commonly known as the Dambusters Raid, the high-stakes British bombing of German hydroelectric dams in 1943.
“It’s a really amazing story about invention and solving problems to try to achieve a goal,” Jackson said, noting the 1955 British film The Dam Busters about the historical incident, but adding that the full story remains to be told because British documentation about the raid was still classified during the making of that earlier, somewhat fictionalized feature.
“The true story is actually much more interesting,” he said.
“Dambusters was actually the movie I was supposed to make until I ended up doing The Hobbit — and then I sort of swapped in other films afterwards,” Jackson explained. “But The Dam Busters is sitting there in the back of my mind, so I’d like to make that soon.”
Jackson also balanced his views on AI elsewhere in his talk with a few caveats, noting that he was “not talking about AI in general, like the thing that it might destroy the world,” but just its film world applications.
“To me, it’s just a special effect,” he said. “It’s no different from any other special effect.”
“The only thing with AI that I think is absolutely critical,” he added, “is that you don’t do an AI version of an actor without their own approval.”
Jackson likened the AI licensing of identity rights to any other form of licensing involved in the conventional film industry.
“You can’t play music, a song in a film, unless you own the rights to that song. You can’t adapt a book unless you have licensed the book,” he said. “So you shouldn’t be able to show somebody’s face through an AI technique without the approval of whoever it is — either the person themselves, or if they’re dead, their estate.”
He added: “I mean, it’s pretty straightforward, really. I don’t know. I don’t see the concern about it.”
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