There was a “Lord of the Rings” reunion Tuesday night at the Cannes Film Festival, with Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson receiving an honorary Palme d’Or from Elijah Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the series.
In his speech, Wood recalled meeting Jackson for the first time at age 18 after he sent in an audition tape. “He had been watching a VHS tape I had made with some friends in the woods in Griffith Park, and now he wanted to meet the young man who had sent it to him,” Wood said. “And then a little while later, when I got the call that I was going to be Frodo Baggins, I sat on my bedroom floor and realized that my life was just split between before and after. And I also know that I’m not the only one whose life was changed by Peter Jackson.”
Jackson, who accepted Wood’s award with a hug, said he has “grown some facial hair” since they first met 27 years ago. “If someone were to remake ‘Gone with the Wind,’ that might be your role,” Jackson joked. He then gave a heartfelt speech about how Cannes saved the Lord of the Rings series after a period of bad publicity following the disastrous merger between AOL and Time Warner.
“We were shooting The Lord of the Rings over three years, and we were shooting three movies at the same time,” he recalled. “And the press was kind of weird too. It was a weird time because Warner was being sold – whatever happens, comes around again – so all the press was talking about this big folly. What if the first movie fails? What are they going to do with the second and third movies that have already been made? This was a big gamble, and all the media was talking about how that gamble was going to fail.”
But New Line Cinema founder Bob Shea had a plan. He decided to screen his first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, for 20 minutes at a festival in 2001 to rewrite the story.
“We brought those 20 minutes here in May of 2001 and did some press in that castle on the hill and had a party there. Bob’s great gamble really changed the perception of the movie,” Jackson said. “And obviously, for me, it was a life-changing event. So by the time this movie came out, there was an expectation that if it wasn’t for Cannes, this movie wouldn’t have happened.”
The moment Jackson won the Palme d’Or meant his return to Cannes. During the 2001 festival, Jackson silenced widespread skepticism about the Lord of the Rings trilogy by releasing a 26-minute video of The Fellowship of the Rings. The scene electrified the festival, and a lavish afterparty hosted by New Line got the industry even more excited about Jackson’s film adaptation.
“There is clearly a before and an after Peter Jackson. Life-size films are his trademark, and his comprehensive entertainment art is particularly ambitious,” Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux said of Jackson before the festival. “Peter Jackson is not only a great engineer, but above all a great storyteller. And an unpredictable artist. What will his next world be?”
Jackson joins a prestigious list of past Cannes Honorary Palmer Prize winners, including Agnes Varda, Marco Verrocchio, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Tom Cruise.
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival runs until May 23.
