While he never had a film in official selection at Cannes, it is where the filmmaker won over the distributors who bought his work.
In 1988, he secured distribution at the festival’s marketplace with his first movie, Bad Taste. Then, in 2001, he screened a 26-minute preview from The Fellowship of the Ring.
The film’s success was stratospheric. Jackson became a household name and the Lord of the Rings trilogy went on to bag 17 Oscars, with Return of the King snatching 11 alone.
The films took in $3 billion in revenue, making it one of the most profitable film series of all time.
Jackson said Cannes was an important place for himself and cinema.
“This festival has always celebrated bold, visionary cinema, and I’m incredibly grateful to the Festival de Cannes for being recognised among the filmmakers and the artists whose work continues to inspire me.”
Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, winners of Best Adapted Screenplay for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Photo / Albert L. Ortega/WireImage
Festival director Thierry Frémaux said there is “clearly a before and an after Peter Jackson. Larger-than-life cinema is his trademark, and his all-encompassing art of entertainment is particularly ambitious”.
“He has permanently transformed Hollywood cinema and its conception of the spectacle. But Peter Jackson is not only a great technician; he is above all a tremendous storyteller. And an unpredictable artist: what will his next universe be?”
Jackson first found success with Bad Taste, before releasing Braindead in 1992 and Heavenly Creatures in 1994.
Melanie Lynskey (left) as Pauline Parker and Kate Winslet as Juliet Hulme in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures.
Then in a monumental feat, the Kiwi filmmaker undertook a “colossal logistical challenge” to release the three Lord of the Rings movies in three consecutive years.
The films took years of work and cost around $500m to produce, involving 274 days of filming, three years of post-production and 20,602 extras.
The three films were shot simultaneously between October 1999 and December 2000.
Post Lord of the Rings, Jackson remade King Kong in 2005, turning parts of Wellington into New York City for the film then adapted The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold into a film in 2009.
A scene from Peter Jackson’s documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
More recently, Jackson has restored and transformed rare and previously unusable footage into documentaries, like They Shall Not Grow Old in 2018, using footage from World War I.
Recently, he took unreleased footage of The Beatles recording the album Let It Be in 1969 and turned it into a three-part series.
The official selection will be announced on April 9.