Peter Jackson at Cannes: "AI Is Just a Special Effect"

Peter Jackson accepted an Honorary Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival opening ceremony on May 12, 2026. The following day, at a masterclass hosted by the festival, he offered his most direct public position on artificial intelligence in filmmaking: "I don't dislike it at all".

"It's No Different from Other Special Effects"

Jackson placed AI alongside the long history of technical change in cinema. "To me, it's just a special effect. It's no different from other special effects", he said. He acknowledged the broader public fears about what AI could mean for humanity, but was clear that those concerns belong in a separate conversation from AI as a filmmaking tool.

The comments arrived at a pointed moment at Cannes. The festival banned generative AI from its Official Competition in April, citing "human effort" as the condition for Palme d'Or eligibility. One day before Jackson spoke, General Delegate Thierry Frémaux was proposing certification labels for films made without AI, modeled on organic food standards. The festival that drew those lines then gave its highest honorary distinction to a director who declines to draw them.

Where He Draws the Line

Jackson did not argue for unrestricted use. On actor likeness rights, he was unambiguous: "It's absolutely critical" to protect performers. His framework is consent, not technology.

"If you're doing an AI duplicate of somebody, as long as you've licensed the rights off the person who you're showing, I don't see the issue", he said. "It's when people's likenesses get stolen and usurped".

Jury member Demi Moore made a parallel argument at the same festival, saying fighting AI entirely is a battle the industry will lose and calling instead for a framework that works alongside it. Both arrived at the same conclusion: the problem is misuse, not the technology.

The Andy Serkis Problem

Jackson also named a specific casualty of the AI debate: he believes it is the reason Andy Serkis has never received Oscar recognition for his motion capture performance as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The controversy over AI has colored how the Academy evaluates any performance mediated by technology, even work that predates generative AI by two decades.

The Academy's current AI eligibility framework, clarified by CEO Bill Kramer in March 2026, centers on "human authorship". Applying that standard to motion capture has proven harder in practice than the principle suggests.

Wētā FX and the Beatles

Jackson is not speaking from outside the technology. Wētā FX, the visual effects company he founded in Wellington, New Zealand, has explored AI tools in production workflows for years. In 2021, his team built custom machine learning software called MAL to restore decades of degraded audio for The Beatles: Get Back documentary.

That work gave his studio direct experience with what AI tools can accomplish in a professional production context without displacing the people running it. His Cannes comments are his most direct public stance on generative AI to date.

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Sources

Variety