Peter Jackson Gets Palme d’Or From Elijah Wood at Cannes as Director Credits Festival for Saving ‘Lord of the Rings’: ‘It Was a Huge Gamble’

It was a “Lord of the Rings” reunion at Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night as Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson received an honorary Palme d’Or from Elijah Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the franchise.

In his speech, Wood recalled meeting Jackson for the first time at 18 after sending in an audition tape. “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,” Wood said. “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.”

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Accepting the award from Wood with a hug, Jackson commented that he’s “grown a little bit of facial hair” since the first time they met 27 years ago. “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 “The Lord of the Rings” franchise after a time of bad press during 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.”

But New Line Cinema founder Bob Shaye had a plan. He decided to screen 20 minutes of the first film, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” at the 2001 festival to try and rewrite the narrative.

“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 said. “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.”

Jackson’s Palme d’Or moment marked a homecoming for the director at Cannes. During the festival’s 2001 edition, Jackson silenced the widespread skepticism around his mounting of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy by unveiling the 26 minutes of footage from “The Fellowship of the Ring.” The scenes wowed the festival, and a lavish afterparty thrown by New Line got the industry even more excited for Jackson’s adaptation.

“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,” Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux said about Jackson before the festival. “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 joins a prestigious list of previous Cannes honorary Palme recipients, including Agnès Varda, Marco Bellocchio, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Tom Cruise.

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival runs through May 23.