(left to right) 'Lord of the Rings' creative team Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, director Peter Jackson, Billy Boyd, and Dominic Monaghan at Chateau Castellaras in Castellaras, France, a suburb of Cannes in 2001. Courtesy of Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect/Getty Images Peter Jackson will be presented with an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening night ceremony at this year’s 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, even though he’s never had a film play the fest itself. Nevertheless, he’s left a lasting imprint on Cannes. Jackson has recalled first visiting the Croisette in 1988 because his first movie, Bad Taste, was in the marketplace. But it was his return trip in 2001 that made cinema history, when he offered the first glimpse of footage from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
New Line Cinema’s decision to invest more than $270 million in three films based on the J.R.R. Tolkien classic was considered a big gamble, if not an outright folly. But the 26 minutes of footage previewed for the press quickly silenced the naysayers.
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Writing in a blog he maintained at the time, Ian McKellen, who played the wizard Gandalf, wrote, “With relief and some excitement I can report that Peter Jackson’s images not only look convincing, they look stunning.” And then, New Line upped the hype by staging one of the most legendary of Cannes parties, high on a hill at the Château Castellaras.
As described in exhaustive detail on the fan site TheOneRing.net, “Orcs, hobbits, elves and men were dancing wildly to French versions of ‘Oh What a Night’ and the latest Latin offerings. In the back of the crowd, you could see the flicker of candles as a huge cake floated toward the front. The band played a rather strange/disturbing version of Happy Birthday, and Bilbo’s cake appeared before us. We all cheered wildly and toasted our favorite hobbit.”
Festival director Thierry Frémaux wasn’t exaggerating when, in announcing the honorary Palme, he 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.”
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