This is per Variety, reporting on a wide-ranging talk that was reportedly pretty heavy on AI conversation, and lighter than many of Jackson’s usual human interactions on “How do we bring this giant, terrifying bird back to life?” Jackson states, for instance, that while he thinks AI is going to “destroy the world,” he doesn’t mind it in terms of filmmaking technique, comparing it to any other special effect. (We’d argue that those special effects are designed by human beings instead of being crapped out from datasets scraped from god knows where, but we don’t want to face the wrath of a 2-meter tall, 600-years-dead bird. ) Jackson did express some sadness that Hollywood’s general uneasiness with Tilly Norwood types means his old pal Andy Serkis might be even further from winning an Oscar for his motion-capture performances than he was before, calling it “a bit unfair” that Serkis (who’s directing The Hunt For Gollum, with Jackson’s blessing) is unlikely to ever win an Oscar for his work.
Jackson—who hasn’t directed a non-documentary film since 2014’s The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies—also expressed his belief that Serkis has got Hunt covered, saying, “Andy knows this guy better than anybody.” But he apparently is still poking at Tintin, saying that he and his partner Fran Walsh are currently in the midst of writing a follow-up to Steven Spielberg’s 2011 adaptation of Belgium’s most beloved non-blue comics export. “The deal was Steven directs one, and I direct another,” Jackson said at Cannes, clearly hopeful that his dreams will take flight, in exactly the way that a six-foot-tall extinct murder bird probably wouldn’t.
