AL HAYAT - After the hobbits, director Peter Jackson tackles 'Tintin'

The New Zealand director said that he has been working on a script for a film about the boy reporter created by the Belgian cartoonist Herge nearly a century ago.

Jackson said his film would be a sort of follow-up to Steven Spielberg's animated film "The Adventures of Tintin" in 2011.

"The deal was that Steven directs one and I direct another," he told a masterclass at the Cannes Film Festival, where he received an honorary Palme d'Or lifetime's achievement award Tuesday.

"So Steven did his film, then for 15 years I haven't made mine. I feel very awkward about that," he said. But he hasn't been wasting any time while at Cannes.

In between galas and picking up his prize, "I've been working with Fran (Walsh, his partner) on another Tintin script. I was writing it in the hotel room here," he said.

Jackson, who turned JRR Tolkien's trilogy into one of the biggest box office franchises ever, said he loved Tintin, whose adventurous japes in comics like "Tintin in Tibet" and "The Blue Lotus" have been a staple of European children's bookshelves since the 1930s.

Jackson, who owns Weta FX, one of the world's most important special effects companies, which has worked on "Avatar" as well as "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, also weighed into the debate on artificial intelligence that has been raging at Cannes.

He said that although he thought AI is "going to destroy the world", when it comes to its use in film, "I don't dislike it at all."

"I mean, to me, it's just a special effect. It's no different from other special effects."

S.al-Qahtani--al-Hayat