Jackson: King Kong is why I'm here

Monster movie: King Kong is 'played' by Andy Serkis

10 April 2012

I cried when I saw the original King Kong," says Peter Jackson. "I wanted to become a film-maker the moment I saw it." That was 1970, when, as a nine-year-old, he sat awestruck in a picture-house in Wellington, New Zealand.

Thirty-five years later, he has brought new life to the Hollywood classic that created one of cinema's most enduring images, of a screaming Fay Wray in the grip of the giant beast.

"Actually, I wanted to become a monster-maker first," Jackson corrects himself, "because I didn't really know what directing was. But I wanted to create that sort of imaginative experience because, for me, that film does what entertainment should. It captivates you. It sweeps you away to another place but it also affects you emotionally. It's the reason I'm in the film business."

One of his Kong stars, Jack Black, recently said that Jackson only wanted "to do things that were interesting to him as a kid", and indeed he has many childlike qualities, including a disdain for all things sartorial. That said, Jackson, 44, has shed a good deal of weight since his last public appearances 18 months ago, the result of a health regime he undertook at the end his last project, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. His diet was simple: he cut out all junk food and ate only fruit and vegetables.

The physical transformation is startling. He still has scraggly hair and beard, but Hobbit comparisons are no longer remotely appropriate. Jackson looks decidedly handsome.

You'd think after making films of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, to which Jackson remained staunchly faithful, the multi-Oscarwinner would want to avoid another sacred cow. But King Kong has been his dream project and he has been trying to get it made for years.

"The sense of responsibility has been great because I'm remaking my favourite movie," he says. "I just wanted to try to step in the footsteps of the original. I wanted to do something that was as entertaining today as the original was back in 1933."

He has certainly made a huge movie, at three hours long, on a gigantic $207 million budget. King Kong is a mighty entertainment, too, jammed with special effects - about 2,300 effects shots in total, Jackson estimates - and featuring a central relationship between the big ape and Ann (this time played by Naomi Watts) which is genuinely touching.

For those who don't remember the original, King Kong tells the story of an expedition led by a maverick filmmaker, Carl Denham (played with comic madness by Jack Black) to find the mysterious Skull Island, where he plans to shoot the ultimate adventure film. He leaves Depression-era New York having recruited a down-and-out actress called Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) to be his leading lady and playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) as his screenwriter. They set sail on the SS Venture whose crew includes young British star Jamie Bell as a cabin boy with a hunger for adventure.

It takes 45 minutes for the action to get to Skull Island, where natives kidnap Ann and offer her as a sacrifice to a monster who lives behind giant walls. After 70 minutes, we finally see Kong bounding out of the jungle to collect his petite human prize.

Thereafter, audiences will wriggle and squirm their way through an epic brontosaurus stampede, two extended T-Rex battles, a stomachchurning sequence involving giant bugs and Alien-esque worms, and a fight between Kong and a swarm of giant bats. Jackson is determined that his rollercoaster of action would be the most adrenaline-pumping thrill-ride ever put on film.

SO devoted to the project was he, that he shared the cost of "overages" - production costs above the pre-determined budget - which amounted to a reported payment from Jackson of close to $30 million. Universal had first agreed that the film come in at around 135 minutes, but by the time Jackson started assembling the footage, it was looking more like 200.

"The length of a film is not really a science," he explains. "You budget for a certain length and you make plans for that, but ... I don't know what to say. We shot the script and kept trimming back. I mean, we shot a lot more than what ended up in the movie."

Universal top brass travelled to New Zealand to see sections of the film as they were finished. Jackson screened a finished version which ran to 187 minutes. "We said, listen, we don't know whether this length is an issue for you but we want to have your feedback," he recalls. "They liked it and didn't have a concern about the length at all."

The best thing about the film is Kong himself, a special effects marvel whose movements are seamlessly fluid and whose enormous eyes are so realistic and affecting that when he and Ann stare into each other's faces atop the Empire State Building this time, there won't be a dry eye in the house.

The director's primary concern was that Kong be created with all the stateofthe-art digital genius his effects house Weta Digital in New Zealand could muster, thus delivering the ultimate update on the clunky black-and-white monster of 1933.

Jackson turned to his pal Andy Serkis, the English actor who had provided the physical blueprint for the computer-generated Gollum in The Lord of the Rings — arguably the first fully-realised CG character in a film.

Jackson had already decided that Kong would not be a fantastical monster but an outsized version of a silverback gorilla. During the shooting of Rings, he enlisted Serkis to also play the part of Kong — to enable Jackson to make emotional decisions for the character, to provide on-set reference for the other actors and to serve as a motion-capture reference for the effects wizards rendering Kong on computers.

Serkis took the part seriously, travelling to Rwanda to observe gorillas in their natural habitat and learning to mimic their vocalisations, physical behaviour and non-verbal communication.

"The noises in the film are all Andy," says Naomi Watts. "His voice is distorted by a voice box we called a ' Kongaliser' and that would sound through the studio. In every scene where I am with Kong, I am looking into Andy's eyes. That way the emotions were more accessible for me, even though he was raised up on a piece of machinery to get the eyelines right."

Eyes, whether Andy's or Kong's, were the essential element of the whole enterprise, according to Jackson. "The single most scary thing about making the movie was showing Kong, how realistic he was and how much you empathise and engage with him.

His eyes are so important. So much work went into how reflective they are, how much they water and how much they tear-up." To compensate for Serkis's dedication to roles for which he would never be seen on screen, Jackson also gave his friend the human part of Lumpy the Cook, who is killed by a giant worm.

Ironically, for all the attention that went into updating Kong himself, Jackson opted for a stylised, often setbound look for Skull Island. Massive room-sized miniatures of the terrain and landscape were built by hand, sets were constructed of some of the locations and all the creatures on the island were computer-generated.

Jackson wanted it to look "unlike any real place on earth. I wanted Skull Island to have a mystique and stylisation that was similar to the original".

If he'd wanted realism, he adds, he'd have gone into the rainforests of New Zealand to shoot the jungle scenes there. For Thirties New York, he shot on large-scale sets, again in New Zealand, and, of course, a life-size replica of the top of the Empire State Building.

"That sequence was really important to me. It was the first scene I started to design while we were doing The Return of the King," he says. Jackson started making films with a Super 8mm camera when he was a teenager, and in 1983 he made his first short film, a science-fiction horror comedy called Roast of the Day, which would be expanded over the next five years into his first feature, Bad Taste.

He followed that with gore-filled camp-fests Braindead and Meet the Feebles - the latter marking his first collaboration with screenwriter Fran Walsh who would become his partner, mother of his two children and chief collaborator on all his films.

His international breakthrough came in 1994 with a surprisingly elegant and disturbing true-life story, Heavenly Creatures, which launched Kate Winslet's career and put the director on Hollywood's radar. His first foray into big-budget spectacle, The Frighteners, with Michael J Fox, was a disappointment in 1996, so much so that Universal pulled out of Jackson's planned Kong remake at that time. Disappointed but unfazed, the director struck a deal to make the Rings trilogy in 1997.

His next project, though a monstrous story, is a far cry from the blockbusters he has become accustomed to. He plans to film Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones. It will be fascinating to see how he deploys his imagination on the story of a young girl's murder and how her family copes, while she watches them from heaven.

"When we are fully rested and have some brain cells back, we will work on the screenplay," he says. "There will be some special effects in it but nothing like King Kong or Lord of the Rings. It'll be a lovely change."

King Kong opens Thursday 14 December.

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