As a horror nut I first discovered Peter Jackson when Dead Alive was released on VHS tape back in the early 90s. After viewing that first film I knew Jackson was destined to become one of the great filmmakers. I immediately saw his other works such as the Oscar nominated Heavenly Creatures and Meet the Feebles. When his first Hollywood film, The Frighteners, was going to be released I thought that the entire world was going to discover him then. But I was dead wrong because that film tanked. But as everyone knows, Jackson beat the odds and created a near perfect movie trilogy with the Lord of The Rings films.
Now Jackson is releasing his interpretation of the movie King Kong. He has kept the film set in the 1930s and cast Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow, Jack Black as a crazed filmmaker and Adrien Brody as the screenwriter whose jungle script takes them to deadly Skull Island. With King Kong, Jackson has created a spectacle that may change the world almost as much as the original Kong did back in 1933.
Check out the official site for King Kong
Daniel Robert Epstein: A lot of people call you an auteur and you do these films with monstrous budgets and marketing campaigns. How hard is it to stay true to your vision when you also have to serve this marketing machine?
Peter Jackson: I dont quite know what an auteur is. I never really understood that term because filmmaking is such a huge team effort. I regard myself as being the final filter, so that anything that ends up in the movie is there because its something that I think is cool. I very much tried to make a film that Id enjoy, but Im open to ideas. I need a huge team of people to help me and I try to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible. I think thats the job of a director, to funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.
The marketing is really something that happens with other people and its not something Im an expert in. My job at the end of the day is to make the best possible film I can. Thats really where my job stops. Marketing people take over after that.
DRE: It seems like you havent stopped working since 1997.
PJ: It is true. Im exhausted. Im absolutely tired. I havent really had a life. Ive been making movies for ten years now with the Lord of the Rings movies straight into Kong. Im very pleased that we did that because we were able to utilize the great creative team we had assembled for the Lord of the Rings films for King Kong. One of the reasons why I wanted to make Kong very quickly was because I wanted to keep this team together and be able to just channel that creativity into another project.
People didnt really know it at the time but when we flew over to Los Angeles for the Oscars for Return of the King, we were in a Kong production meeting the following day. We had a Universal script meeting the day after the Oscars and then after that I got on a plane and flew to New York to meet with Fay Wray. We got a tour of the top of the Empire State Building and took reference photos. So its been a continuous journey.
DRE: What did you and Fay Wray discuss?
PJ: I was trying to talk her into doing a cameo in the film because as a King Kong fan I really wanted her. I thought it would be fantastic if she could appear in even one shot. She said, No, absolutely not. But we got on well and the last thing she said to me was Never say never. So I thought there was a chance that we might get to shoot a cameo with her but of course she passed away soon after. I think we saw her about three or four weeks before she died. But I'm really pleased that I met her because obviously as a life long King Kong fan I've always wanted to meet her so I'm very grateful for this project and the time we had together.
DRE: With your version of King Kong you were quite faithful to the 1933 version. But you actually cut a couple of scenes like the giant snake and the pterodactyl. How did you decide what scenes to keep and what scenes to cut?
PJ: Its instinct to some degree and it doesnt reflect a right or a wrong way of doing it since every filmmaker that would make a version of King Kong would do a completely different film. Ive wanted to make this movie for a long time and Ive had ideas and images in my head for years. To me it wasnt a particularly difficult situation to decide what should be in or out, I just really wanted to play down a movie in my head. Incidentally we shot a scene where they cross the swamp and theyre attacked by a creature but it didnt end up in the cut. Even though the movie is three hours long, there are quite a few scenes we filmed that didnt make it into the finished movie.
DRE: The spider pit scene in the original King Kong was cut out. Was it very important to you to get a spider pit scene in your version?
PJ: As a King Kong fan the spider pit scene is mythic because it was cut from the original at the last minute. So I wanted to put it in there as a Kong fan. Though it was also a rare opportunity for us to show a little bit more of Skull Island because one of the things that I really like about the story of Kong is all the creatures and inhabitants of the island because it is a sort of hell on earth jungle that's survived over the years. As much as I like the tyrannosauruses and brontosauruses, I wanted to make sure we put a few original creepy crawlies on the island as well.
DRE: What was it about the 1933 King Kong that inspired you to become a filmmaker?
PJ: I saw the original Kong on TV when I was nine years on a Friday night and that weekend I grabbed some plasticine and made a brontosaurus. I got my parents Super-8 movie camera and tried to animate the plasticine dinosaur. There was a moment in time when I just wanted to do special effects and do monsters and creatures but ultimately it led to becoming a filmmaker. I didnt really know what directing was when I was nine; it was more about monsters at that stage.
The original Kong is a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment. It has everything thats really cool about movies like a lost, remote island, a giant ape, dinosaurs, and it also has this wonderful heart and soul. When I first saw King Kong I cried at the end. That moment of shedding tears for him has stayed with me. That level of emotional engagement and pure escapism is what I personally like about the movies.
DRE: Why did James Newton Howard replace Howard Shore as the music composer?
PJ: Howard Shore was the original choice as composer. Were very good friends but it just came to the point where it seemed that our sensibilities for the film were somewhat different. So we decided to not to go down that road anymore. James Newton Howard is a composer that weve admired for a long time. Wed used some of his earlier scores on some of the temp tracks we had, and his sensibility and his feeling for the music seemed to relate really well to the pictures that we shot. We also found an opportunity to pay homage to Max Steiner. We used some of his original score in the Broadway show where Kong is put on display on the stage.
DRE: How did you decide how much to make Kong human versus making him an animal?
PJ: As a filmmaker youre going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work. I certainly dont deny that. But we did set out to base him on a real gorilla as much as we could. We sat down at the beginning and asked, What is Kong? Is he a monster, is he some sort of missing link or aberration? We decided we wanted to make him as genuine a silverback gorilla as we possibly could. So we studied silverback gorillas and Andy Serkis, who did a lot of the performance of Kong for us, studied gorillas in the mountains and even tracked a group of them in the Rwandan mountains for a couple of weeks. Everything in the movie is based on what a silverback gorilla would do but with a little bit of manipulation and cheating on behalf of the filmmakers.
DRE: How much did you work with Andy on Kongs personality?
PJ: It was interesting because we found that a lot of silverback gorillas personality and character is expressed through simplicity. Studying gorillas so much allowed us to simplify his characterization. Gorillas dont really give away a lot. Its all to do with eye contact and whether or not they are looking at you. As weve been refining Kong, I realized I didnt want to fall into the trap of making him too cute. The point in the story where we want the audience to empathize with Kong, I didnt want to stop him being dangerous. I didnt want to stop him from being a wild creature who can kill characters. I wanted people to empathize with him but also keep him wild and unpredictable.
DRE: How did creating Kong compare to creating another total CGI character, Gollum in Lord of the Rings?
PJ: What was most important was to make people be able to connect with Kong and make him believable. I knew going into this that the movie was ultimately going to live or die on whether you believed in Kong. The biggest concern that I had in terms of the film completely failing was if Kong wasnt believable. It was a difficult thing to pull off; it was much more difficult than Gollum. Gollum talked the whole time and so much of his character was presented in his dialogue. Yet Kong is completely mute. Hes got so much screen time and so many close-ups so we deliberately reigned in him and didnt want him to express much.
DRE: How was working with Naomi Watts?
PJ: Naomi was our first and only choice for the role. We responded to her because shes such an honest actor. She makes her roles as real as possible. If shes shedding tears in a scene, its because shes thinking of something that makes her cry. I dont know how she does it, but shes utterly believable which for this role was essential.
Naomi was also hugely helped by Andy Serkis. People think of Andy as the guy who does motion capture for Kong, which he does. Hes in a suit, and he acts out the role and we did all the motion capture of the character with Andy and that was put into animation and then into performance. But one of Andys greatest contributions was always being on set with the actors during Kongs scenes. He wasnt even filmed. Andy was there for the other actors. Every close-up of Naomi when shes looking at Kong, shes actually looking at Andy. Andy was acting his heart out as Kong. I think that was hugely beneficial. That was the beginning of the character that would be taken to the motion capture and then to the animation and finally to the film.
DRE: My favorite scene in King Kong is the one where Kong and Ann Darrow are sliding on the ice in Central Park. Where did the inspiration for that scene come from?
PJ: The thinking behind that scene is that didnt want to go straight from Kong escaping from the theater, reuniting with Ann and then go directly to the Empire State Building. We wanted to give them a moment together to fulfill the relationship and the friendship that had started on the island. We just wanted to create a quiet moment for the two of them.
DRE: How long will the extended DVD cut of King Kong be?
PJ: Im not quite sure. With the Lord of the Rings situation the extended DVDs were a conclusion. In this case Universal is waiting for the release of the film before they decide what they want to do. The tentative plan is to release the movie as it is in theaters on DVD sometime next year. Theres been talk of an extended cut but we havent started working on it yet. If I was putting in some of the other cool scenes we would have about 30 to 40 minutes.
DRE: Are you still doing The Lovely Bones?
PJ: Yeah.
DRE: Have you thought about who you are going to cast?
PJ: No. Were going to have a break first and then work on the script to that.
DRE: Is the horror filmmaker who made Dead Alive and Bad Taste still in you?
PJ: Oh absolutely. I hope to one day make another low budget horror film. Right now I want to rest and recuperate from the last ten years of filmmaking. Recently Ive realized that for the last ten years Ive had just two projects Lord of the Rings and King Kong. We originally tried to make King Kong after The Frighteners and then when that got canned we went into Lord of the Rings and then back into King Kong again. So Ive had two projects in the past ten years. Its really an exciting time to rest up and think of new ideas.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Now Jackson is releasing his interpretation of the movie King Kong. He has kept the film set in the 1930s and cast Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow, Jack Black as a crazed filmmaker and Adrien Brody as the screenwriter whose jungle script takes them to deadly Skull Island. With King Kong, Jackson has created a spectacle that may change the world almost as much as the original Kong did back in 1933.
Check out the official site for King Kong
Daniel Robert Epstein: A lot of people call you an auteur and you do these films with monstrous budgets and marketing campaigns. How hard is it to stay true to your vision when you also have to serve this marketing machine?
Peter Jackson: I dont quite know what an auteur is. I never really understood that term because filmmaking is such a huge team effort. I regard myself as being the final filter, so that anything that ends up in the movie is there because its something that I think is cool. I very much tried to make a film that Id enjoy, but Im open to ideas. I need a huge team of people to help me and I try to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible. I think thats the job of a director, to funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.
The marketing is really something that happens with other people and its not something Im an expert in. My job at the end of the day is to make the best possible film I can. Thats really where my job stops. Marketing people take over after that.
DRE: It seems like you havent stopped working since 1997.
PJ: It is true. Im exhausted. Im absolutely tired. I havent really had a life. Ive been making movies for ten years now with the Lord of the Rings movies straight into Kong. Im very pleased that we did that because we were able to utilize the great creative team we had assembled for the Lord of the Rings films for King Kong. One of the reasons why I wanted to make Kong very quickly was because I wanted to keep this team together and be able to just channel that creativity into another project.
People didnt really know it at the time but when we flew over to Los Angeles for the Oscars for Return of the King, we were in a Kong production meeting the following day. We had a Universal script meeting the day after the Oscars and then after that I got on a plane and flew to New York to meet with Fay Wray. We got a tour of the top of the Empire State Building and took reference photos. So its been a continuous journey.
DRE: What did you and Fay Wray discuss?
PJ: I was trying to talk her into doing a cameo in the film because as a King Kong fan I really wanted her. I thought it would be fantastic if she could appear in even one shot. She said, No, absolutely not. But we got on well and the last thing she said to me was Never say never. So I thought there was a chance that we might get to shoot a cameo with her but of course she passed away soon after. I think we saw her about three or four weeks before she died. But I'm really pleased that I met her because obviously as a life long King Kong fan I've always wanted to meet her so I'm very grateful for this project and the time we had together.
DRE: With your version of King Kong you were quite faithful to the 1933 version. But you actually cut a couple of scenes like the giant snake and the pterodactyl. How did you decide what scenes to keep and what scenes to cut?
PJ: Its instinct to some degree and it doesnt reflect a right or a wrong way of doing it since every filmmaker that would make a version of King Kong would do a completely different film. Ive wanted to make this movie for a long time and Ive had ideas and images in my head for years. To me it wasnt a particularly difficult situation to decide what should be in or out, I just really wanted to play down a movie in my head. Incidentally we shot a scene where they cross the swamp and theyre attacked by a creature but it didnt end up in the cut. Even though the movie is three hours long, there are quite a few scenes we filmed that didnt make it into the finished movie.
DRE: The spider pit scene in the original King Kong was cut out. Was it very important to you to get a spider pit scene in your version?
PJ: As a King Kong fan the spider pit scene is mythic because it was cut from the original at the last minute. So I wanted to put it in there as a Kong fan. Though it was also a rare opportunity for us to show a little bit more of Skull Island because one of the things that I really like about the story of Kong is all the creatures and inhabitants of the island because it is a sort of hell on earth jungle that's survived over the years. As much as I like the tyrannosauruses and brontosauruses, I wanted to make sure we put a few original creepy crawlies on the island as well.
DRE: What was it about the 1933 King Kong that inspired you to become a filmmaker?
PJ: I saw the original Kong on TV when I was nine years on a Friday night and that weekend I grabbed some plasticine and made a brontosaurus. I got my parents Super-8 movie camera and tried to animate the plasticine dinosaur. There was a moment in time when I just wanted to do special effects and do monsters and creatures but ultimately it led to becoming a filmmaker. I didnt really know what directing was when I was nine; it was more about monsters at that stage.
The original Kong is a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment. It has everything thats really cool about movies like a lost, remote island, a giant ape, dinosaurs, and it also has this wonderful heart and soul. When I first saw King Kong I cried at the end. That moment of shedding tears for him has stayed with me. That level of emotional engagement and pure escapism is what I personally like about the movies.
DRE: Why did James Newton Howard replace Howard Shore as the music composer?
PJ: Howard Shore was the original choice as composer. Were very good friends but it just came to the point where it seemed that our sensibilities for the film were somewhat different. So we decided to not to go down that road anymore. James Newton Howard is a composer that weve admired for a long time. Wed used some of his earlier scores on some of the temp tracks we had, and his sensibility and his feeling for the music seemed to relate really well to the pictures that we shot. We also found an opportunity to pay homage to Max Steiner. We used some of his original score in the Broadway show where Kong is put on display on the stage.
DRE: How did you decide how much to make Kong human versus making him an animal?
PJ: As a filmmaker youre going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work. I certainly dont deny that. But we did set out to base him on a real gorilla as much as we could. We sat down at the beginning and asked, What is Kong? Is he a monster, is he some sort of missing link or aberration? We decided we wanted to make him as genuine a silverback gorilla as we possibly could. So we studied silverback gorillas and Andy Serkis, who did a lot of the performance of Kong for us, studied gorillas in the mountains and even tracked a group of them in the Rwandan mountains for a couple of weeks. Everything in the movie is based on what a silverback gorilla would do but with a little bit of manipulation and cheating on behalf of the filmmakers.
DRE: How much did you work with Andy on Kongs personality?
PJ: It was interesting because we found that a lot of silverback gorillas personality and character is expressed through simplicity. Studying gorillas so much allowed us to simplify his characterization. Gorillas dont really give away a lot. Its all to do with eye contact and whether or not they are looking at you. As weve been refining Kong, I realized I didnt want to fall into the trap of making him too cute. The point in the story where we want the audience to empathize with Kong, I didnt want to stop him being dangerous. I didnt want to stop him from being a wild creature who can kill characters. I wanted people to empathize with him but also keep him wild and unpredictable.
DRE: How did creating Kong compare to creating another total CGI character, Gollum in Lord of the Rings?
PJ: What was most important was to make people be able to connect with Kong and make him believable. I knew going into this that the movie was ultimately going to live or die on whether you believed in Kong. The biggest concern that I had in terms of the film completely failing was if Kong wasnt believable. It was a difficult thing to pull off; it was much more difficult than Gollum. Gollum talked the whole time and so much of his character was presented in his dialogue. Yet Kong is completely mute. Hes got so much screen time and so many close-ups so we deliberately reigned in him and didnt want him to express much.
DRE: How was working with Naomi Watts?
PJ: Naomi was our first and only choice for the role. We responded to her because shes such an honest actor. She makes her roles as real as possible. If shes shedding tears in a scene, its because shes thinking of something that makes her cry. I dont know how she does it, but shes utterly believable which for this role was essential.
Naomi was also hugely helped by Andy Serkis. People think of Andy as the guy who does motion capture for Kong, which he does. Hes in a suit, and he acts out the role and we did all the motion capture of the character with Andy and that was put into animation and then into performance. But one of Andys greatest contributions was always being on set with the actors during Kongs scenes. He wasnt even filmed. Andy was there for the other actors. Every close-up of Naomi when shes looking at Kong, shes actually looking at Andy. Andy was acting his heart out as Kong. I think that was hugely beneficial. That was the beginning of the character that would be taken to the motion capture and then to the animation and finally to the film.
DRE: My favorite scene in King Kong is the one where Kong and Ann Darrow are sliding on the ice in Central Park. Where did the inspiration for that scene come from?
PJ: The thinking behind that scene is that didnt want to go straight from Kong escaping from the theater, reuniting with Ann and then go directly to the Empire State Building. We wanted to give them a moment together to fulfill the relationship and the friendship that had started on the island. We just wanted to create a quiet moment for the two of them.
DRE: How long will the extended DVD cut of King Kong be?
PJ: Im not quite sure. With the Lord of the Rings situation the extended DVDs were a conclusion. In this case Universal is waiting for the release of the film before they decide what they want to do. The tentative plan is to release the movie as it is in theaters on DVD sometime next year. Theres been talk of an extended cut but we havent started working on it yet. If I was putting in some of the other cool scenes we would have about 30 to 40 minutes.
DRE: Are you still doing The Lovely Bones?
PJ: Yeah.
DRE: Have you thought about who you are going to cast?
PJ: No. Were going to have a break first and then work on the script to that.
DRE: Is the horror filmmaker who made Dead Alive and Bad Taste still in you?
PJ: Oh absolutely. I hope to one day make another low budget horror film. Right now I want to rest and recuperate from the last ten years of filmmaking. Recently Ive realized that for the last ten years Ive had just two projects Lord of the Rings and King Kong. We originally tried to make King Kong after The Frighteners and then when that got canned we went into Lord of the Rings and then back into King Kong again. So Ive had two projects in the past ten years. Its really an exciting time to rest up and think of new ideas.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 16 of 16 COMMENTS
lensturtle420:
And Peter is a really nice guy - I wrote to him just after the first LOTR, just telling him how I'd been following his career since 'Bad Taste' (the funniest sci-fi horror of all time bar-none), and he wrote back to me, making direct references to things I had said in my letter. Sent me a signed picture too, which was nice of him. Peter Jackson is so much better than Spielberg could ever dream of.
stluv1:
I think what would have been interesting if Jackson had taken another route for the King Kong Movie and had Kong take a a big shit while hanging out at the empire state... so I could have called that fiilm a big peice of crap!!! 