Peter Jackson Q&A

Exclusive: The director discusses the difficulties involved in remaking 'King Kong' for a new generation.

Dec  9 2005

Dave Calhoun caught up with Peter Jackson in New York last week to discuss the making of the biggest film of the year, 'King Kong'.

I hear you were working on the film right up until the very last minute.

We left New Zealand on Monday and I was still working on the film 20 minutes before getting on the plane. It sounds crazy but I was. We had a 9.30 flight out of Wellington and at 9 I was at Weta Digital looking at the last two shots out of about 2,300 or however many they are. I looked at them, signed off on them, then dropped by the dub stage which is just down the road, signed off on that, went straight to the airport and got on the plane.

What were those last shots you were signing off?

One is of the Empire State Building as Kong is climbing up the side and the camera pulls back and back and back and there are searchlights… I think that was just about the most complicated render that we've ever had to do, it was all completely CG. The other one was complicated for different reasons – it is a much shorter shot of Kong running along the street and jumping into a building.

Do you think you're able to see the movie as a complete film yet?

No, not as a finished film. Obviously I've seen it many times as a movie with incomplete shots – which is ok, because I can look past that and see the movie. So I'm very familiar with the film itself. But it's certainly a novelty when you see a shot that you've seen for a year with just grey, simplistic, cartoonish shapes and outlines, which is exactly the shot but lacking all the colour and details. Suddenly to see New York and the Empire State Building and all the lights and the skyline, it's pretty thrilling. No matter how much you see a film, with the visual effects you keep getting surprised – I keep seeing things as they get better and better – it's constantly exciting. I usually used to spend an hour at Weta everyday to see their updates of every shot. I’d come in tired to look at the latest shots and always walk out kind of excited because I'd see things and think 'that looks cool'.

Is the finished film as you imagined it would be?

The biggest surprise, I guess, the biggest thrill from a technical point of view is just how well Kong ended up. I've no idea whether the film is what I imagined it to be because at some point it's impossible to even remember what you imagined. It evolves so much over such a long period of time that you forget. It's like watching a child grow up, it just happens in front of your eyes. It's exciting to be hit with these new images of Kong acting and performing.

It's a peculiar challenge to remake such an iconic film as 'King Kong'? A similar challenge, I suppose, to adapting the works of Tolkien? Both are sacred cows - one in cinema, one in literature.

In a way, it's a chicken and egg thing. The iconography is one of the reasons to do it. I didn't invent the idea of Kong climbing up the Empire State building. That was invented by Merian C Cooper in 1933. He invented it for a particular reason which is strangely quite valid today. He wanted this incredible example of nature, this most magnificent specimen of the natural world to be towering over what was the most amazing achievement of mankind at that point in time. Cooper deliberately wanted that combination of these two things. In a funny way, it still works today. I still feel kind of emotional at the way the Empire State Building looks so magnificent. It's almost like a wonder of the world and there's this gorilla working his way up the side of it.

It's a very powerful theme: man's folly in trying to overcome nature.

It also resonates in a way because mankind has a habit – and not a particularly good habit – of taking what's wondrous and miraculous about the natural world and wanting to own it and control it and manipulate it and in the worst cases exploit it. I saw the original movie when I was nine and I cried at the end of it – that's always stayed with me. It's more than just feeling sorry for Kong, but you also feel guilt that this was an inevitable end for him. He came across mankind and it was never going to end any differently, because of us. That's where the power of that ending comes from.

Your film very much feels like a homage to Merian C Cooper's original.

It's made by somebody who loves the original film. I didn't remake this movie because I thought I could do it better or for any sense of wanting to improve. I wanted to make it because I loved the original film. I have no issues with remaking a classic film like King Kong because it's two separate things. The original film is a classic and will always be. It's going to outlive me and the film I've made. It stands as an example of wonderful filmmaking. It's such a great iconic story that has so much to say and is so cool – simply cool. Remote islands hidden in fog, native sacrifice and girls being taken by giant gorillas and fighting dinosaurs and the Empire State Building – it's got everything that's cool about escapist cinema and has this great emotional punch, this great heart to it. It's worth revisiting again.

There's a powerful marriage in the film between escapism and tragedy.

As a 9-year-old, the three things that stuck in my mind were Kong fighting the T-Rex, thinking that was one of the coolest things I've seen in my life; the biplanes attacking him on the Empire State Building, which was such an outrageous image and has deservedly become one of the most iconic images of film history; and the fact that I cried at the end of it. It's really that combination. There are many examples of escapism without the tears – the thrills but not the tears. I think that's what makes Kong different. What differentiates him from Godzilla or any other monster that smashes up a city and fights other monsters is the fact that you've got this story that has a heart and a soul and you get to improvise with this creature, this gorilla. The other thing that the original film did and I made sure I preserved is that I never wanted to make Kong overly cute. That's 'Mighty Joe Young', that movie got made, where a gorilla is cute and relatively benign. Kong is neither cute nor benign; he's a very scary, frightening animal. The fact that you get to empathise with him and understand a little bit about his heart and his nature and you see that he has this incredible love towards Ann Darrow, this protective instinct towards her, doesn't stop him being terrifying and dangerous and unpredictable. I like that about the film. I like that he's neither a villain nor an overly humanised, cute animal. There's a complexity about it which I think is quite interesting.

There's a fine line between trying to make an audience understand Kong's emotions and going too far, anthropormorphising him.

It is anthro... I can't say that word, you write it down. You humanise. As filmmakers you tend to have to do that at times; he has to serve the story of the film and there are moments when he has to do something that you need him to do for the movie in order to advance to the next scene. But what we always tried to do was make him behave in the way in which he naturally would behave given what he is and who he is. He's existed in the most violent place on earth, he's solitary, he's phenomenally lonely, I would assume. We assumed that he's the last one of his species, that his other siblings or parents have died of old age or been killed by the dinosaurs.

His behaviour does make you wonder what kind of childhood he had!

Yeah. He's lonely and he has a code of behaviour which is genetic. He has no other way of acting. He doesn't have a value system in the way that we have. He operates totally in his own instinctive way – and that instinct is ultimately to protect Ann against all costs. It's like how a wild gorilla would protect its child to any cost; it will kill anything that comes between it and its child. Kong will kill anything or anybody that stands between him and Ann eventually.

I know you cast Andy Serkis to act as Kong alongside Naomi Watts and also to provide the basis for the digital Kong. But how did use Andy Serkis without allowing Kong to appear too human?

That's an interesting question. I wanted somebody to act – I wanted to have an actor to represent Kong. On one level, when you're making a movie, apart from the fact that your actors are appearing on camera (apart from Andy in this particular case), I always see the actor as being the representative of the character in a way. It's like a democracy. Everybody has their own things to worry about on set. When I'm working, I have a lot of things to think about: which lens to use, where to put the camera, do I use a dolly or a crane. I have a script that I have to shoot, a schedule I have to keep to, actors that I have to work with and so I have to juggle all these things. The one thing that I have to rely upon is that the actors generally have to concentrate on one thing, which is their character. So I have a huge reliance on their input. And I love to be collaborative and listen to their input and ideas; as far as I'm concerned, they know their character as well or better than I do. To me, it was very important that I had an actor who represented Kong. What was the alternative? For scenes that were with Naomi and Kong, the alternative is that I show up on set with Naomi and it would just be the two of us and Kong would not be represented by anybody.

Apart from you...

Exactly, I'd suddenly have to be an actor, acting out the part of Kong and making his decisions for him and talking to Naomi. I didn't feel comfortable with that. I'm not an actor and I've got 101 other things to think about. I thought it was important to be able to turn up and rehearse the scenes with Ann and Kong, and be able to talk to Kong. To have Kong on set to talk to was a critically important part of the process. For Naomi, it gave her someone to act with. The only alternative was a yellow tennis ball on a stick, which is a pretty grim scenario for an actor. Actors feed off each other; it's one of the key things of their craft; they use each other to generate performance. Virtually every single shot of Naomi looking at Kong, she's looking at Andy, she’s looking at his face and he's up on a cherry-picker or on a scaffold tower or somewhere. That was one part of the Andy Serkis situation. The other part was that Andy was the actor, the person, who studied gorillas more than anybody. He studied them more than I did. He went to Rwanda and lived up there for a couple of weeks. I watched the National Geographic tapes in the comfort of my bedroom at home. I did what I could but he did the real thing. If Andy said to me, 'that's not how a gorilla would behave Peter', I would obviously be paying attention. We wanted to make Kong as realistic a Silverback gorilla as we possibly could. But obviously you cheat to tell a story where you need to, but we thought the most interesting approach would be to have one foot in reality.

With a production as huge as 'King Kong', do you find you're fighting to spend enough time with your actors?

No, not really. We did have a sufficient amount of rehearsal time. We wrote the script and defined a lot of what the characters were then. If you cast good actors then the conversations on set become quite simple. For me, it's a case of talking to the actor and explaining what the needs of the film are. So, if I want Naomi to be upset or to feel stressed, I don't have to spend a lot of time talking to her about how to do that. That's what she does. She's brilliant at doing that. Actors like Naomi, Adrien and Jack, they don't pretend, they don't fake it, they work themselves into the moment. They're pulling something from inside themselves.

I know you first wrote a script for King Kong in 1996 but then scrapped it completely. What changed between the two scripts? How did making 'Lord of the Rings' inspire those changes?

I can sum it up pretty clearly really. The script we wrote in 1996 was very much a Hollywood action-adventure. I'd describe it as something akin to 'The Mummy' or 'Van Helsing' or 'Indiana Jones'. It was that type of genre. I guess the reason why we did that was that we thought it was fantastical, an adventure, and so we should write a script similar to movies we were watching at the time and were aware of. What we ultimately learned from 'LotR' was the value of planting a strong foot in reality to counterbalance the fantasy – which was what we didn't know or think about in 1996. In 'LotR' it manifested itself in terms of the characters and the way we designed the world. So when we were designing Rohan or the Elvish world, we made them as real as possible. We based the Elvish architecture on Art Nouveau; we based the Rohan culture on the Vikings in Scandinavia. We made Gandalf the Grey look like he'd slept under a hedge for six weeks – he was like an old tramp that wandered the countryside. It's also important that just because it's a fantasy, it's not an excuse for actors to act in a way that's fantastical. We wanted every character to believe they were in that situation and to behave accordingly. We threw away our old script after reading it again a couple of years ago because we didn't like it at all. We rewrote it. It's an odd situation really, to write Kong twice in the space of ten years – two completely different screenplays based on the same movie.

Do you think the success of 'LotR' gave you confidence to do something more traditional, to not tow the more obvious Hollywood line?

It's more about finding a more interesting direction to take. As a filmmaker, you have to enter through a doorway, and to me there are different doors to choose from. Anything from high camp to the most dour kitchen-sink drama. What, to me, started to get really interesting about Kong was keeping it as real as possible – what would Ann Darrow do if she was kidnapped by a gorilla and how would she survive? What would she do and how would Kong react to that? Why doesn't he kill her? You have to think of it as a real-life situation. To me, it appeals more immediately than just thinking of it as a fantasy with no rules in which anything can happen. But also, I didn't want it to be the real world in terms of updating it to 2005 either.

Did you ever consider setting the film in another time?

I never considered it. The very first conversation I ever had with Universal in 2002 when they came back to us and asked if we wanted to go back to King Kong again, the very first thing I said was that we wanted to do it, but we should be totally honest and decide that it's got to be period and it's got to be 1933. I was aware that most Hollywood remakes decide to update them to the modern day to make them more accessible. I thought the reverse was true: Kong would be more accessible if it was in 1933. I thought that on one level, for obvious reasons, you could believe that there was an undiscovered islands that contained dinosaurs because the world was just innocent enough at the beginnings of the 1930s for that to happen. It lost its innocence in the 1940s to some degree.

Other, much greater menaces have emerged since the 1930s...

Yes, much more potent things have happened, that's exactly right. Dinosaurs and gorillas pale in comparison with some of the horrors in the world today. The other reason, which was more of an emotional one for me, was that I badly wanted to be able to recreate the sequence of him biplanes on the Empire State Building. I didn't want helicopters and jet-fighters, and I didn't want the Empire State Building to have all that telecommunication crap that it's got on it at the moment with all the TV aerials and antennae that they put up in the 40s. It was a beautiful, pure piece of deco design.

It seems to me you could go two ways with 'King Kong'. One would be to set it in 2005. The other would be to approach it in a tongue-in-cheek way, more self-consciously as a B-movie. You don't do that. There's a lot of respect at the heart of your film.

Well, that's just because I love the original movie. It's not an intellectual process, it's an emotional process. I'm a guy who is making movies because I saw that film. I saw it on a Friday night on TV in New Zealand and the next day I was trying to make it on Super-8, aged nine. I did it again when I was twelve, not very successfully.

I like how 'King Kong' is evidence of cinema handing down its own stories – ones that cinema owns - through the generations.

That's what Tolkien always said, that the best mythology is one that is handed down through the generations and built upon and interpreted from generation to generation. It should never be cemented in one time or place. But having said that, I didn't even set out particularly to improve or alter the film, I just wanted to make it as a fan of the original film. But I'm not a fan in 1933; I'm a fan of 2005. I'm not of the time-period in which the original film was made, so obviously technology is very different.

Cinema often takes inspiration or complete stories from other art forms, be it theatre or novels. But this is cinema's own folk-tale.

Yes, and it's proud of it. In every book you read about the history of cinema, they usually use the photo of him on the Empire State Building with the airplanes. That sort of pasted and glued-together publicity photo that's not actually a frame from the movie. That image always appears in books as one of the great wonders of film. Which it was. The original film was an incredible product of its time, coming out of the Depression, and a wonderful bit of escapism for a people who were in the blackest year of the Depression in 1933. In terms of New York, in particular, 1933 was the worst year of the Depression. There was a shanty-town of people living homeless in Central Park.

And there's the character of a filmmaker within the story.

It somehow glorifies what's romantic and amazing about filmmaking and then compounds it with dinosaurs and big gorillas. It was such a romantic notion. What I love about it is that that romance and escapism is not lost. The world is so different to how it was 72 years ago, and yet that same need for escapism is still around.

You made the film in New Zealand. But how much of the real New Zealand is in there?

Intangibly, it's all New Zealand. But physically, very little of New Zealand. This is not a good film for the New Zealand Tourist Department.

So you weren't able to incorporate as much of NZ as you were in 'LotR'?

I didn't want to. That was a fundamental decision at the beginning. One of the big questions at the beginning was whether Skull Island would be a location or not. I did a lot of location-scouting for 'LotR', and I knew from that experience that Skull Island wasn't going to be in New Zealand. There were plenty of places you could shoot if you wanted to shoot in a rainforest and mountains and all sorts of places. But to me it would have nothing of the mystique that I wanted Skull Island to have. Not only are you dealing with the physical situations and wanting amazing looking twisted trees and precipices and chasms and dangerous looking environments that either don't exist at all or would be a nightmare to shoot on, I also wanted to control the lighting. Otherwise you have to take what you get. It might be raining and you really want a lovely backlit sun streaming through the trees and you're stuck. I wanted it to look somewhat similar to the 1933 film when it was artificially manufactured on tabletops and glass paintings and stop-motion animation. I wanted our Skull Island to be a cousin of the original. We built huge miniatures where we could control the lighting and the terrain and could create a world that was stylised to a degree. But I figured that if you believed in a giant gorilla and dinosaurs you could believe in Skull Island to some degree.

You've opened as huge a film as this three times now. How do you feel at this point in the proceedings, a few days before opening? Nervous?

You're always nervous. You're nervous because there's a huge amount of other people's money riding on it. The studio takes a huge amount of trust. You want people to enjoy the movie. At the end of the day, and I know it sounds horribly simple and naive, but the greatest thing that you hope for is that you want people to walk out of the movie and look at each other and say, yeah that was pretty cool, I enjoyed that. That's actually all that you want – and a degree of pride for the film that you've made. Until that happens, obviously, you've got a bit of a knot in your stomach.

'King Kong' is released on December 15 and is reviewed here.

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