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4 Peter Jackson Q & A
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 Question: You must be the busiest man in the universe right now?Peter Jackson: Well, not too bad right now. I've just got the point, a day or two ago, where things line up for the finishing line. So, it is a little bit more straightforward right now.
Question: Give me an idea of your “To Do” list for today?
Peter Jackson: I start today at the editorial cutting room where we are going to look at some miniature plates that we shot, that we are just going to trim up. And then cut them into the movie so that Weta can get the last few shots done with the miniatures. The miniature crew wrapped last week, after a year and a half of shooting, so the last few plates that they did have to be cut. Then I'll go down to post-production at Park Grove which is only five minutes away - all these things are five minutes away from each other - to do the sound mix.
We're mixing the sound track at the moment, a preliminary pass through the whole movie that is nine reels long. We are up to reel four. So, I will go in and check how the sound guys are getting on. We've got music compositions happening so I'll get on the Polycom with Los Angeles and check in with James Newton Howard and see how he's going. He starts recording music tomorrow. We'll listen to stuff that he is composing which will take about an hour. I'll then, this afternoon, do another hour or so in the mix, to see that everything is alright and if I can help in any way. I'll then go to Weta Digital this afternoon, the CG department, they've got all of the shots that are currently left in the movie that they are working on. They deliver the last shot in four weeks time, so everything is in play at the moment.
I'll go look at the various shots of animation, the renders, just review all the shots that are left to do and give them notes on them. Weta are currently producing about 20 shots a day, so every single day 20 finished shots come out the end of the pipeline. If I miss a day, we have to go to the cinema to project 40 shots on film, just to make sure they are okay. So, that will take me through to about six o'clock. I might have left something out - oh, yes, grading the film. Colour timing is going on - the movie has to be colour timed and that is happening concurrently with everything else. You know, it is always very busy, but under control because it is a known quantity. It was only up until last week that we were cutting the movie and that process is sort of a bit more intense because everybody is waiting for the finished cut. They then can really dive in and finish things.
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Question: Has it been tougher than with the Lord Of The Rings movies?
Peter Jackson: It is not tougher. What, I guess, is interesting is that we thought it would be a little easier than Lord Of The Rings because we actually thought… The thing that happened is that we thought we were dealing with a shorter film, because the Lord Of The Rings films were up to three hours twenty minutes, the sheer length of the movies makes for a more intense time. Instead of six reels, you've got nine reels to finish. You've got more effects shots. We had fairly intense post-productions on the three Lord Of The Rings movies and turning these three hour films over.
We thought for a long, long time that Kong was going to be two hours, two hours ten, two hours twenty possibly, see what works in the film and all that. When we got a cut done about five or six weeks ago we ended up with a three hour film (laughs). And that sort of explained a lot to me, I didn't know it was going to be a three hour film. I tried to trim it down, we worked throughout the year cutting it and cutting it and cutting it. There were huge amounts of shots to do. I thought, why is this so intense? Then it all made sense with three hours. And then the studio flew down to see the working cut and they were fine with it - which is a good thing. They viewed the movie and said, “It's fine, go with it.” I was expecting they would want to tighten it up or shorten I, which we would have tried to do - you lose objectivity about a film when you've stared at it for so long.
Question: That must have been gratifying?
Peter Jackson: It was, good like that. I mean, one of the Universal guys who saw it didn't know the length of it, and afterwards thought it was two hours long, which was kind of cool. Anyway, they didn't want to change it and we said, “Okay”. It did explain a lot, because the length has this correlation with how much work everybody has to do.
Question: What makes it longer, given that the original came in shorter than that?
Peter Jackson: That is a very good question. I have asked myself the same question, how come the original movie was one hour and forty minutes, why can't we be at least one forty-five, one fifty? I don't know. We actually follow the same structure as the original film. We have a lot more character stuff going on in our film, we take more time to develop the characters, we take more time to develop the relationship between Ann and Kong on the island. In our movie, there is more time spent between Ann and Kong on Skull Island than the original. In New York, at the end, we have more events that don't happen in the original film. We touch most of the well known sequences, but we do have extra stuff. Our T-Rex fight is twice as long as the original film.
Question: Would you say it has a different feel to the original film?
Peter Jackson: It does. I think it is inevitable it would have a different feel. So much of the feel of the first film is connected to its time period. I saw the original again last week, I ran it again to watch it. I mean, I just don't know, it is impossible for me to judge it. So much of what you get from the original film is due to the fact it was made in the thirties and it has that style of dialogue and delivery and acting of the thirties, it has O'Brien' stop-motion and black and white photography. I just don't know how on Earth you hope to have a movie that feels the same. And our one doesn't.
Question: How would you describe the feel of your film?
Peter Jackson: I'm surprised at how our one feels. When we saw it a while ago - you get to a point where you can actually watch the movie and that happened a while ago; we'd seen scenes and we'd been cutting scenes, just bits and pieces of it. And the thing that surprised me about it, and it is one of the things that people are going to take away from it, is that it is fairly uncompromising. As I came away from it I felt enormous sympathy for Kong, which was intentional, we went in deliberately trying to achieve that.
I was also happy with the way that we hadn't compromised Kong and turned him into Mighty Joe Young. He's a brutal, wild gorilla, he's a wild animal and there is an unpredictability and edge to him that we never lose. We can have a scene that is playing enormous empathy towards Ann Darrow on the island, and you really feel for Kong and you connect and you start to understand what makes him the way he is. And in the very next scene he attacks the sailors that are pursuing them, characters that we know are suddenly killed by Kong.
It's kind of shocking. I found that interesting. It was kind of deliberate, obviously, but I didn't know whether that would come across. I like the complexity of it. I like that fact that we have presented Kong as we have. The dangerous thing would have been at the point of the film where we start to feel sympathy for Kong, to empathise with him. We can't have him doing anything nasty or horrible to any of our characters anymore. We didn't do that, and it works quite well, because it gives him a believability as a wild animal. You read stories about people that raise lions or tigers as cubs, they hand rear then, then suddenly after eight or nine years they turn on their master and attack them. There isn't anything that you do. A wild animal has that spirit inside them, that unpredictability that will make them behave in a shocking way and you can never quite predict it. We definitely have got that edge to Kong.
Question: When did you get to the point when you knew you had exactly the right look for Kong?
Peter Jackson: It was a while ago. It was after the trailer came out. We had to scramble to get the shots into the teaser. We were still working on him when we put the teaser out. Immediately after the teaser, we went back in and did another round of work on him that did make him look a bit different to how he was in the teaser. We locked him down pretty much then, which was about three months ago.
We had a lot of shots in play, a lot of the wide shots we had done were fine because you don't see the differences. We went in and finished off close-ups after that, once we were totally happy. He had this kind of snaggle tooth that sticks out, we reduced the size of that after seeing him in the trailer, brought that down in scale slightly. We gave him an older look, I always thought he would be very old. The one that ended up in the trailer I didn't think it looked quite old enough. We did a lot more work aging his face, giving him more scars, making him more sort of craggy. We narrowed his face down slightly - I thought he looked a little round faced. And we gave him more grey hairs to help with the aging. We dirtied him up a lot more, he looked quite clean in the trailer and in the movie he's got matted hair and mud all over him and leaves stuck to him - the look of someone who has been embedded in Skull Island for decades.
Question: What is most elaborate piece of animation you've had to do?
Peter Jackson: Everything is complex one way or the other! I haven't struck an easy shot yet. The most elaborate choreography would be the T-Rexes. He fights three of them and it is sort of a rolling brawl. What I didn't want to do with the fight was have it take place in one location, like a clearing in the forest. It obviously starts in a certain place but I wanted it to be a rolling, travelling, brawling fight that goes across the island. It keeps moving all the time.
We developed some animatics, Christian Rivers and David Platton, two of our animators, worked a lot on that sequence. This was all before the shoot too. This was at the beginning of last year, when we had just finished on Return Of The King, and we worked out the sort of flight path through the island. And the conceptual artists did all these cool looks for different parts of the jungle and different bits of terrain and geography. And they came up with vines hanging over chasms, and all these broken statues and shelves, and it sort of ends in this cavern and this swamp. So we took all these bits of Skull Island that we liked and put them into the fight.
Then we did an animatic of this fight sequence which ended up being very elaborate, being very intricately choreographed involving Kong and the dinosaurs being entangled in these vines and swinging out over a chasm. And Ann is also entangled in the vines and Kong is trying to protect her and at one point she breaks free and ends up under threat from these T-Rexes who are swinging like a pendulum over the chasm, and Kong has to try and tear vines away to get to her. It is fun. I remember it being particularly hard work, but it is exciting and everyone's creative juices were flowing. It ends up being this sequence that is about 300 shots long, about nine minutes long.
So it is the big set-piece of the movie, the central set-piece of the Island scenes. It has taken us the entire duration of the project for us to do. The other difficult thing, which was difficult for a different reason because technically it wasn't too bad, was the Empire State Building scene. It was difficult more psychologically because it is such an iconic sequence. It is the reason to re-make King Kong in a lot of ways. Being the guy who gets to remake that particular sequence was driving me wanting to do it. The wonderful biplanes attacking Kong on the Empire State Building, incredible stuff. And because I felt so strongly about it, I was worried about it.
But it worked out okay. We actually started the animatics for that before I left for England for scoring on Return Of The King. We hadn't even written our Kong script yet! But it was a scene I knew was going to be in the movie, Kong and the aeroplanes. I wanted to get it right. It is strange when you have a sequence that means so much to you personally, that has had a huge impact on your life and your career. To actually get to do it, I did feel the weight of it. But I am proud of it.
Question: What have you learned from making the Lord Of The Rings movies that makes you a better director now for Kong than when you first tried to get the project going in 1996?
Peter Jackson: Everything is film school when you go onto a movie set really. You learn everyday. Kong now is a much better movie than it would have been back then. Apart from all the experiential elements, the fundamental thing we learned from Lord Of The Rings was to keep it real, keep it as real as possible. I talked about that a lot with Lord Of The Rings, and because of the mantra for that we naturally continued on into Kong.
And it did make a significant difference. It was the overriding reason we rewrote our 1996 script, because there wasn't anything real in that, it was a total kind of lightweight Hollywood action film. We just thought it was interesting to see the fantasy through the idea of keeping it real and what would really happen. And for me the story of King Kong suddenly gets a lot more interesting if you pretend that it really happened. That there was this group of people in the 1930s, a filmmaker and an actress and these people on a ship and they found this island.
And, guess what? They find the last remaining example of this weird race of large apes who once populated this island and there were dinosaurs. And the ape is fighting to be king of the island with the dinosaurs, he's terrifying, he's brutal, he's never empathised with anything in his life, he's lonely, a really forlorn, sad figure who has probably had the most brutal life you could ever imagine. When he comes into contact with Ann Darrow how would he react to that?
And he's a gorilla, so factor in the fact that all his reactions have to be how a gorilla would behave. He's a creature that we study and understand. We studied gorillas and thought about what would happen and how he would behave, how he would react, how he would come to connect with Ann and what that would do to him. Obviously we then took it from Ann's point of view as well. If you were taken by this creature on the island, how would you behave? What would you do? How would you behave to increase you chances of survival?
We approached everything we could in terms of what would actually happen. It's what we ended up with on Lord Of The Rings which made a huge difference. I think the problem with a lot of fantasy movies over the years, is because they are fantasy people have felt that everything can be fantasy, everything can be lightweight. There is no reason to make the relationships real or the people real, because it is fantasy. That is not what people want to see. We feel completely the opposite. If there is fantasy, if there are fantastical elements - dinosaurs, hobbits and trolls and orcs - then everything else you've got to make seem as incredibly real as possible.
That is why we based Jack Black's character Carl Denham on real people. We thought about Orson Welles, we studied the expeditionary filmmakers, who were these guys in the 1920s and 30s, sort of the makers of National Geographic type documentary movies, who would go to some forgotten corner of the world to film tribal rituals. Filmmakers that would shock audiences with a kind of exploitation combined with a National Geographic type thing. Those films were big in the 1920 and 30s. After that, the world became a different place really. Ann Darrow contains a bit of Fay Wray because Naomi met up with Fay Wray with us in New York right at the very beginning of the process.
Question: That must have been quite amazing?
Peter Jackson: It was amazing. The one thing that I will be eternally grateful for in making this movie, is that I got to meet her. Because I don't think I would have done it any other way, she is someone that I had been wanting to meet for years and years and years. And I got to meet her and get to know her a bit before she died. We met her about four or five times and had dinner in her apartment, got to really like her a lot. She was really nice. It was interesting because when we took Naomi to meet her we didn't talk about King Kong at all, because there was sort of no point really.
What we talked about, which Naomi was interested in having become involved in our movie, was what it was like to be an actress in the thirties. Fay was telling us there was no make-up department, the actors would normally do it all themselves. She decided she wanted to have a blonde wig to do Kong, so she went out and bought a blonde wig, she paid for it herself. And she put in on herself each day. The year that she made Kong she made twelve films; in one year. We asked her a lot of questions about the business and the industry and what it was like in those days. I know Naomi took a lot of that into her role and I recognise bits of Fay, little gestures and mannerisms.
Question: Do you think after Lord Of The Rings you were also better equipped to deal with Hollywood?
Peter Jackson: Yes, to some degree. The business side of it becomes a little easier. The real struggles were earlier on. Something like Kong is relatively straightforward, because the studio approaches you about doing it and we said, “Sure, we would love to go back to it.” And a deal is done reasonably quickly. A budget is agreed to, reasonably quickly. And you just go ahead and make the movie. The fact that we are basing ourselves down here completely is great. During King Kong I have barely been to Los Angeles.
I have been to New York to do location scouting: the Empire State Building etc. We did some auditioning in Los Angeles and New York, but that is the only time I have been there for this movie, about three days of travel. Apart from those three days, it has all been down here. It is great to be able to have access to the Hollywood infrastructure and not have to be part of that. It is very political, I know that. What you learn about Hollywood, I guess, is that what drives most executives is a fear of losing their jobs. You understand where they are coming from - nobody wants to lose their job. It is not like it is a crime to behave like that. Once, you come to realise what motivates and drives people, you can often help that process. You come to points where you want something to happen and these people are in fear of losing their jobs if X, Y, or Z happens.
You can help that by figuring out a way to do it that is not going to endanger people's jobs. You just start to manoeuvre your way around the politics. And the politics are usually based on fear, the fear of looking bad, of being a failure and ultimately of losing your job if you really stuff it up. And it is weird because, the thing that should drive the film industry is a creative excitement. It is strange. You can certainly feel how conservative things have got. Fear drives people to be more conservative, if people are worried they are going to play it safe. I am feeling that with movies there are no real rebels, there is no creative excitement and it is hard to see it. And when it happens it is a joyous thing.
Question: It must have been tough to replace Howard Shore?
Peter Jackson: It is absolutely a horrible thing. There isn't anything good about a time like that. Again, you are dealing with human beings and all sorts of devils. And this isn't just talking about composers, you could be talking about anything. It either clicks or it doesn't. And especially with music if it doesn't it can be negative for the film. On Lord Of The Rings it clicked incredibly well, and on this film it didn't. Howard was a pleasure to work with and will always be great to work with, but there just wasn't that connection. This wasn't a project that was exciting him, inspiring him to find a music for it. I could see that, and I think he could probably see it too. It became a common consent at the end of the day. These are the real things that are a bummer with being a filmmaker and a producer.
Question: Just how detailed is the world you have created?
Peter Jackson: Well, to start with, New York is incredibly detailed and very, very accurate. We wanted to create a feeling of New York in the 1930s. With all this technology we have at our disposal now and the fact that we had done Middle-earth that was highly detailed and brought that to life from the book, I wanted to make New York no less than what we had done on Lord Of The Rings.
What I wanted to do with New York, was to end up with a movie where it felt like had been able to walk in New York in the 1930s and film on location with free abandon. Absolutely no restrictions. A lot of period movies feel restricted, they feel that if they have shot on location there is only one angle that they can do, they have closed off one street and covered over the fire hydrants and parking meters, they don't have much choice. Or, if they film on a backlot, you are equally restricted with how big the shots can be and what you can see. I really wanted to free it up and make audiences feel that there was complete freedom in a 1930s New York to shoot anything that we wanted to.
We did that by building a street level set, the buildings were only 20 foot tall which enabled us to do anything that we wanted to do on a street. I also didn't want to block the streets off. One of the most memorable things about New York, being there, are these avenues that just go and on and on, for blocks and blocks and blocks, and you can see for miles and miles. I wanted that, too. We just built our bits of street, because you still need something for your actors to walk on and your cars to drive on, to jump into cars, and go into buildings.
So we built everything we needed to. The minimum amount we needed to in a way. And then we built New York in a computer. That was an interesting experience. We couldn't really get any reference of exactly what New York in the thirties. We could get a lot more reference for what it was like today. This was way back at the beginning, and again was one of the first things we did while we still doing Return Of The King. We basically built New York in a computer as it is today, and we got all the aerial information, and the maps, and the surveys.
We started to then study old period movies and photographs, because we couldn't really get any old blueprints of New York. We hunted for months and months and months in archives to get as many photos as we could. And we got some good aerial photos from the thirties and we started to study the streets and buildings in modern day New York and we began to take buildings away and replace them with buildings from the thirties. It was a process of converting a fairly accurate present day New York into an accurate thirties New York. We built a New York that gives me total freedom to fly around. One of the key things was obviously the aerial sequence at the end.
The aerial sequences are so realistic you cannot tell that it is not a real New York, it is just extraordinary what we've managed to do there.. It was a chance to really put audiences in the seats of the planes and feel part of the action. Or you are in a helicopter chasing the planes and they are diving down to make an attack on Kong. I wanted to have a similar freedom at street-level to. So we shot our street sequences using our pieces of set, which we built to be multifaceted, to do different bits of New York.
We built a set that contained bits of Time Square, bits of Herald Square, obviously there is a bit of Empire State Building in there, there are brownstone buildings. We had various theatres that we use at different times in the story. There is a restaurant where we have a scene. Then we were able to extend the buildings. We shot Time Square as Time Square and then the art department would come in and turn it into Herald Square and we would just put different CG extensions on and so you would see that set in a different part of the city. It was fun to recreate Time Square in 1933.
We studied all the old pictures. It was as gaudy as it is now! They had a fantastic Pepsidin Toothpaste sign that we were able to recreate. We were very particular, I wanted to make sure all the signage was exactly as it was. We found a few photos of Time Square from 1933, so we had to get permission to use all the different brands: Chevrolet, Pepsidin, Coca-Cola.
Question: How about with Skull island?
Peter Jackson: Skull Island was interesting because it was the bit of the film that worried me the most - having to deal with the native parts of the story. How you stop it becoming kind of clichéd or racist, how you deal with that kind of aspect of it. I thought at the end of the day the thing we had to do was to make this race of people on Skull Island as realistic as possible, not to send them up in any way, not to make them clichéd, to make them as authentic as possible.
So we studied lots of cultures, sort of Melanesian/Micronesian cultures. Up until recent times there were people who lived in a way they had for centuries. We were able to do a lot of research and we were able to create a race of fictitious race of people to be the race living on Skull Island. It wasn't based on one particular group of people but we used motifs and we used elements of cultures that we had seen in our research. In the architecture of the island we create the feeling that before the island had been settled by this native tribe who worshipped Kong, there was this ancient civilisation, hundreds of years earlier.
That was fun to create that and Alan Lee was just finishing up Lord Of The Rings with us, so we got him to do some work on the culture that was embedded in the island - which is much more of an Aztec, kind of Mayan type of thing. And we did that and I hope it kind of feels believable. I didn't want to explain it in the movie, so there is nothing in the film about where or why they were or anything. They didn't do that in the original film, and even though we have a much greater running time, I didn't feel we needed to do that in our movie. I like the fact it is not explained.
Question: Just to return to the racial elements, one of the readings of the first film is a racial subtext, especially relating to the time it was made, have you completely dropped that idea?
Peter Jackson: Anybody can read anything into a film, and people often do. It is not obviously something that we wanted to get into with the film. We wanted this to be much more entertainment based. People often link Kong with racial stuff because his fur is black. Nothing more than that. I couldn't think too much about that, because a lot of that stuff is sort of silly - he's a gorilla and gorillas have black fur. In our movie Kong is absolutely a Silverback gorilla. We were very careful to make our tribe on the island feel as authentic as they could. I didn't want to move into cliché, to feel like you are exploiting people.
My feeling is the race of people, the culture that have been clinging to this island has probably gone quite mad, they would have been driven crazy by their existence. And that is one of the reasons they have made Kong this deity. It would drive anybody mad clinging to this rocky outcrop on the edge of the island. As I say, we also haven't tried to explain any of this. The racial thing is a potential hot potato, and it is something we have tried to not emphasise at all. We've done what we needed to do for the plot of King Kong. It is one of those sticky things, you can't really do King Kong without having the race of people on the island who worship him and who want to sacrifice Ann. If you drop that, you may as well not bother doing Kong. But, obviously, people will make up their own minds.
Question: Did your new cast come looking for their own life-changing experience akin to the actors of Lord Of The Rings?
Peter Jackson: (laughing) Well, it was kind of funny. They all came here knowing the reputation, having read the same interviews from the guys from The Lord Of The Rings. They all got on fine. I mean, The Lord Of The Rings thing was so intense because it was so long. The actors were here for eighteen months, and then came back for pick-ups. This time it was a little bit more controlled. Partly, it might be to do with the way we make movies.
It is not just that we make movies in New Zealand and hanging out here for months is that exciting. I am sure people often get homesick and want to go home. Adrien, Naomi and Jack, did say it was a great experience making a film here. I think it is partly the culture and partly the way the set is run - that we are very inclusive. Adrien said to us at one stage, because we have meetings with him to talk about the script and talk about the character and that would go on through the shoot, he had never done this before. That no one had ever invited him into the process as closely as we had.
That sort of surprised me in a way, because we don't know any other way. It made me feel, they may have worked in a slightly more autocratic way where the actors are just told to turn up and do their jobs and go home again. We feel the actors are a really important part of the process. I kind of rely on them in many respects to look after their character. If you are having a meeting about the script, it is really great once the actor gets to know their character well, because they might say, “Well, I don't think I'd be doing this,” or “If I didn't do this, this is how I would behave.” Which is great because you have suddenly got the person who represents the character being part of the creative process. And we certainly got actors who were capable of doing that.
Question: Do you still have any props left over from when you first attempted to make of King Kong at the age of 12?
Peter Jackson; Yes, I do, I've actually got them in the cutting room. I've had them in the cutting room for the last few months. I built the top of the Empire State Building out of cardboard boxes and I have that. That has been sitting beside me in the cutting room as a kind of good luck totem. I built it when I was about twelve. I made a model of Kong out of wire, I didn't know how to do stop-motion armatures back in those days. I had no ability to do those, so I would just use wire and eventually after you'd moved it a lot of times the wire would snap. I have this wire frame model of Kong which I put foam rubber onto and my mother gave me a fox-fur stole which she didn't use anymore.
And I was able to take the fur from the fox-fur stole and glued it bit by bit onto the model. So, I do have him still, he's holding up pretty well, he's quite fragile, being 30 odd years old now. He's falling apart a little bit. One thing that I might have - because I've got some of my old stuff in storage from my childhood - is my mother gave me an old bed-sheet with I spread out and painted the backdrop of New York city as cyclorama. I got a photo of the film and I painted The Chrysler Building and the river and the bridges to use as a backdrop. I hope I have got that, I haven't seen it for years. I haven't looked through my old stuff for a while. But I do have the Kong and The Empire State Building here. One thing I did shoot, but I don't have any more is a Plasticine Brontosaurus for the jungle scenes, and I painted a backdrop of Skull Island with a volcanic peak. I made some trees out of paper that I painted green, I shot the Plasticine Brontosaurus chewing some leaves.
Question: If there was a question you could ask the directors of the 1933 King Kong, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, now what would it be?
Peter Jackson: I would want to ask them if they would want to see my film, and I would want to ask them what they thought of it. That is the thing you can't help but be intrigued about. It was the same with Tolkien, you can't help but wonder what they would think about it. And Willis O'Brien, I wonder what he would think of computer generated imagery. I'd want to ask Cooper what happened to the spider scene. There are photos of the spider pit, there are about three pics. They did some still frame tests. Apparently, they shot it but obviously no one has ever seen it. There are some frames of the scene that exist. And we've got some behind the scenes photos which are really cool, you see the bottom of the pit, you seem some of the models.
Question: Do you remember first seeing the 1976 version?
Peter Jackson: I do, I mean I was a big Kong fan and I was reading Famous Monsters Of Film Magazine, and Starlog. In the middle of being a huge of fan of all that stuff , I was following it for a year or two. Universe and Paramount were fighting who was going to do Kong, and for a while it looked as if they'd both do King Kong. The Universal one was sounded more interesting because they were going to have stop-motion dinosaurs that Jim Danforth was going to animate. It was going to be in Sensoround, that old 70s thing that they did.
And they were going to set their movie in the 1930s. And Dino was racing ahead with his, and I know at the time I was hoping that the Universal one would win or we'd get both of them. But Universal pulled out of the race when they couldn't get out first. And so we were left with Dino's. I still got really excited about it, and I kind of bought into the hype. What I do remember from the Dino version was the incredible marketing campaign. I was 14 years old, and in the months leading up to the release of the movie it was everywhere, Kong was everywhere. And they were obviously feeding the whole fictitious idea that it wasn't a guy in a monkey suit, it was this big, mechanical Kong that they had built. I knew it was Rick Baker in a Kong suit, because I had been following the making of it in magazine articles.
What they were doing were trying to entice people to the cinema to see this incredible forty foot high robot, who was going to be agile and walk around and do all the movement. They were really trying to delude people that this robot had done most of the movie. And I got myself so excited about seeing it, I convinced myself that on opening day there would be crowds and crowds of people going to see it. I must have taken a day off school, or maybe it was the holidays, I can't remember, but I certainly wasn't at school. It would have opened, in New Zealand, on a Friday.
t was at the King's Theatre, Courtney Place in Wellington and the first performance was a matinee at eleven o'clock in the morning that I rushed to go see. I remember thinking it was going to be crowded because there was so much hype. And I got onto an early train to Wellington because we lived 20 miles away. So I jumped on a train at seven in the morning, thinking I was going to join the queue, be first in line to get a good seat. I got there and there was nobody at the cinema, it was locked and empty, and it was eight o'clock in the morning. So, I remember thinking, “What do I do?” So I hung around, went to the library, and then I went back again to check on the queue and there wasn't any queue, so I went back to the library. At five to eleven, I just strolled in and bought a ticket. There were about ten people in the audience! I saw the movie two or three times. I was disappointed by it, but I didn't dislike it.
As a fourteen year-old I was happy to see King Kong. I really liked what Rick Baker did. I wished it was stop-motion animation, that was my dream back then - to do a stop-motion King Kong and have Harryhausen do it, or Jim Danforth, that would be the ultimate. I was disappointed there were no dinosaurs, and I really didn't like the modern day setting. I hate the helicopters at the end, I hated the fact it was all done at night, when he's fighting off the helicopters on the World Trade Centre at the end. It was all night-time because it was too hard for them to do it in the day. So they cheated. There were things about it that I didn't like and didn't respect. And seeing the movie again, a year or two ago, Jeff Bridges is still really good in the film. He is the best thing to come out of the movie. Everything else about it isn't that great. Rick Baker's work is good and the music is good, but that's all that holds up.
Question: This may sound daft, but can you describe to me Peter Jackson?
Peter Jackson: Me? Well, I think, I'm relatively dull. I really do. People elevate you to something you just know you are not. A lot of filmmakers feel this way, because I have spoken to them too. I try to live as normal a life as I possibly can, and I try to be as normal as I can. In some ways it is hard to do that, because I do live a kind of extraordinary existence with the publicity and the attention and what happened to The Lord Of The Rings movies changed things obviously.
Before Lord Of The Rings, it was much more normal with the attention. What I have tried to do, rightly or wrongly, I try to preserve as much normality as I can. As a person, I don't think I'm hugely interesting in the sense that I have particular hobbies that I like. I don't like sports, I'm a terrible person to sit down and talk about sports. I don't like bars and I don't like parties. I'm reasonably shy, I like having a friend that I can trust. I like to spend time with my friends, I like spending time with my family, I like spending time on my own. I'm the least likely to person to want what happened to me have happen. I've never craved attention, I don't really like it. To some degree I have tried to rebel against it a little bit. My biggest fantasy is to suddenly do a Kubrick and do no more interviews or ever promote a movie, to do what Terrence Mallick does. That is what I would secretly love to do. To go off the radar, that would be good. And it sound like
I'm complaining, which I'm not. There would be a particular kind of person who would really embrace and revel in all the attention and I'm not like that.
By Ian Nathan
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