by Brian Sibley
I believe that our recreation of New York will really showcase what CG can now do, because we have used the computer to extend the buildings and streets on our set upwards and outwards to give an impression both of incredible height and depth, of looking up at towering skyscrapers and of looking down twenty blocks with 500 CG vintage cars and 2,000 CG people.
The attention to detailing in the completed sets would be on a par with those created for Rings. The look evokes one familiar to anyone who has ever seen the work of American photographers in the early years of the twentieth century: brownstone houses with stoops; elevated railways and steaming manhole covers; delis and diners; street vendors and newsstands; the breadlines and the fading glamour of the burlesque shows.
Despite the irony of filming New York in New Zealand, I think we’ve created a spectacular, epic view of how the city looked in the Thirties that is real and believable. I love the mixture of the believable – and I use that word a lot – with the fantastical. The truth is, our New York is just as ‘fantastic’ as Skull Island, or any of the other imaginary places. However, building the fantasy on a foundation of the believable is really the trick.
The quest for what might be termed ‘Jackson’s fantastic-realism’ is reflected not just in the authenticity with which 1930s New York has been visualised, but also in the way in which the characterisations have been drawn.
Mary Parent, Co-president of Production at Universal Pictures, comments, ‘Peter, Fran and Philippa have done wonders in retaining a period-specific style to the dialogue and characters without making them seem stagey or stylised. Just as the full menagerie of characters in the Rings series existed believably in another time but felt familiar and immediate, the scripting of King Kong is able to take place in the Thirties without seeming distant or arcane.’
Peter and his colleagues began by determining that they were going to apply their credo of realism to the film’s eponymous creature.
Kong is not a movie-monster; he is a gorilla who happens to be twenty-five feet tall. We’ve tried to invest him with very real animal behaviour: to extrapolate what a gorilla would behave like if he was King Kong; what his personality would be like if he was the only one of his kind surviving on an island inhabited by dinosaurs.
We see him as a creature that has not empathised with any other living being in his life; he has to fight for survival in one of the most extreme, dangerous environments that exists and, as a result, he has become a brute.
So as soon as you take a character like that and you try to have him connect with a human being, or feel emotion for the first time, it makes for a really interesting story.
A great deal of research was carried out during the pre-production period and Andy Serkis, who was to be intimately involved in the creation of Kong’s screen persona, studied gorillas at the London Zoo and in the wild in Rwanda, where the Mountain Gorilla was first discovered in 1902.
‘When the original film was made,’ says Andy, ‘very little research had been done into gorilla behaviour, so there was a real sense in which they were seen as a feared monster. What we are trying to bring to the film Kong is a characterisation that includes as much as possible of what has been discovered in the past 100 years – especially through the work in the 1960s by the late Dian Fossey, whose life story was told in the film Gorillas in the Mist. We have not tried to make Kong cuter and cuddly, he is a savage beast, but he is not a monster. What is extraordinary about these creatures is that, emotionally, they are 97 per cent identical to humans; obviously they transmit certain emotions differently, but we use that fact in the story to create a believable relationship between Kong and the heroine, Ann Darrow.’
We’ve taken the character of Ann Darrow made famous in the first film by Fay Wray and have tried to re-think the role.
It’s curious because people often talk about how the original Kong is known as a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ story and, in a funny way, we always think about it as being a kind of a love story.
But when you really study and analyse it, there is hardly any connection between the Fay Wray character and Kong: she’s been taken against her will, she is permanently terrified of Kong – not just in the jungle sequences but also in the scenes set in New York – and she never really comes to understand him. We ultimately sympathise with Kong in spite of the way in which Ann reacts to him.
We thought it would be an interesting approach to the story if we tried to build a relationship between them. We asked ourselves, ‘How would she behave if she was kidnapped by this huge ape? What tricks would she use in order to survive? How can we find a way for them to connect?’ It creates a puzzle, which we as the film-makers need to solve. That’s what makes it such a fun job.
You can go many different ways with a story like King Kong; there is no particular right or wrong way. You just have to choose which door you want to come in at, I guess, and we thought it would be interesting to explore what would happen if Ann and Kong succeeded in connecting in some way, so that by the time the Skull Island sequences came to a close, you were really feeling that the two of them had a bond that you could then carry through to New York and basically play out the climax with that connection very much intact.
Once it had been announced that the Jackson version of King Kong was to be made, public interest in the project became as keen as it had when the news first broke that Peter Jackson was to make The Lord of the Rings.
Of particular interest – especially to journalists in the entertainment media – were details of Peter’s deal for Kong that Variety reported in August 2003 under the headline ‘Rings Trio Get Big Payday for King Kong!’ According to the business journal, Forbes, ‘Jackson is receiving a beastly upfront fee of $20million to direct and produce his next film and write the screenplay for it.’ The fee was in fact to be shared with Fran and Philippa but the overriding fascination was in the concept of a writer/director being paid a fee that would scarcely provoke comment were the recipient an A-list movie star.
‘We made a deal,’ says Peter Nelson, ‘that was appropriate for Peter and Fran’s level of skill and accomplishment and we made it at market level although it did happen to be the biggest deal of that ilk. There is so much focus these days on the business of entertainment, such as theatrical box office receipts and pay scale for actors and, even though little of the information that got out was fully correct, the deal became a lightning rod of a story that created something new in that it was about the compensation of a director.’
What was clear from the publicity stories that began to circulate around Kong was that Peter had succeeded in carrying many of the Rings audience with him beyond the confines of Middle-earth.
TheOneRing.net fan site launched a companion site, KongisKing.net, which followed TORn’s formula of collecting and disseminating news, gossip and speculation, combined with articles on aspects of Kong’s extensive pedigree. Stories ranged from the news that Howard Shore would be composing the score for Kong through to a delightful report that Fay Wray (Kong’s original leading lady) had given the new project ‘the thumbs up’, saying: ‘I think it is excellent and honourable that Peter Jackson wants to be true to the original. I am proud that he wants to keep King Kong alive.’
Recalling lessons learned in the early days of Ring’s shooting, Peter made the canny decision to work with KongisKing to address fans, to keep them informed about the film through an on-going series of video ‘Production Diaries’. These offered tantalising glimpses into different facets of the film-making, which boldly inverted the usual
Naomi with Fay Wray a couple of days after The Return of the King Oscars in 2004. A wonderful night – I just couldn’t believe I was meeting the lady I’d watched in that old black and white 1933 movie – seventy-one years after she finished working on it. Time seemed to fold in on itself that night. When I tried to explain to her how the experience of watching King Kong had changed my life, I burst into tears. Fay was quite alarmed!
film studio attitude of kee
ping sensitive film projects under wraps and helped cultivate interest in Kong.
This idea of the video diary was born of our desire to make this a very different experience to The Lord of the Rings. We endured years of keeping all details ‘secret’ until the films were released. I thought it would be fun to go the opposite way, and have a ‘making of’ documentary happening in real time, as we were making the movie. There’s really no other agenda. The people who log in to the KongisKing site would probably come to the film anyway, so it’s not a particularly clever marketing move. Fun is the prime motivator.
The first ‘Production Diary’ was filed on Day 1 of the shoot, 7 September 2004 and showed Peter standing beside the SS Venture, the vessel used to take Carl Denham and his film crew to Skull Island. The replica ship had been built on the parking lot at Peter’s Wellington studios, an area previously covered in grass for filming blue-screen shots of charging Rohan warriors on the Pelennor Field! There was also, however, a real ship that became the source of an early fan site story.
We bought a rusty Fifties ship that we converted into a period tramp steamer by adding, amongst other things, a funnel and a wheelhouse. This ship was sitting alongside the Miramar wharf looking like an old tub. Then I read all about it on TORn, how we’d painted the name on the ship – something which I’d meant to tell them not to do until the very end. So, within an hour of reading the story on TORn, I drove over to where the ship was moored and asked them to paint the name out again!
The internet has shrunk the world and fan sites can now have a powerful impact on a film. Sometimes, where studios know they have produced a really bad film, they turn out a trailer that makes the movie look amazing, in order to con the moviegoer out of $10. Sometimes, the ‘early word’ about films can actually prevent directors from getting their films to a point they are happy with.
The impact of the internet is the reason why we never did a single test screening of any of The Lord of the Rings films and I am eternally grateful, because it would have been a disaster. And would probably have resulted in the movies being seriously dumbed down. Test screenings for a director are not good experiences: having to screen your film to a bunch of strangers whose opinion is more important than your own! That’s why part of the deal with Universal over Kong is that we control whether or not there is a test screening.
The internet was a-buzz with guesses about who was to feature on the Kong cast-list, including Ian McKellen – in an unspecified role – probably because, after playing Gandalf, he had been busily mentioning the possibility of being in the next Jackson movie – perhaps in the hope of persuading the director! As for a successor to Fay Wray, the ‘hot tip’ on the rumour schedules had for some time been former Heavenly Creatures star, Kate Winslet.
In reviewing the role of Ann Darrow, the writers had developed
Billy and Katie’s cameo at the beginning of King Kong.
the character to give her – albeit within the 1930s setting – a contemporary sensibility. Ann was now a singer and dancer playing in vaudeville but with dreams of being a legitimate actress. Down on her luck, she is suckered into Denham’s crazy movie project, meets playwright Jack Driscoll, whose work she admires, and eventually uses some of her skills as an actress to play for Kong’s sympathy and save her life…
Despite the speculation about Kate Winslet, the role went to Naomi Watts, who had made an impressive impact with her performances in Mulholland Drive, The Ring and Le Divorce.
We were big fans of Naomi, and we really wanted to work with her. It was a case of us being interested in Naomi Watts before we were in a position to make Kong; she was someone we’d already had our sights on, and as a result she was the first and only person that we ever offered the role of Ann Darrow to.
We auditioned a lot for the secondary roles in Kong, but for the principal three roles we just chose the actors, met with them and cast them.
In the 1933 film, the role of Carl Denham was played by Robert Armstrong as an ambitious movie-making adventurer, not unlike Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the men who made King Kong. Armstrong’s Denham is determined and ambitious, but quite different to the way in which he would be portrayed in the new version of the story. Peter presents Denham as an extrovert showman, a maverick who is constantly dodging creditors and ducking and diving in order to stay just one step ahead of the authorities, a chancer and risk-taker, an amiable rogue with dubious moral standards.
In 1996, the actor being considered for the role was Robert de Niro and when the film began its second life-cycle, there was considerable speculation on the internet about who would be offered the part – including several of the usual suspects, among them the one-time-possible Aragorn, Russell Crowe…
When you’re writing a movie you stop and think, ‘What’s the obvious thing to do here?’ The discipline we’ve adopted is to stop and think of the least obvious thing – ask, ‘What wouldn’t you expect to be happening here?’ We did this with casting, and thought about unlikely choices. When we write, we always like to base a character on someone we know, or at least know of – either an actor, or a public figure. It helps to get us on the same page, and means the character has qualities based on a real person. We decided to move away from a Robert Armstrong approach to the role and thought, ‘Why not go younger? We started to redefine the role a bit, and thought about Orson Welles as having a lot of Denham qualities. Welles was a highly ambitious, driven film-maker in the 1930s. He was obsessive, but also had a humorous wit. We didn’t want to cast someone to play Orson Welles, but he was to be a good guide for Denham’s character traits during the writing process.
We thought of which actor we could cast to play this new interpretation of Carl Denham. Jack Black was our first choice. He had the intelligence, wit and energy we had written into Denham’s character.
Apart from playing a hobbit who had used the One Ring for an
Shooting the movie is the toughest part of the process – as opposed to writing, pre-production and post-production. The day is spent racing against the clock to get what you need on film. Having people like Jack Black, Colin Hanks and Jamie Bell around sure helps to keep the stress levels down.
experiment in intimate body piercing for the MTV Awards spoof on The Lord of the Rings, Jack Black was best known for starring as the down-and-out rock star, Dewey Finn, in The School of Rock.
The fact that Jack was known for one particular role didn’t bother us. If we’d looked at the films Elijah Wood had done before The Lord of the Rings, you’d realise that he was an unlikely choice for Frodo, yet people now have totally accepted him and associate him with the role. If someone is a good actor – like Elijah or Jack – they will be able to play against type. I have always rejected people thinking of me as a ‘splatter director’, and hate the idea of typecasting actors in the same way.
In the original film, Jack Driscoll was first mate on the SS Venture. Played by Bruce Cabot, Driscoll is a straight-shooting ‘man’s man’ who doesn’t have any time for women – particularly not aboard a ship, but who eventually falls for Ann Darrow and becomes her gauche but gallant romantic lead…
Again Peter, Fran and Philippa decided against going for the ‘action-hero image’ and adopted a revisionist approach, making Driscoll into an aspiring New York playwright who gets conned by Denham into helping with his movie project and is virtually hijacked aboard the ship. To complete the transformation, the role was given to the soulful-eyed Adrien Brody, who had won an Oscar for his acclaimed performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.
We met Adrien in London on the day of the BAFTA Awards in 2004. The actors cast for the roles of Driscoll, Denham and Ann were all our first and only choices – which is a luxury. It’s always a wonderful thing when you come up with an idea of casting an actor, then meet with that person and offer them the role and it’s done. We were very fortunate in that we were fans of Adrien, Jack and Naomi and had the perfect project that enabled us to bring the three of them togeth
er.
For Andy Serkis the first inkling that he might be involved in King Kong came during the pick-up filming for The Return of the King: ‘It was my birthday and Pete and Fran invited me over to see them and Fran started showing me a book of photographs of an albino
Adrien spent a couple of nights under rain towers during the storm scene. Here he’s going over script notes with Fran between shots.
gorilla…It suddenly dawned on me that they were showing me for a reason! They told me that they wanted me to be involved and I was absolutely thrilled and very excited…It was just talk at that point, but they said they were going to approach the creation of Kong in the same way as Gollum, although, obviously, many things would be quite different, since he wouldn’t be communicating with words.’
Andy was also cast as Lumpy, the ship’s cook, a character who appears in the 1932 novelisation of King Kong, but who was never featured in the original film. ‘Lumpy,’ says Andy, ‘is an ex-First World War naval cook who’s had to cook horrific stuff throughout the war years and, as a result, has completely lost his taste buds. Now he’s a cook on a merchant ship and is suddenly exposed to all these exotic spices and foods from around the world and goes a bit crazy with his experiments! He thinks what he comes up with is fantastic, but everybody really hates his food! In addition to being a chef, he’s the barber, ship’s doctor, tattooist, jack-of-all-trades and is, in a way,