John Mosby attends a press conference for King Kong
Look up to the skies… wait, what’s that hairy beast at the very top of one of the world’s tallest buildings??? If you think it’s King Kong… well, you wouldn’t quite be correct, because on one day last year the figure in question was actually its director Peter Jackson. Though the Empire State Building is a regular tourist attraction, it rarely allows anyone above the normal viewing platform made famous by such films as Sleepless in Seattle. The Rings director was a welcome and understandable exception to the rule…
“We did that because the end of the film is obviously taking place in a studio on a small piece of Empire State Building, on blue screen. Naomi and Fran (Walsh, Peter’s wife and partner) and I went to New York and went up the real Empire State Building. We thought we had to do it, to see what it felt like. Naomi’s fingernail marks are still on the side of the building today,” Peter smiles. “It’s not where the tourists go, with the observation decks, it’s like in the movie where Naomi runs out of the doorway and she’s on that little circular balcony bit, that’s where we got to go. There is no safety rail, there’s a drainage grille off the floor, it’s falling over height, easy. Fall backwards and it’s all over.”
“It’s about four foot high….” Naomi adds. Clearly remembering the view… and the potential danger. “And it was a windy day and the ledge only comes up to your waist. I didn’t think I was afraid of heights but I’d never been up such a great height as that.
“I asked the Empire State people if I could go up to the very top, as a King Kong fan, so they unlocked these doors. There’s a step ladder up to the flat bit on the top of the dome which is about six foot in diameter, and you go up through this trapdoor. I got to stand on the very top of the Empire State Building - which was a real big thrill for a King Kong fan,” Jackson beams.
Jackson’s film, arguably his magnum ape-us as it were, has largely been well received by critics - though many agree it could have been trimmed slightly for length around the midriff. But for Peter it was a clear labour of love, recreating the magic he’s first witnessed as a child and adding the imagery only available in this new century of film-making.
“As a filmmaker, you’re making films because you want people to enjoy them. There’s no other reason. I’m not a filmmaker with a message to tell, or something I want to impart upon the world. I just simply want to entertain people and I’m always pleased when a film I’ve made gets a reception and people enjoy it and seem to like it.”
“This particular film, as you say, is sort of a lifetime ambition of mine because I was inspired by the original King Kong when I saw it when I was nine years old on TV. Then three years later, when I thought I’d developed the necessary skills, I borrowed my parents’ super 8 movie camera, made a little model of Kong out of wire and rubber and my mum’s fur coat supplied the hair, and I started to do a remake of Kong when I was 12. I didn’t get very far. It was a little bit ambitious. I actually switched from that to doing a remake of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and went through the years becoming a Ray Harryhausen fan, stop-motion animation . . .it was really monster-making. I loved creatures and monsters and eventually found out what directing was, but always harboured this desire to one day - if I was ever lucky enough - to remake King Kong.”
Jackson and his team needed to walk a thin line. They wanted Kong to be sympathetic, but not so humanised that he was a caricature of an actual gorilla. He had to be both savage and sympathetic.
“It was an interesting combination, because we set about wanting to make him a gorilla as opposed to a monster,” Peter explains. ” Godzilla is a monster, Kong is not. Kong is a gorilla and the gorilla’s characteristics and their behaviour is actually very interesting and it leads to a lot of ideas that you can incorporate in the scenes. But obviously we are also filmmakers and we have to achieve certain results, and so there’s no doubt that there are little bits of cheating that you do here and there to make a moment work in a scene because the scene requites that moment to work. If it’s not something that a gorilla would naturally do we certainly tried to make it look as close as possible to something you could believe in.”
Kong was a creation of both CGI and Andy Serkis once again (literally) getting under the skin of a character that would only be fully formed later in production.
“When you see the movie, every single close-up of Naomi when she’s looking at Kong - of which obviously there are many - she’s looking at Andy’s face. He was up a cherry picker or on a ladder, somewhere where he needs to be so Naomi always has Andy to look at. And the other side of green screen is creating environments, so instead of being in a rainforest somewhere in the miserable cold, with the sun going down behind a hill and us not having enough light, we decided to control our situation. So our jungles were built in a studio, which meant they were surrounded by green screens. But we had art work and sketches that we were able to look at to see what the invisible environment was going to offer the movie. So the green screen involves the environment, and it also involves the characters. We sort of had both of those covered in different ways.
“I still didn’t wrap my head around it completely, until I got to the set, but I was relieved that I wasn’t going to be looking at a tennis ball on a stick moving round the stage!” Watts smiles. ” Obviously Peter, having done it for seven years, I knew it would all be very worked out and that was true. The moment I got to set, I could see the tools they had created to facilitate the imagination. But you didn’t give me any dinosaurs to look at…”
“No, but we did you give you that big polystyrene head to jump on….” he laughs.
Jackson also changed the gorilla-damsel dynamic, making his Anne Darrow less passive and more emotional.
“It was not so much deliberate going in, but the relationships between Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray) in the original movie and Jessica Lange in the second film and what Naomi does now - they’re actually three different relationships. It’s the same story, but three different types of things going on. Certainly with Fay and her character it was a case of an unwilling kidnap victim. She never really felt comfortable being with Kong, was always terrified of him and always screaming. There was never really a sense, in the original movie, that she really connected or understood Kong. The Jessica Lange one was kind of a weird 70s sexual innuendo. They camped up the sexuality of it more than anything, which we didn’t want to do. So we created our one with a foot in neither camp, really.”
“To me, the most interesting thing about a story like King Kong when you’re thinking about it at the beginning, writing it before anything has really happened, to me the most interesting doorway to go through is the reality door. It’s to say ‘okay, if you were on this island and you got kidnapped by this gorilla who is intent on killing you, how would you actually respond?’. There’s not a lot you can do. You’re in his hand, you can’t get out, your options are very few. How would you feel, and what would you do. If a little window of opportunity came up where you may be able to survive - it’s not even surviving, it’s staying his hand. If you can keep him curious, if you can engage him on some level, that’s you getting squashed then you’ve got a little, minute opportunity of staying alive that you can work on and develop that…”
Peter has promised himself some time off. Rings and Kong have taken over a decade of his life and even the slimmed-down version of Jackson (looking more like Spielberg these days than his old hobbity demeanour) needs the rest. His next cinematic project… possibly a little film. The sense of relief from his team is obvious.
STAFF - John Mosby
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After coming runner-up in the Jackanory Writing Competition, John Mosby eventually became a freelance entertainment journalist and has spent the last fifteen years or more discovering his and others’ delusions of adequacy. He’s written three books including two official tie-ins: X-Men: The Essential Guide and The Making of Barb Wire and has eMCeed conventions in Los Angeles and Sydney. In March 2006, will help host a major Highlander event at the Royal Armouries in Leeds (www.highlanderworldwide.com). He edits Impact magazine - available in most Borders, W H Smith, Barnes & Noble etc. and Verbatim (e-mail him at a.j.mosby@btinternet.com for ordering details)