Peter Jackson's KING KONG

[Pozer]

As if it doesn't look fake enough already.

[MacGuffin]

is it me or does the non-HD trailer not work for anyone?

It's cause you need GOD DAMNED Quicktime 7 to view it!!!  This is getting out of hand.. I DON'T HAVE TIGER!!!!  Why must I be left in the dust?

RK and other dust-eaters rejoice:

Non-Apple Quicktime Trailer here.

[Ravi]

Man, does the trailer look like a Cliffs Notes version of the film.  It starts at the beginning of the story, shows Kong with Naomi Watts, shows Kong fighting a dinosaur, and ends with Kong on the Empire State Building.  I know that people are already familiar with the story, but I wonder what's going to be left in the film to surprise them.

[mogwai]

i'm currently watching this incredible movie on showtime (eu version):



i just saw king kong chow down a couple crocodiles. that was very funny. king kong looks really phony with his various of serious dramatic faces.

[pete]

American cinematographer article here

[MacGuffin]

As a horror nut I first discovered Peter Jackson when Dead Alive was released on VHS tape back in the early 90’s. 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 1930’s 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.

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 don’t 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 it’s something that I think is cool. I very much tried to make a film that I’d enjoy, but I’m 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 that’s 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 it’s not something I’m an expert in. My job at the end of the day is to make the best possible film I can. That’s really where my job stops. Marketing people take over after that.

DRE: It seems like you haven’t stopped working since 1997.

Jackson: It is true. I’m exhausted. I’m absolutely tired. I haven’t really had a life. I’ve been making movies for ten years now with the Lord of the Rings movies straight into Kong. I’m 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 didn’t 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 it’s been a continuous journey.

DRE: What did you and Fay Wray discuss?

Jackson: 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?

Jackson: It’s instinct to some degree and it doesn’t 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. I’ve wanted to make this movie for a long time and I’ve had ideas and images in my head for years. To me it wasn’t 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 they’re attacked by a creature but it didn’t end up in the cut. Even though the movie is three hours long, there are quite a few scenes we filmed that didn’t 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?

Jackson: 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?

Jackson: 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 parent’s 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 didn’t 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 that’s 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?

Jackson: Howard Shore was the original choice as composer. We’re 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 we’ve admired for a long time. We’d 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?

Jackson: As a filmmaker you’re going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work. I certainly don’t 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 Kong’s personality?

Jackson: 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 don’t really give away a lot. It’s all to do with eye contact and whether or not they are looking at you. As we’ve been refining Kong, I realized I didn’t 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 didn’t want to stop him being dangerous. I didn’t 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?

Jackson: 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 wasn’t 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. He’s got so much screen time and so many close-ups so we deliberately reigned in him and didn’t want him to express much.

DRE: How was working with Naomi Watts?

Jackson: Naomi was our first and only choice for the role. We responded to her because she’s such an honest actor. She makes her roles as real as possible. If she’s shedding tears in a scene, it’s because she’s thinking of something that makes her cry. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s 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. He’s 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 Andy’s greatest contributions was always being on set with the actors during Kong’s scenes. He wasn’t even filmed. Andy was there for the other actors. Every close-up of Naomi when she’s looking at Kong, she’s 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?

Jackson: The thinking behind that scene is that didn’t 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?

Jackson: I’m 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. There’s been talk of an extended cut but we haven’t 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?

Jackson: Yeah.

DRE: Have you thought about who you are going to cast?

Jackson: No. We’re 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?

Jackson: 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 I’ve realized that for the last ten years I’ve 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 I’ve had two projects in the past ten years. It’s really an exciting time to rest up and think of new ideas.

[matt35mm]

Neato.  So he is doing Lovely Bones.  I thought I heard he wasn't, but I guess I was wrong.

[Redlum]

Mark Kermode (legend) interviews Andy Serkis at the london zoo.

http://img-nex.kongisking.net/kong/movies/120805-AndySerkisCulture.mpg

[Ghostboy]

This movie is so good it made my head explode!!!

Except for the racism.

But other than that, I'd say that this film would be more than worth every penny of the most extravanat ticket price.

[modage]

awesome.  some kid at my work saw a screening a week ago and i've been dying a little everyday since obsessing about it. 

i think he said the racism was a nod to the originals racism!

[MacGuffin]

Naomi Watts Ascends in 'King Kong'

One is a three-hour, $200 million-plus combination of digital effects, yearlong hype and the largest of monkeys. The other is a frantic $30,000 production depicting an actress desperate for cardboard-thin parts in the B-est of movies.

The films couldn't be more different and neither could Naomi Watts' career from what it was five years ago.

On Friday, Watts hits theaters worldwide with the famed ape in "King Kong." [MacGuffin's note: It's actually on Wedenesday] But her balance between blockbuster siren and indie shape-shifter is epitomized by the semi-autobiographical "Ellie Parker," released a month ago, featuring Watts in the Hollywood hell of a struggling actress.

She explains her contradictions simply: "That's me."

"I don't want to be boxed into any kind of confined space," Watts recently told The Associated Press.

Peter Jackson's remake of the original 1933 "King Kong" is ratcheting the 37-year-old actress to the top of fame's skyscraper. Since David Lynch famously picked her out of a pile of head shots for 2001's "Mulholland Dr.," Watts has filled her years with critically acclaimed performances, including "Le Divorce," "The Ring" movies and 2003's "21 Grams," for which she received an Oscar nomination.

"People keep thinking I'm this dark, serious person because the work I do is like that," she says. "Yes, the work I'm interested in does tend to be dark in nature, but it doesn't mean that that's who I am."

The blonde, blue-eyed Watts is a carefree force who, while frequently found in the pages of glamour magazines, appears more herself barefoot and a bit ruffled. Her 10 years of struggle remain more familiar than her current success, of which she says, "I'm still working it out."

She was born in England and moved to Australia at age 14. Watts and her mother (her parents separated when she was four and her father, a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, died three years later) moved around frequently, which meant having to repeatedly fit in. She would change her accent accordingly and says the transitions bred her acting ability.

If anything, her penchant for dramatic, emotional shifts in character has become her trademark. She plays essentially two roles in the dream/reality realms of "Mulholland Dr.," fluctuates from grieving widow to drugged-out avenger in "21 Grams," and literally changes persona while driving from one audition to another in "Ellie Parker."

"We do make such dramatic shifts we're capable of anything," she says. "You can't just say this is who I am and I'd never do that. It's like, I could say I'm not a murderer, but if someone touched my (hypothetical) child, I could believe wanting to kill.

"I like that behavior can be so unpredictable."

Scott Coffey, who directed Watts in "Ellie Parker," has been friends with her for years, beginning when they both lived in what he calls "non-ending, perpetual L.A. purgatory."

"I think what people really respond to is there's a deep, deep pain to her work and she's really willing to examine that," Coffey says, adding that Watts openly explores herself in each character, "as opposed to hiding behind the facades of the roles."

Before shooting "King Kong" in New Zealand, Watts and Jackson traveled to New York to visit the original damsel in distress Fay Wray. Wray, who died last year at age 96, was Ann Darrow in the first "King Kong."

Watts recounts: "At the end of the night, we dropped her off, and she said (whispering), `Ann Darrow is in good hands.'"

Of course, the good hands holding Ann Darrow belong, on screen, to Kong. The movie has always been essentially a love story, and making that connection with a computer-generated gorilla was Watts' greatest challenge.

She credits this part of her performance largely to Andy Serkis, who played the digitally created Gollum in "Lord of the Rings." He again used motion capture technology to parlay his physical performance into the gorilla's much larger computer generated image.

Serkis says that Watts "isn't someone who would want to generalize a few expressions to the camera."

"Considering that there were technical shenanigans all around us," he says, "it felt like a pretty normal on-screen relationship two actors just acting opposite each other."

"I was able to go with this absurd fantasy," says Watts. "I was able to fall in love with this creature and believe he was a ferocious, savage beast as well."

Watts, who recently finished filming "The Painted Veil" with Edward Norton in China, isn't currently attached to an upcoming production for the first time in years. She'll now get a chance to actually live in the L.A. house she bought a year ago that is, when she's not in New York visiting her boyfriend, Liev Schrieber (who co-stars in "The Painted Veil).

Older than the normal ascendant actress, she's already fielding the inevitable questions on the short life span of a leading lady. But she thinks those limitations are changing, and is looking forward to playing characters who have experienced more life: children, marriage, divorce.

One feels as though Watts is in the midst of a deep breath before her life takes some new, post-Kong direction.

"I'm off the map right now," she says of her career plans. "I need to get a different flight path, and that's all I'm thinking about."

[Just Withnail]

Few spoils.

Just saw this yesterday. Expectations were reasonably high, mostly because of GBs praise, and it's overwhealmingly positive press here in Norway. Of course it didn't live up. Basically; I wanted and expected to cry some, but couldn't.

The biggest disappointment for me was too few scenes between Kong and Ann, but I've realised over night how great/ fantastic the ones they did have, were. So the movie has already grown on me, but my other major gripe with it still stands; it's unnecessarily long. Whilst they could've expanded the Kong/ Ann scenes, they chose to focus on them going and to and fro the boat, and too many overlong set pieces. They were creative - especially the visuals of the tumbling dinosaurs (whose bodies floating in and out of and filling the screen actually reminded me of the walking-with-the-cross shot in Last Temptation were Scorsese pays homage to the painting) and the sound design of the spider pit - but all went on way too long. Breathtaking to the point of choking.

The CGI is of course as good as it gets. Kong looks overlit like the trailer in a lot of full-body shots, but some of the close-ups are perfect. He also interracts really well with the surroundings. The best part of the film as how they really made him an animal. With Kong being the star, and having him react a lot to Ann, a lot of the emotions and reactions could have been made with a "human" touch. Not so; his first posivite reactions to Ann's vaudeville antics perfectly capture, with the whole of Kong's body, the reactions of an amused and surprised animal, as opposed to a cute smile. Not that he isn't cute, though. As expected their relationship made the film for me, though I left feeling it wasn't quite enough. But thinking back on that note-for-note perfect scene mentioned above, really makes me giddy for another go.

Oh, and the Skull Island name intro was awesome, as well as all the other cool PJ idiosyncracies that shows he remembers his roots amid all the epic-ness.

[cine]

what a great film experience.

i'm glad i'm one of the people to see it first. 

[Pubrick]

forget what i said about the special effects. screw trailers. the real thing REDEEMS 2005.

packed house, biggest screen in brisbane, only thing that sucked is the music was faulty at my screening, is it sposed to sound like all the instruments are out of tune?

personal reaction that really doesn't mean anything to anybody else
i wanted to see it again as soon as the credits rolled. there can only be two real complaints about the movie, both minor when compared to the million great things. and those two things are as such: not enuff naomi watts, and getting to the island feels like it takes a while. a lot of watts shots consist of her looking wide-eyed in awe, or with that adorable dormant face she has where she exposes her buck teef a little through her slightly open mouf. she doesn't have much dialogue, in fact if it weren't for the pre-island first part we wouldn't know anything about her. so the two complaints cancel each other out, those aren't my complaints but they are the only two i would accept.. and then debunk. EDIT: exactly the two things Withnail complained about!

the special effects were astounding. to the extent that it's incredibly easy to become immersed in the reality of the entire world PJ creates. even when things look overlit, the whole picture is stylized to compensate, so it's not really a problem. the detail in kong's face alone is worth price of admission. and the dinosaur chase! my god, you people. every single scene with kong is stolen by him, and the movie is better for it. his movement, persona, and precious interaction with watts is simply unforgettable. this is the definitive kong film. which brings me to..

analysis of what peter jackson has done
the doubters had it all wrong, this movie is COMPLETELY NECESSARY. it isn't a frivolous effort that simply indulges PJ's childhood fantasies (tho there may very well be an element of the latter), it's legitimate, premium entertainment. and much moreso. this deserves the praise Lord of the Rings got, but only this time ppl can actually mean it. watching the big ape, the girl sitting next to me repeatedly stated "oh he's so cute!", and she was better looking than Ann Darrow so she would know .

i don't know yet the significance of what PJ has done. he's refined the story to reflect the essence of kong. and while typically he doesn't hammer any "heavy" ideas in his films (LotR notwithstanding), there's no denying that he has destroyed the original and all subsequent precursors with his awesome tour de force. at one point it feels like he's commenting on this very fact.

winner
kong's fall.

[grand theft sparrow]

That makes me excited to see it more than any other review or recommendation I've come across.