I just want them to play the Pixies "Monkey Gone to Heaven" over the end credits...

I
Have there been any set images, etc. released from the film yet?

Kingdom Kong
Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' was one for the ages. Now he's remaking 'King Kong,' the movie that changed his young life. An exclusive visit to the set

By Jeff Giles
NewsweekDec. 6 issue - Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are indisputably different people, but it is tempting sometimes to think of them as three voices in one person's head. One voice is exuberant (Boyens), one hilariously bleak (Walsh) and one eternally steady and focused (Jackson). It's late Friday night at Jackson and Walsh's house on a bay outside Wellington, New Zealand. The couple's children are in bed, and there are no scenes to shoot tomorrow, so they're lingering over dinner with Boyens, who wrote the "Lord of the Rings" movies with them, as well as their latest epic venture, "King Kong." The wine has been poured—more than once. The conversation has become giddy. "What was the question you asked about the possibility of failure?" Jackson says, attempting to steer the talk toward solid ground. Walsh laughs: "It's more than the possibility. It's the inevitability!" Now Jackson laughs. He tries again: "To live the rest of your life trying to top 'Lord of the Rings' would be a foolish and unsatisfying thing to do. So you set your sights on making a thoroughly entertaining movie so that people are not disappointed. It is highly unlikely 'King Kong' will ever make more money than 'Lord of the Rings'." Boyens can't stand all this levelheadedness another second. She leans forward. "Hello?" she says. "For the record, 'Kong' is going to kick 'Lord of the Rings' ' a--! It will!" Jackson and Walsh look at her fondly. Then, virtually in unison, they say, "That's the wine talking."


All told, the "Rings" trilogy won 17 Oscars, grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide and made Jackson a superstar director, even as he apologized for looking like a hobbit. (He's since lost 25 pounds, shed his glasses and, at Walsh's urging, begun wearing a somewhat broader palette of colors.) Jackson has wanted to remake "King Kong" since he was 13—the 1933 original, with the luminous Fay Wray, is so close to his heart that it couldn't be removed without life-threatening surgery. In 2003 Universal Pictures' Stacey Snider offered him, Walsh and Boyens an extraordinary $20 million advance to write, direct and produce.

Earlier this fall, Jackson invited NEWSWEEK to be the first to visit the set of "King Kong," which is due in theaters next December. His remake takes place in the '30s and is being shot in New Zealand—Weta Digital is building old New York on computer with a fanatical accuracy, using original blueprints and historical records. The movie stars Jack Black (as the obsessive movie director Carl Denham), Naomi Watts (as leading lady Ann Darrow) and Adrien Brody (as Jack Driscoll, in Jackson's version a playwright in the Arthur Miller mode, who's been cajoled into writing Denham's screenplay). Andy Serkis, whose acting was the basis for the digital Gollum, will "play" Kong, whose prehistoric island is breached by Denham as he hunts for one of the planet's dwindling mysteries. Serkis hasn't begun working with Watts yet. Judging from the menacing grunts and body language he summoned up for a reporter with a moment's notice, he is going to scare the crap out of her.

Jackson hopes to bring the Kong myth to a generation that's allergic to black-and-white movies, confuses "King Kong" with "Godzilla" and never saw the original, just the campy '70s remake. "I'm 26, and the only thing I knew about Kong was that he got on the Empire State Building and was shot down by planes," says Colin Hanks, who plays Denham's long-suffering assistant, a new character. "I watched some of the Jessica Lange version. It's painfully obvious that it's a guy in a monkey suit. I mean, he's literally walking around, looking in windows and going, 'Where's Jessica Lange?' "

One morning on the set, Black stands behind an antique hand-cranked Bell & Howell movie camera that's been perched on a nearly full-scale steamer ship on the lot. It's a clear, windy day. Crew members are on an adjacent hill watching the airport so that takeoffs and landings don't ruin the takes: planes fly so low over the lot that you can see the kangaroos painted on their tails. In this scene Black's character, Denham, is filming his own stars, capturing some edgy flirtation between Ann Darrow and her smooth costar Bruce Baxter. Watts and Kyle Chandler, who plays Baxter, nail the '30s-style inflections in dialogue taken straight from the original. He tells her women are trouble. She stiffens: "Well, is that a nice thing to say!" He retreats: "Aw, you're all right. But women—they just can't help being a bother. Made that way, I guess."

Black, playing director to the hilt, eventually calls cut and ad-libs some effusions. "Wonderful," he says. "Does somebody have a hankie, because you are steaming up the screen with true-to-life emotions! If we could just do one more for luck"—this is a Jacksonism, and there are suppressed smiles all around—"and let's bring it down a little in the eyes." Apparently, that's another Jacksonism. The director comes out from inside the ship, headphones around his neck, laughing and telling Black, "At least you're learning!" Later, Black explains: "My main job on this movie is not hamming it up too much. My natural tendency is to clown, so, yeah, he has told me on a few occasions, 'You need to relax the eyes'." "King Kong" has just begun filming, and it's touching to see the cast and crew make their first overtures at friendship. Told the filmmakers clearly love him, Black replies, "They love me? How do you know that?" He purses his lips and thinks. "Well, they may love me, but I totally love them twice as much."


The original "King Kong" is many times greater than the sum of its parts, and whether or not Jackson's remake ever achieves anything like its permanence, it can certainly improve on some things—the animation of Kong, for starters. (The early computer rendering of the gorilla on page 82 will give you a sense of the realism and ferocity Jackson's after.) It can redress the dated, if not racist, portrayal of the islanders who watch Kong get dragged off in chains. As for the performances in the original, Brody puts it best: "Fay Wray was fantastic, but [otherwise] the acting is pretty atrocious in parts of it." Jackson, Walsh, Boyens and Watts met Wray in New York after the Oscars. The director videotaped her briefly, and everyone remembers how Wray, 96, instantly transformed into a movie star, tilting her head and looking beautiful. "I thought, 'My God, I'm actually filming Fay Wray'," says Jackson. Wray died five months later. "Pete was devastated," says Boyens. "He was in love with her." She smiles. "While he was filming Fay, I said to Fran, 'Uh-oh, get the camera off him—he's gone geek'."


After dinner at Jackson and Walsh's house, everyone wanders up to the director's den, which, with its Civil War soldiers, its "Lord of the Rings" figures, its movie books and its big flat-screen TV, looks like the room of an independently wealthy 12-year-old. Jackson shows off some collectibles from the original "Kong." He has a Kong, made of lead and fake fur and smaller than the palm of your hand, that was used for the shot where the gorilla falls from the Empire State, banging ignominiously against the building on his way down. Also a brontosaurus, three feet long, its skin worn away to reveal a metal frame wrapped with rubber, cotton and thread. "This is the one that eats the sailor in the tree," he says. He picks up a model of the top of the Empire State Building, a bit roughly constructed out of cardboard and painted silver: "That's what I made when I was 13."

Everyone slumps down onto couches, and after prompting from Boyens, Jackson does something unexpected. He plays an "animatic"—an animated version of a scene made for planning purposes—of the last nine minutes of his movie. In other words: Kong's final stand atop the Empire State, and his fall. The animation is no-frills. The score is a patchwork. And yet the sequence, far different from the original in its choreography and emotional depth, is stunning. Even the sound of biplanes sputtering toward the gorilla is heartbreaking, because you know that Kong is not a villain—and you know what's coming. After the sequence ends, nobody talks. Then Walsh, ordinarily that funny, bleak voice in the head, speaks up. "People always ask Pete, 'Why do you want to remake 'King Kong'?" she says. "That's why."

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.