A Young Dreamer Meets A Classic Story
For a young New Zealand boy named Peter Jackson, the viewing of a 1930s black-and-white film one Friday night was more than just an evening’s diversion-it quite literally became a life-changing event.
The filmmaker remembers, “I first saw King Kong when I was about eight- or nine-years-old on TV in New Zealand. And it made such an impact on me, such a huge impression, that it was the moment in time when I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. I thought, `I want to make movies. I want to be able to make movies just like King Kong.’ It had that profound an effect on me.”
To have chosen King Kong as an entrée into the world of filmmaking shows just how discerning and imaginative Jackson was, even as a child. RKO’s 1933 masterpiece was a cutting-edge film by the era’s standards, utilizing a combination of groundbreaking visual effects (stop-motion animation, rear screen projection, multi-plane glass paintings, detailed tabletop miniatures) to realize the fantastic story of a giant ape captured in the wilds of a forgotten island and brought back to New York City, where he meets his tragic fate.
During its initial release, the title smashed national attendance records and earned more than $1.75 million for the financially strapped RKO (pulling it back from bankruptcy), who periodically re-released King Kong up until the 1950s. In 1991, King Kong was selected to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress’ National Film Preservation Board (which is dedicated to the film preservation efforts of American film archives and historical societies). The cultural significance of the mythic tale continues to fuel the imagination of film historians, artists and authors to this day, more than seven decades after its initial theatrical release.
That defining Friday-night viewing stayed with young Jackson, and barely three years later, he set out to live up to his career decision…and at age 12, he started work on his own version of the 1933 classic. His mother donated an old stole, which provided the gorilla’s fur; the garment was cut apart and used to cover a padded wire-frame body, and voilà-a stop-motion Kong figurine. The top of the Empire State Building was a painted cardboard model (to conserve the budding filmmaker’s efforts, he did not paint the back of the structure, since that side was never going to appear on camera). The New York City skyline was provided via a painted bedsheet (admittedly more appropriation than donation, as his mother was never informed of the bed linen’s involvement in the project).
Sadly, the film was never completed, although the fur-covered figure of Kong, the Empire State model and the skyline backdrop still exist. But the idea continued to preoccupy Jackson. Jackson’s ongoing collaborator, screenwriter Philippa Boyens, comments, “I think for a lot of filmmakers-not just Peter-but for a lot of others, the original King Kong is one of those landmarks when you saw cinema reaching for the impossible and trying to do something extraordinary. In terms of the actual story-a giant gorilla, and then putting that giant gorilla in New York?-is about as brilliant as cinema gets in terms of its ability to tell a story differently than reading a book or hearing it orally. I think that relevance for today’s audience is still there-and Kong is again reaching for that.”
Flash forward several years, when the director had already triumphed as a singular new voice in filmmaking with several projects, most notably the confident entry of 1994’s inventive and acclaimed Heavenly Creatures (which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay).
In 1996, his thoughts once again returned to King Kong and this time, the obsession had advanced far enough that a full-length screenplay was drafted. Jackson remarks, “Our 1996 draft was written as a very Hollywood-y, sort of tongue-in-cheek adventure story, full of gags and one-liners.”
Facing a marketplace that was also welcoming its own “big gorilla” movie in Mighty Joe Young and other projects like Godzilla, Universal put the project on hold-to the heartbreak of Jackson. Instead, the director was to begin an ambitious project that would occupy the next several years of his life: The Lord of the Rings.
To accomplish this, Jackson assembled an enormous team of film artisans and actors to his native New Zealand and shot all three of the entries simultaneously (over 16 months, with 274 days of filming), the first filmmaker in history to complete such a daunting task. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, hit theaters in 2001; The Two Towers in 2002, and The Return of the King in 2003.
Even before attending the last of the awards ceremonies where Jackson and his team would be lauded for their three-part epic, the idea of remaking King Kong once again returned. Fresh from his experience of breathing life into one of the greatest fantasy adventures in literature, the filmmaker now approached the story of the great ape much differently than his previous attempt in 1996.
He explains, “One of the lessons that we learned with The Lord of the Rings movies was the more fantastical your story, the more you should try to ground it in the reality of the world. We set King Kong in the 1930s, but we’re making it a very realistic 1930s. We wanted to make it feel very grounded, and the adventure on Skull Island is very gritty. It’s a story of survival. It’s a story of relationships and love and empathizing for this huge beast. But it’s told in a very down-to-earth, realistic way.
I think because something has fantasy elements in it doesn’t mean that you have to approach it with a fantastical style as a filmmaker. I think it’s much more interesting to approach fantasy through the door of reality and make it as real as you possibly can. That gives it the veneer of the real world, which makes the fantasy all the more extraordinary. We had definitely learned some lessons doing Lord of the Rings that we didn’t know in 1996, and we applied those lessons to doing a complete revision of the screenplay.”
With this maturity as a filmmaker, Jackson was now ready to tackle King Kong and weave reality with fantasy into his version of the film. He shares, “The original 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie of all time. And I guess for that reason, I wanted to remake it. I just thought a version of this wonderful story told with the technology that we have available to us today would be a really amazing thing. So I guess I’m remaking King Kong as a fan who wants to see a hightech version of this wonderful story.”
It really comes down to one filmmaker’s continued fascination with a movie creature whose presence has impacted popular culture for nearly 75 years.
Jackson continues, “It seems strange. I mean, King Kong has been part of my life for so long now. For 35 years, I’ve had this movie as my favorite film, and the fact that I’m remaking it now is an incredible dream come true-it’s something I would of never thought would ever happen. It’s just really cemented my affection for King Kong, having been the person that gets to remake it. I feel very obligated to him, because he really did start my career off-the kickstarted me in the direction towards being a filmmaker. And in a way, if I can do him honor by telling his story well today, then I’m returning something of the favor that I owe him.”
A City That No Longer Exists
Much as in the creation of Skull Island, it would need a team of accomplished artists to produce the other major setting (and one no less legendary) of King Kong: the New York City of 1933. Taking the advanced computer technology developed for The Lord of the Rings to the next level, digital artists were able to turn back the clock and literally rebuild a city that no longer exists. As it has changed so radically in the last 72 years, it was impossible to transform modern New York, so the entire place had to be built from the ground up. And unlike the totally invented environment of Skull Island, this city has a real-world counterpart and, therefore, had to be constructed within certain confines (What buildings still exist? What is known of the city at that time?).
Existing aerial and ground-view photographs from the period provided key reference for artists. These shots were then cross-referenced with a low-resolution digital dataset of present-day New York. Any buildings constructed post 1933 were stripped out, leaving a huge amount of structures to be replaced with data correct for 1933. Since the period photos were black and white, an initial color palette had to be determined by cross-referencing the hues of buildings that still exist from the time. From this starting place, proprietary computer programs began to rebuild the city, adding intricate detail to the low-resolution dataset. These programs were governed by a strict set of guidelines (period appropriate building styles on everything from doorframes to materials and trim color).
Visual effects producer Eileen Moran comments, “Watching 1930s New York being built was truly amazing. We were able to build the entire city in 3-D. CG supervisor Chris White created what he called `CityBot,’ which created whole city blocks with correct architecture for each area. We had great aerial reference photographs taken in the 1930s, and we matched our 3-D city exactly to the photographs.”
The results, which took over one year to complete, show just how advanced the process was: 57,468 unique Manhattan buildings were created, which were constructed using 22,011,949 components/cells. Add to that another 32,839 buildings for Queens, Brooklyn and New Jersey, plus 51 “hero” (or starring) buildings, which makes for a total of 90,358 buildings. These structures cover an area stretching more than 26 miles.
All of these are 3-D constructions, and newly created software allows an artist (or a film director) to take a camera and fly practically anywhere in the virtual city. Of particular import were the rooftops, as they have changed considerably since the ’30s-so even existing period structures could not appear “as is.” The roofs are all visible during the film’s climactic moments when Kong scales the Empire State Building.
Weta Digital also developed a unique weathering software designed to digitally cover the whole of Manhattan in snow and rain. The city was designed to function in the daytime or at night. When lights are turned on inside one of the buildings, full virtual interiors are visible.
When superimposed on top of one another, the virtual skyline and the 1933 photographs align almost identically. According to CG supervisor White, “We built over 90,000 buildings, nearly 60,000 of which are unique down to the finest level of detail. Each building is constructed of windows, doors and ledges, doorknobs, steps, anything that you would expect to see on a building-there are also thousands of smoking chimneys, water towers, fire escapes. All of these details have been created to match the style of the time, and they’re all things that make the city feel alive. This is a view of New York that we haven’t seen in any other films.”
King Kong (2005)
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Colin Hanks, Thomas Kretschmann, Jamie Bell, John Sumner, Kyle Chandler, Geraldine Brophy, Mark Hadlow
Screenplay by: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens
Production Design by: Grant Major
Cinematography by: Andrew Lesnie
Film Editing by: Jamie Selkirk
Costume Design by: Terry Ryan
Set Decoration by: Simon Bright, Greg Cockerill, Dan Hennah
Art Direction by: Joe Bleakley, Simon Bright, Dan Hennah
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for frightening violence, disturbing images.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: December 14, 2005
Visits: 384
