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 Entertainment | December 2005 
New Kong Film has Old Love Story, New Technology
 Daniel Trotta - Reuters
New York - A new version of "King Kong," the greatest "Beauty and the Beast" movie ever made, is about to frighten and inspire audiences - this time with modern special effects, a more realistic gorilla and more loving glances between ape and girl than ever before.
"Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson shifts his attention from the tiny Oscar-winning hobbits of Middle Earth, to a $200 million remake of the 1933 classic about the giant ape and his love for a blond who fits in the palm of his hand.
The movie opens on Wednesday and is already generating Oscar buzz in Hollywood with some experts even predicting that it could challenge "Titanic" for the biggest-grossing film of all time.
Jackson has left the storyline set in the 1930s but updated it with the kind of 21st century computer film technology that he showed off in his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
He has also made Kong look and behave like an authentic gorilla, except for size, and he based Kong's attraction with the character Ann Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) on a real gorilla's need for companionship, not on the fondling and ogling of the original and its 1976 remake.
"He is the ultimate man," Watts said, referring to the soul and the power of Kong.
The result is a three-hour, white-knuckle ride that Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric, hopes will thrill audiences and position Jackson as the most bankable director of blockbusters since Steven Spielberg.
Jackson, 44, has wanted to remake Kong ever since he was 9 years old and saw the original on television in his native New Zealand.
"It had such a profound affect on me as a 9-year-old that it made me want to make films. The next day I got my parents' Super 8 movie camera and started to do stop-motion animation with a clay dinosaur," Jackson said of recreating the scene in which Kong fights a tyrannosaurus.
"As a film fan and a King Kong fan, I really wanted to see it done with the technology that we have now," Jackson told reporters at a news conference promoting the film.
The original Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, stunned audiences with special effects that may appear crude today but were revolutionary for the their time.
Jackson's version also scraps the ape's apparent sexual attraction to Ann as shown in the 1933 and 1976 versions, thus creating a more compelling and believable relationship.
"It's really up to personal taste," Jackson said, adding that he was more interested in the big ape, Skull Island (the lost prehistoric island where Kong lives among dinosaurs) and the emotional connection between Kong and Darrow.
'IN GOOD HANDS'
Watts said she was well aware she was reviving "an iconic part" by playing the role made famous by Fay Wray more than 70 years ago.
She met Wray a few months before her death in 2004 at age 96 and recalled the moment Jackson introduced them at a dinner.
"She (Wray) looked up at me and went, 'You're not Ann Darrow. I am! ... At the end of the night ... she whispered in my ear 'Ann Darrow is in good hands.' Those were great parting words," Watts said of her only meeting with Wray.
Watts credited Andy Serkis, the actor behind Kong, with making believable the relationship between a lonely ape and the woman he repeatedly saves from death.
The two are brought together on the uncharted Skull Island, and the big ape - the last of his species - is brought back to New York for the movie's denouement atop the Empire State Building in a meticulously recreated 1930s New York. The 1976 version ended at the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
Serkis studied gorillas in the wild in Rwanda and in the London Zoo to prepare, and he and Jackson built on their experience from "Lord of the Rings" when Serkis played Gollum.
Serkis acted the part of Kong in a "motion capture" suit that translated his movements into those fitting a gorilla body. A separate contraption marked 132 points on his face and converted his expressions into gorilla emotions.
"Kong is a very emotionally uncomplicated character. He's quite a pure heart. And Ann Darrow is an incredibly complicated person," Serkis said.
"It all goes back to a gorilla's absolutely primal desire to have companionship. He's not a psychotic murder who rips women apart as kind of a sexual frustration."
Serkis at times worked in an elevated machine so that, acting opposite Watts, she would be looking up at him as if he were 25 feet tall. Meanwhile his imitation gorilla grunts and growls blasted out of a bank of speakers on the set.
The story is also a love triangle as the Darrow character has already started to fall for the writer Jack Driscoll, who is played by Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody.
"If those two men (Kong and Driscoll) were welded into one, that would definitely make the perfect man," Watts said. "Adrien Brody plays the writer. He has all the words. Kong has all the soul, and all the power as well." |
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