This piece originally appeared in Hotdog.
“How did I feel about taking on King Kong?” muses Jack Black. “I guess you could say it was a combination of arousal and fear.” Black’s mixed emotions are easy to understand given the size of Peter Jackson’s follow-up to his Rings cycle.
While other directors might have scaled back after a project as large as The Lord Of The Rings, Jackson wouldn’t have a bar of it. And as for how big Kong is going to be you need look no further than the immense Gates of Kong set, complete with ancient temples, rope bridges and a monstrous, moss-covered wall high enough to keep out even the greatest of apes.
New Zealand’s favourite son has also assembled an impressive international cast, including Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, Academy Award-nominee Naomi Watts, boy wonder Jamie Bell, the versatile Andy Serkis (playing both Lumpy the cook and the monstrously large simian) and Black, the reigning clown prince of Hollywood.
“It’s quite a thing, starring in a motion picture with Sasquatch,” smiles the School Of Rock star. But if the size of his co-star is pretty daunting, the Tenacious D frontman is aware that Kong’s smaller than the minds bent on bringing him to life.
“It’s the intelligence behind the production that really stuns you,” he says, dropping his wild-and-crazy-guy demeanour for a moment. “Naturally, I came here with a good idea of how I wanted to play Carl Denham, who’s a pretty dark character. But then Fran [Walsh, co-writer and Peter Jackson’s good lady wife] suggested that there was something of Willy Lohman from Death Of A Salesman about this guy. That was really smart and very insightful.”
Big brains have also been at work bringing Kong and Skull Island’s prehistoric citizens to life. At Weta’s famous workshops, the world’s top special effects artists have been busy not only creating a primordial menagerie but two very different environments - the dense forest of Kong’s homeland and the urban jungle that was 1930s Manhattan.
“At Weta, we have the largest computer facility in the southern hemisphere,” says visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, sounding every bit like a Bond villain. But rather than being the white-cat stroking resident of an undersea volcano, the modest American is at work in a non-descript office building in a quiet Wellington suburb.
If the façade is unimpressive and Weta’s workload is incredibly hefty (after taking six months to rebuild New York, they have the same time to breathe life into 30 CGI creatures.) Letteri’s eye is squarely on the spectacular. “Impossible is no longer in my vocabulary,” he says, a shy smile suggesting that after King Kong, the Battle of Helm’s Deep will look like a late-night kick-up in a pub car park.
Of course, the man with a real burden on his shoulders is writer/producer/director Jackson. Fortunately for the Kiwi, he can draw upon his profound love and thorough understanding of Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack’s classic monster movie.
“It sounds odd,” he laughs, prior to a frantic night’s shooting, “but I think the 1976 adaptation of Kong has dated more than the original movie. But that’s the strength of the Kong story. It feels like an ancient myth, a tale that has been with us for many generations, but it was actually cooked up by a couple of guys as recently as the 1930s.”
With all that Jackson’s gone through in the last five years - worldwide acclaim, box-office records, a gold rush of awards - you might expect arrogance to have become a part of his make-up. However, the director is under no illusions whatsoever about how big a task he has ahead of him.
“How do you improve on the original King Kong?” he ponders while scratching his slimmed-down stomach. “It’s a hard ask. There’s certainly a lot of pressure. But then there’s always pressure.” And as we know from past experience, when the going gets tough, Peter Jackson gets making the greatest movie epics.