The stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen is in that select group of first-generation Kong fans, seeing it as he did at its opening run at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1933.

I’m probably part of the third generation. I first saw Kong on TV in New Zealand in 1970, and like so many people before me, I have wanted to make movies ever since. In fact the very next day, I was doing crude stop-motion with Plasticine dinosaurs. My generation was the luckiest because we had not only Kong to inspire us, but also the wonderful series of Ray Harryhausen films, gifted to us film-fantasy lovers by the No 1 Kong fan of all.

When my Kong/dinosaur/stop-motion craze hit our household, my mother did the only thing she really could to help — she went to the local library to look for books on the subject, and came home with a copy of Ray’s first book, Film Fantasy Scrapbook. That book became a fixture in our household. I would constantly renew it at the library, thumb through the pages and stare in wonder at photos and drawings from films I’d never seen.

While my school classmates were going out with girls, learning to drive, listening to music, I was the solitary kid; an only child who rushed home from school to build rubber monsters and dream of using something mystical called foam latex. At the weekends I would animate, bringing my creatures to life one frame at a time. I remember the day Elvis died — it was the day I saw Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger!

As the years went by, I did become a film-maker, taking the low-budget horror movie route into the industry, sneaking a little stop-motion in where I could. But the arrival of science-fiction films into mainstream cinema, led by Star Wars, and the computer technology that followed, meant that the fantasy genre became unpopular for a while. Ray retired and I finally got to meet him, first as a fan who queued for hours at a bookstore to get his autograph.

It seemed like the world of cinema had moved on from fantasy, but not for me. In 1996, whilst I was building up a computer visual effects facility in Wellington, I still wanted more than anything to make a movie just like the films that inspired me through my life. I wanted to make my Jason, or my Sinbad (both Harryhausen films). My partner Fran Walsh and I toiled for a while on original fantasy story ideas, before settling on the idea of adapting The Lord of the Rings. LOTR is my “Ray Harryhausen” movie. Without that lifelong love of his wondrous images it would never have been made.

It’s so important not to grow up — the lucky people stay young at heart. I finally got to meet Ray properly and spent time with him and Diana, and he has continued to inspire me. That’s exactly how I want to be when I reach his age. He has not lost his boyish excitement. We can talk about King Kong like two 13-year-olds.

© Peter Jackson 2005. Extracted from The Art of Ray Harryhausen, Aurum Press, Nov 28, £25. Copies can be ordered for £22.50 with free delivery from Times BooksFirst on 0870 1608080. Ray Harryhausen presents a season of his own films on Sky Cinema on Sunday from 3.30pm

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