Two figures spin gracefully on the ice of a frozen Central Park lake, like Astaire and Rogers. In this case, however, the figures are King Kong and his paramour Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). The tender scene, a highlight of the new version of King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson, is suddenly shattered by the arrival of the US Army. As soldiers begin their onslaught, Jackson’s Kong takes on new dimensions: he is no longer a large and clumsy brute, but a desperately lonely and lovestruck figure.
Since 2003, when he wrapped up his 17 Oscar-winning trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Jackson has been consumed with a remake of the seminal 1933 movie King Kong. He admits that King Kong is the film he’s wanted to make since he was a small child, playing around with Super 8 film. More recently, when the film was running over budget, he even threw in a sizeable amount of his own money — about $30 million — to finish it.
But what is the enduring appeal of the super-sized gorilla? After all, apart from Jackson’s version, King Kong has already appeared in one remake and inspired countless others, including King Kong vs Godzilla, King Kong Escapes, King of Kong’s Island, APE, Queen Kong, King Kong Lives and The Mighty Kong.
For the veteran fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, the creator of Elric and Jerry Cornelius, it’s very simple: “Essentially Kong is a very large child — innocent, amoral — who is punished for his innocence.”
Moorcock sees the literally larger-than-life figure as more than just your typical creature running amok: “For me, the appeal of Kong was that he was both a monster and a hero in one — a Gothic hero-villain, if you like. In that sense he’s Byronic, and it’s his Byronic aspects which I’ve always liked.”
Film special effects have moved on since the release of the original in 1933: what was once impossible is now very much within film-makers’ grasp. Creating a fully-realised digital version of 1930s New York, a perfect copy of the real thing, like that which bookends Jackson’s King Kong, would have been unthinkable until recently.
For Richard Taylor, the head of Weta, thespecial effects company Jackson has worked with ever since his gross-out comedy Meet the Feebles (1989), Kong resonates as much today as it did 70 years ago. “The original story is such a strong statement on the deterioration of the flora and fauna and abuse of our natural world. It was pertinent in 1933 and it’s dramatically more so in 2005.”
It’s not just on-screen that Weta took meticulous care in creating the world that Kong inhabits: they also approached the tie-in book The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island (published by Pocketbooks) in much the same way. In lavish hardcover, the book, overseen by Daniel Falconer at Weta, treats the terra incognita of Kong’s island as if it were a real place and catalogues the creatures that inhabit the giant gorilla’s habitat.
“Most of our design team on King Kong were dinosaur and animal freaks as kids and, given the nature of our job, we’ve had the perfect excuse not to grow out of that fascination,” Falconer says. “Developing Skull Island was a chance for us to indulge our fantasies and create whole new creatures and habitats.”
The spirit of exploration has always infected King Kong. Merian Cooper, the writer, director and producer of the 1933 version, was himself an adventurer, and part of the inspiration for the film came from the real-life explorer W. Douglas Burden’s attempt to discover the komodo dragon.
Peter Jackson isn't the only film-maker enamoured with King Kong. The special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, the producer of the Sinbad films in the Seventies, as well as Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of The Titans (1981), saw the film when he was a teenager and has been hooked ever since (he’s 85 now).
For Harryhausen, the original Kong has always been more than just an exercise in bringing a mythical monster to life: “It wasn’t just the technical virtuosity that fascinated me in Kong, it was the structure of the story,” says. “They gradually took you by the hand from the mundane world of the Depression into the most outrageous fantasy that’s ever been put on the screen. Max Steiner’s score also helped, as it was the first film score to work along operatic lines. It contained leitmotifs for each character on screen." Jackson’s remake is a brave one, since it follows in the wake of Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 attempt at an updated King Kong. It was described at the time as one of the worst films ever made, a failure that meant the property was left untouched until now. For the new film to work, the monster had to be better than the giant mechanical arm of 1976.
Enter Andy Serkis, the British actor who brought so much to the role of Gollum in Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy. Serkis has an unusual position in King Kong: he plays the boat’s cook, Lumpy — the film’s light relief — but he also plays Kong. Without Serkis, who provided the motion-capture for his facial expressions and body movements, Kong would have been just a series of higly rendered pixels. Serkis wanted to get his “character ’s” behaviour and mannerisms correct, so he contacted London Zoo and spent months studying the apes there. Mick Carman, the specialist primate keeper at the zoo, worked closely with Serkis and sees the enduring interest in apes and gorillas in film triggered by a number of factors over the years: “Films like the original King Kong and the Tarzan films brought gorillas to people’s attention. They’ve always been seen as a creature of mystery, possibly because there weren’t many in captivity for quite some time.”
Serkis has been fascinated by primates since he was small. For him, King Kong is a story about love and a grand adventure: “It’s also like a Greek tragedy: there are these two characters who come together who really shouldn’t, and the connection brings about downfall and destruction.”
The emotional climax of the new film — Kong’s escape from imprisonment and the battle at the top of the Empire State Building — is the same as it was in Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's 1933 version, but here it is so much more powerful. The iconic image of Kong being assailed by a squadron of planes at the top of the skyscraper is given weight and pathos by Serkis’s virtuoso motion-captured performance.
For Harryhausen, though, the 1933 classic remains the ultimate cinematic experience. “King Kong was the sort of picture you need to see on a big screen. I saw it at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It had a 30ft screen. It’s a different film when you see it on a little box.
“The original King Kong had a dreamlike quality — which is something stop motion tends to give — and so the film felt like a nightmare when you were watching it.”
King Kong opens on December 15
Zoo’s who: more dumb chums of the silver screen
Deer: The Yearling
Dogs: Lassie; Beethoven; 101 Dalmatians; Napoleon
Dolphins: Flipper; The Day of the Dolphin; Waterboys
Horses: Seabiscuit; Black Beauty; Phar Lap
Penguins: March of the Penguins; Madagascar
Whales: Free Willy; Orca; Namu, the Killer Whale
Lions: Born Free; To Walk with Lions; The Lion King; Clarence, the Cross-eyed Lion
Gorillas: Gorillas in the Mist
Chimpanzees: Bedtime for Bonzo; Summer of the Monkeys
Orangutans: Every Which Way But Loose
Research by Helen McMahon
