GORILLA FILMMAKING 'KONG' NEEDED TO BE BIG, BUT PETER JACKSON AND HIS ACTORS DIDN'T FORGET THE SMALL DETAILS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

The numbers tell only half the story.

Peter Jackson's remake of the giant gorilla classic ``King Kong'' cost a whopping $207 million. Its three-hour-plus running time is almost twice that of the 1933 black-and-white original. And it incorporates more special-effects shots than the director's three multi-Oscar-winning ``Lord of the Rings'' movies combined, including a meticulously accurate, building-by-building digital re-creation of Depression-era Manhattan.

But the most important element of Jackson's lifelong dream project was the acting. ``Kong'' - unlike most big-budget fantasy blockbusters - depends on primate emotion for its greatest effect.

So a first-class cast was assembled to play off of the big ape.

Naomi Watts is starving vaudeville actress Ann Darrow, who bonds with the frightening simian after the natives of an uncharted island serve her up as a sacrifice. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody (``The Pianist'') is Jack Driscoll, the writer who falls in love with Ann and eventually rescues her. Actor-comedian Jack Black may seem a strange choice for showman Carl Denham, who leads the expedition to Skull Island and ultimately brings the sedated Eighth Wonder of the World back to New York for display, but he plays him like a desperate, obsessive Orson Welles, a man who loves cinema despite his ethical (and perhaps creative) limitations.

Making Kong a king-size actor

But the most impressive performance of all had to be Kong himself. And although what you'll see on screen is, technically, computer animated, it was first created by flesh-and-blood actor Andy Serkis, who also provided the base performance for ``LOTR's'' mad, compelling, digitized Gollum.

``The whole ethos that Peter has about CG characters is that you can't expect the other actors to make decisions for a very important character and do generalized reactions,'' says Serkis, who observed the behavior of great apes at zoos in his native England and the famous mountain gorillas in the wilds of Rwanda for the assignment.

``There's got to be an actor making decisions for Gollum or, in this case, Kong. So there were two major stages to creating Kong. One is on set, opposite the other actors. And the second phase is creating the motion-capture stage of Kong, where I get to experiment and bring him to life.''

On the main production's New Zealand sets, Serkis wore a gorilla muscle suit, fanged dentures and arm extensions, and played each scene opposite his leading lady and others from 25 feet up in cherry pickers, scissor lifts or other crane devices. It was an absurd-looking tableau, but one which his co-stars quickly came to value.

``We had moments when we were falling about in fits of giggles,'' acknowledges Watts, who's known mainly for heart-wrenching psychodramas such as ``Mulholland Dr.'' and ``21 Grams,'' as well as the ``Ring'' horror films. ``But for the most part ... if Andy wasn't there, I couldn't have told the truth through any of it.''

``It looked pretty comical, and I was trying to stifle laughs at first,'' Black (``School of Rock'') agrees. ``But once Andy looks in your eyes and you see the terrifying beast rage, it snaps you out of the giggles.''

Learning to be an ape

After completing principal photography, Serkis did the whole thing again for motion capture, during which he acted everything in a dot-covered body suit, which computer animators then used as guide footage for creating Kong's movements and expressions.

``The biggest challenge of the whole job was how we were going to bring this creature's emotions to life,'' Serkis explains. ``I was very keen from very early on that this Kong would remain true to gorilla behavior. We know so much about gorillas in 2005 vs. what people did in 1933. Their interpretation were these fearsome, hateful, demonic half-man/half-beasts. But since, people like Dian Fossey have put an enormous amount of research into gorilla psychology and behavior, and we understand how genetically similar they are to us and how their personalities are as varied as ours. Once I started researching gorillas, I found out that they are as individual as you or I and show their emotions in that many varied ways.

``So the whole challenge was, how much to anthropomorphize for the audience to let them know what Kong is thinking, and how truthful to keep him to gorilla behavior and allow the audience to project their feelings. There's a balance in between. So on the motion-capture stage, I just played the same scene many different ways.''

Jackson's Weta Digital company also created a program that interpreted human facial expressions into the corresponding looks a gorilla's different musculature would make to express the same emotion. This was vital, Jackson says, when it came to showing, say, menace as an animal would.

``It was important for us that Kong wasn't a big, brutish monster, that he had a heart and a soul, as any animal has,'' the director notes. ``But it was equally important that we didn't make him overly cute and didn't humanize him too much. So it was a delicate balance, and I didn't want to get to a point in the movie where, after we start to empathize with Kong, he can't hurt anybody or do anything bad. I wanted him to have his wild animal unpredictability and scariness all the way through to the end.''

Bringing the 1930s up to date

Of course, the movie isn't all about the big monkey; indeed, he doesn't even appear until the second act. Beloved as Ernest Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper's '30s original is, its characters can sometimes come off as hokey as Willis O'Brien's primitive (if groundbreaking and widely influential) stop-motion model animation does to modern sensibilities.

So, for example, there's detailed setup of Ann's professional frustrations and dire economic straits and how they've affected her emotionally.

``It was important to establish how desperately lonely she was, and how hard things were in the era of the Depression, as well as how she is full of courage and not a victim at all,'' Watts explains.

``She is very much on the way to her spirit being broken, but she hasn't allowed that to happen yet. So, by the time she has her first major interaction with Kong - after she's past sheer terror - she sort of sees his loneliness and identifies with that.''

``Peter's definitely had time to digest the original and ensure that certain elements are clearer,'' Brody adds. ``Maybe the way the world is today is similar to some struggles that we were facing in the `30s. We're living in a very harsh world, and I think that the movie depicts the world in a very brutal way. Even though we are a civilized world, it is evident that we have not really lost the brutality of the prehistoric age. What it really shows is that Kong's world is so brutal and lonely, and Ann's world and my character's is brutal and lonely, too. The three of them share that.''

Scream and scream again

All well and thoughtful, but the production still involved lots of running from hungry T-rexes, stampeding brontosaurs, giant bugs and dozens of other threatening creatures that weren't there.

``When we were chased and I thought I should be scared of something, I just invented a new creature, which was half-tiger and half-shark,'' Black reveals. ``I imagined it was running after me with the head of a tiger but the mouth of a shark. That got me scared.''

``With most of it, we had to rely on our imaginations,'' Brody confirms. ``We did have animatics, moving storyboards, that gave us a basic, generic idea of how the scene will play out and the size and scale of the creatures and how we fit in with the landscape. So we did have a general sense. The rest required imagination.''

Watts proudly acknowledges she did all of her own ear-shattering screaming, if not all of the juggling and pratfalling act she performs to distract the initially threatening Kong. But for all the cyber-magic that went into the movie's action sequences, the petite Australian actress wants the world to know that that's mostly her getting knocked all around.

``They had great, great stunt people to do the really difficult parts for me,'' says Watts, who was often manipulated by multiple stuntmen in green suits who would later be turned into huge Kong fingers by computer. ``But I got awfully beat up. After seeing the movie a couple of times now, I'm glad that you can actually get a sense of that. I would have felt really annoyed if it was barely in there, 'cause let me tell you, we're talking three months of doing some kind of physically strenuous activity every day.''

In the shadow of Fay Wray 

The scariest part for Watts, though, was the thought of embodying the mother of all movie scream queens, indelibly created by Fay Wray in the '33 ``Kong'' and re-created by Jessica Lange in the generally reviled 1976 remake. Lange had no problem offering Watts her best wishes. But Wray, whom Jackson and company met in New York days after ``Return of the King'' swept the 2004 Academy Awards ceremony, startled Watts by declaring ``I'm Ann Darrow.''

By the end of the evening, though, the 96-year-old legend seemed to have come around.

``Of course there was a lot of trepidation,'' Watts admits. ``That's why I kind of needed Fay's blessing to make it my own. That's kind of what she was trying to say when she told me, 'Ann Darrow is in good hands,' at the end of the night. I think she was passing the baton over. Now it was mine to have ... on loan! But she'd loaned it out once before.''

Wray passed away before Jackson could fulfill his hope of having her make a cameo in his new ``Kong.'' Other than that, though, he says that his remake is exactly the film he wanted to create. (Seeing the original ``Kong'' on New Zealand television at the age of 9 was what inspired him to become a filmmaker, he says.)

Jackson failed twice to remake ``Kong,'' first in his childhood back yard, then in 1996 when Universal Studios pulled the plug on a campier version he'd prepared, due both to the box-office failure of his ghost comedy ``The Frighteners,'' and a glut of big monster remakes that included disappointing revivals of ``Godzilla'' and ``Mighty Joe Young.''

``I do find, to some degree, that I'm making the film for myself,'' Jackson says. ``The way that you ultimately have to make those decisions - 'Are you exhausting people? Is this too much?' - is you just say, 'Is this something that I'd like to see?' So everything that's in there is there because I thought it was cool. It does feel like a huge project of mine since I was a kid, and I'll love the day when it goes out into the world and that pressure goes away - however it ends up.''

Living up to enormous expectations

In a year that's been lousy with, well, lousy remakes, how ``Kong'' does end up commercially is a very big, $200 million-plus question.

``I don't think this is like any other remake, or at least like what's going on in the general trend,'' Brody reckons. `` 'King Kong' was the main inspiration for Peter to become a director. He already attempted to remake it at 10 years old, so the passion was there well before he did 'Lord of the Rings.' He did it because he always wanted to do it, not just because it's a good idea right now. And he also has all the qualities to make it great.''

Like that love for the material, which could prove the key factor that drives all the numbers, especially potential gross figures.

``It's a big action-adventure, but it does have a beautiful emotional center to it,'' Watts notes. ``That was always my concern and wish, that it does move people, and it seems to be doing that. I'm happy.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

The monkey's uncles

1933

PLOT

Written and directed by Merian C. Cooper, who also has a cameo, the involves a starving actress, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) who is hired by filmmaker Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) to star in a movie to be shot on mysterious Skull Island, which turns out to be a lost world, filled with dinosaurs and a giant ape, Kong, who rules over the island. After the film crew arrives, Ann is kidnapped by the natives and offered up to Kong. But the big guy takes a shine to the actress, who is eventually rescued - and Kong, while trying to get her back, is captured.

Taken back to New York City, Kong is displayed in a live show at Radio City Music Hall. When he thinks Ann is being attacked as cameras flash, Kong breaks his chains, gathers up Ann, wreaks havoc and climbs the Empire State Building, where he is shot down by airplanes. Then Denham, looking down on Kong's body, which has fallen to the street below, utter's the famous line, ``Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast,'' which was voted the 84th greatest movie line by the American Film Institute.

TRIVIA

-- In its first weekend in 1933, the film took in $90,000, the biggest opening of its era. It went on to generate $1.7 million.

-- The models of King Kong were only 18 inches high.

-- Kong's height in the posters is 50 feet. He was closer to 19 feet tall in the jungle and close to 25 feet when in New York City.

-- King Kong's roar was a lion and a tiger's roar combined and run backward.

1976

PLOT

Dino De Laurentiis' remake of 1933 involves an updated script. Charles Grodin plays Fred Wilson, an oil company official who discovers an unknown Pacific island that is rumored to be brimming with black gold. Hoping to strike it big, Wilson assembles a crew and sets sail. While at sea, the crew discovers a stowaway, Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), a paleontologist who tells Wilson he's actually headed for the legendary Skull Island, a land of prehistoric monsters and a giant ape. Wilson dismisses the idea but decides to use him to photo-document the find. Soon after, the crew rescues a beautiful woman in the water, Dwan (Jessica Lange, in her first screen appearance), after the yacht she was on sank. Once on Skull Island, the natives kidnap Dwan and offer her up to Kong.

Since Wilson's oil find is a bust, he has his crew help Jack rescue Dwan and capture the beast. Trying to make him the symbol of the oil company, Wilson takes Kong to New York and puts him on display. After escaping, Kong climbs the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

TRIVIA

-- Critics at the time were relatively kind to the $24 million production, which eventually made $80 million worldwide, but it is mostly dismissed now.

-- Though De Laurentiis touted a giant mechanical robot built by Carlo Rambaldi for the film, it appears on screen for less than a minute in the final version.

-- While the massive and expensive model was being constructed, makeup artist Rick Baker played Kong in a gorilla suit for most of the film.

2005

PLOT

It's essentially the same as the original - set in 1933 with the character of Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) being fleshed out. Denham (Jack Black) is more of a hustler, and Jack Discoll (Adrien Brody) is a playwright. Though Kong is computer-generated, his role was acted out during filming by Andy Serkis.

TRIVIA

-- It was filmed on Skull Island, a set in New Zealand that contained 104,000 pieces of artificial foliage and 120 miniature-scale trees.

-- New York had to be rebuilt using a computer, stripping out any buildings constructed after 1933.

-- Peter Jackson was paid $20 million to direct this film, the highest salary ever paid to a film director in advance of production.

-- In the scene at the diner, Naomi Watts wears a hat that is Peter Jackson's tribute to Fay Wray's hat in the original.

- Daily News

CAPTION(S):

8 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) KING KONG

One woman, one big, hairy, sensitive ape

(2) no caption (King Kong)

(3) The new ``King Kong,'' while set in the 1930s, updates both the special effects and the psychological underpinnings for its human characters and giant ape.

(4) The origional King Kong, 1933.

(5) Skull Island gives the humans of ``King Kong'' plenty to run from, including dinosaurs, above, and giant bugs.

(6) Fay Wray as Ann Darrow

(7) Jessica Lange as Dwan

(8) Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow

Box:

The monkey's uncles (see text)