Читать книгу Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey - Brian Sibley - Страница 6

The date: Sunday 2 March 2003. The Place: Universal Studios, Los Angeles.

Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, are in town for the Directors Guild Awards. While in the City of Angels, they are due to meet with Stacey Snider, President of Universal Pictures, and assorted movie executives in order to reach a decision on whether or not they will be signing to make King Kong. The Fates, perhaps, have already decided the outcome of this meeting since Peter’s opening remark is, quite simply, that of a passionately devoted film fan: ‘This may not mean anything to you,’ he tells those present, ‘but today, 2 March, is the seventieth anniversary of the opening of the original 1933 film, King Kong. Our meeting is taking place, seventy years since King Kong opened – to the day!’

The date: Sometime in 1971. The Place: Pukerua Bay, an idyllic seaside community on the Kapiti Coast, just over 18 miles north of the New Zealand capital, Wellington.

The 9-year-old Peter Jackson is watching a movie on television. It doesn’t matter that the family only has a black-and-white TV set because the film is in black-and-white and old. It had been made in the golden age of Hollywood when film-publicist’s hyperbole knew no bounds. It was, moviegoers in 1933 were told, the ‘Strangest Story

Pukerua Bay – my parents bought a tiny cottage there after their wedding, and that’s where I lived for my first twenty-six years. Our house was perched on the top of cliff above the sea. A great place to grow up.

Ever Conceived by Man! Out-thrilling the Wildest Thrills! Out-leaping the Maddest Imaginings!’

Cavalier film-maker Carl Denham picks up pretty blonde Ann Darrow, down on her luck on the streets of depression-racked New York, and whisks her off to an exotic, dangerous world of primal fantasies. ‘It’s money and adventure and fame,’ Denham promises her. ‘It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning…’

It was also, if she had but known it, an excuse to re-live, with variations, a scenario borrowed from an old fairy-tale: ‘It’s the idea of my picture,’ Denham confides to first mate Jack Driscoll. ‘The Beast was the tough guy. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him…’

Ann Darrow and Kong re-enact an eighteenth-century fable in a contemporary twentieth-century setting, featuring, in its climactic sequence, what was, at the time, the newest icon of human endeavour and achievement: the 102-storey-high Empire State Building, completed only two years before King Kong was made.

But the appeal of King Kong – in 1933 or 1969 – is that its heroes and heroine forsake the world of today to go in search of a place where mysteries and wonders can exist without explanation or rationalisation. The SS Venture steams away from the steel-and-concrete civilisation of New York City and heads for a location not found on any map or chart: a land that time forgot filled with palaeontological nightmares; a carnival freak-show of savages and monsters; Skull Island…

And what did it mean to the young boy watching this story unfold to the orchestrated snarl and gnash of dinosaurs, the enraged bellowings of a great ape and the endless, ear-piercing screams of a woman in peril? Peter recalls…

It was around nine o’clock, one Friday night when I first saw King Kong. I remember being totally swept away on this great adventure! The ingredients of this film were everything that I loved! Like any kid, I was intrigued by the notion of lost places, uncharted islands – King Solomon’s Mines, The Lost World – and the idea that, on such an island, there might exist some colossal, unknown beast.

And what absolutely made it for me wasn’t just that there was a huge, terrifying gorilla that carried the girl away in his hand: it was that when the guys go after them into the jungle, they find what? Dinosaurs! It was just so great!

It is a very simple story, but one that is loaded with strong, potent, poetic themes: beauty and the beast, love and death – ‘It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.’ Even today I am moved – often to tears – by the end of the film; but the real moment of emotion is not actually Kong falling off the Empire State Building and crashing to his death on the sidewalk below, it is the moment where, knowing that he is going to die, he carefully puts Ann down, makes sure that she is safe, regardless of what happens to him.

Ask me today what I think of King Kong and I will tell you that it is one of the most perfect pieces of cinematic escapism. If you had asked me as a child, I would have said that it was everything that I imagined an adventure story should be. Kong was, quite simply, a ripping yarn! More than that, it created a totally believable fusion between the real and the fantastic. The story is set in this world, not in some outrageous, outlandish Other Place. Then, in introducing a giant gorilla and dinosaurs you make that leap from the real to the fantastical.

That has always been my aim as a film-maker: you have to believe in order to become involved with the story and to care about its protagonists. That is why, when we approached the filming of The Lord of the Rings, I was determined – no matter how many trolls, balrogs and fell-beasts we might encounter – that the world in which they exist would be real – just as I’m sure it was real for J. R. R. Tolkien.

King Kong was important because it showed me the power of movies to make you experience things that are outside what you could ever experience in your daily life. I came to love the fact that film had that potential; and, in a way, it has been what has defined every film that I’ve ever made.

That is the legacy I owe to King Kong and it is one of the reasons why I have so long wanted to make my own film version of the story. I want to re-tell that tale for a modern movie audience. I want them to discover the excitement of travelling to Skull Island…