Peter Jackson and King Kong: Onfilm NZ
Tehanu @ 5:15 am EST

New Zealand's Onfilm magazine has an interview with PJ about "King Kong" - I'll just report the interesting things it covered.

"No film as captivated my imagination more than King Kong....I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was nine years old. It has been my sustained dream to re-interpret this classic story for a nwe age.

As in LOTR, Peter and Fran will be joined by Philippa Boyens on the screenplay. "We can do a complete rewrite. Now that Philippa has joined the team, it's a chance to start over," said Jackson. When he and Fran finished the first script in 1996, he said, "The basic storyline will be very similar but the scenes, the sequences and the detail will be very different." Now he finds he doesn't like "the flip, smart-arsed tone of our old script. We are better writers ow than we were in 1996. This new version will be based on the 1933 movie, but not on our 1996 script. This movie will be so much better than the 1996 film would have been. In hindsight, fate has been kind to us."

Jackson also commented that more of the film- about two thirds - will be set on Skull Island, as compared to previous versions.
He has always said that he didn't want to make a "colourised version" of the original. That is to my mind rather like his approach to making LOTR - he evidently never intended to make a "visual xerox" of the book.