Peter Jackson likes King Kong

From Darkhorizons, "Peter Jackson remains the most formidable director of his generation. An Oscar winner for his Lord of the Rings, his King Kong may not have been the triumph he had hoped for, but at least he can spend time relaxing now that Kong is headed FOR DVD. A relaxed and philosophical Jackson talked exclusively to our LA correspondent about the Kong DVD, rumours of a new DVD boxed set of Lord of the Rings and what is next up for Mr Jackson.

Question: When you make a film as big as King Kong and there are all these pressures riding for the film's success, do you get jaded by all of that? Do you feel disappointed when the film doesn't quite meet those sorts of expectations?

Jackson: No, you're never jaded; you just want the studio to make a profit. I mean, the most important thing is that the studio makes their money back. There can be all sorts of expectations and, the media have liked just about turned it into a reality TV show of sorts where they love to sort of try to second guess what the top film of the weekend is going to be. And, they have all sorts of expectations but the one thing that I've always had ever since the beginning of my career making very low-budget films was that, the people putting the money up for the film do get their money back because if you don't do that I think your career comes to an end pretty quickly.

Question: Do you think DVD has in some way then become a kind of saving grace for a filmmaker like yourself?

Jackson: Well... DVD I think has helped all studios because I think, it has given studios a secondary profit stream, that they've never had in the past. I mean you look at films that were made in the 1960s and '70s and, and, they had one or two ways of earning money which was the theatrical release and then obviously eventually to TV. But, there's been endless amounts of invention of income streams for films, not just DVD but I guess pay TV and airlines and hotels' TV and all that sort of thing, so I think everything helps because I think it allows - as the cost of films go up -the studios to sort of keep up with the rising cost of films. But I think it certainly feels it's getting to a limit now it's not going down but the rise of the DVD is obviously slowing down, which has got studios in a slight panic.

Question: When you were making the film, was DVD as much on your mind as getting a theatrical cut ready?

Jackson: No. No. I mean essentially the DVD that's being released now is the theatrical cut, so, no, you're always just making the film for the big screen.

Question: Can you talk about, some of the major add-ons in this DVD?

Jackson: Well the main thing that, that we've put into the DVD - which is something that the fans have wanted and asked for, is the postproduction diaries, which was never intended for the DVD at all. We did those obviously as a sort of online, event which picked up a momentum of its own. But there was this ongoing request to have them all on a DVD in the same place, and obviously at a much better quality. So we released half of them - because there were so many that they would have had to create an extra disc for them just to put them on this release. So we released the production diaries, concurrently with the theatrical film and then this release has the postproduction diaries so it completes the whole set. And then we did a couple of documentaries, because I guess so much of the making of the film has been covered by the production and postproduction diaries that rather than just sort of show an expansion of that - even though there's a lot of stuff that we have held back - we decided to create a couple of documentaries that are just a little different; the background to New York in the 1930s and then this documentary about Skull Island. So we thought it would just be kind of fun to do a couple of documentaries that were just a little different from the usual EPK type, stuff that you often see on DVDs.

Question: And no major deleted scenes or anything like that?

Jackson: No, that's all been saved for, ... it depends on Universal making a decision, but they seem to be pretty, keen on the idea of doing a 3 or 4 disc release, towards the end of the year which would include deleted scenes and bloopers and a whole new raft of docos that would go a lot deeper into the technical stuff of the making of the film that we couldn't show in the production diaries.

Question: I understand that you're also thinking of doing a box set for Lord of the Rings on DVD.

Jackson: Well that's been a plan for a long time. There hasn't been anything announced about it yet. I think they're waiting to do something with the high-definition release, because I always assessed that the natural time for that box set would be when, when you release the films in HD, and I don't know what their plans are with that. So we're not working on anything at the moment but I know that there is an idea is in the background, yeah.

Question: What's the status of The Lovely Bones at this point?

Jackson: Just beginning the script.

Question: This is a very different film from what we're used to seeing from you of late, as I understand it.

Jackson: It's a sort of very Heavenly Creatures I guess in terms of how it fits in with films I made in the past, but it's very enjoyable to work on as a puzzle because it's a difficult and very interesting book. It's one of those books that sort of has a profound effect on you when you read it and it has a different effect on each person that reads it. It's a very sort of personal experience, and so to sit down and to analyse that is like a wonderful puzzle solving exercise as to how you adapt the story and make it in to a piece of cinema, which is really one of the great fun parts of the process for me is that very beginning where you have an absolutely blank canvas and you sit there and solve the puzzles. And we're enjoying it doing it, just at our own speed. We have no pressure or deadline we're just taking a year off, which is really a quiet year... and Lovely Bones will be written during the year. And we've been working on it for a few weeks now and it's enjoyable.

Question: Do you miss the quiet that you must have enjoyed prior to Lord of the Rings?

Jackson: I don't miss it, although we're trying to sort of wind, the pace back a little, a pace generated by the movies that we've made over the last ten years. I mean three Lord of the Rings movies followed by Kong has been a relentless ten years in which we've had some huge movies to make and obviously very complex films - and we've had, an ongoing series of deadlines that we've moved from, having to finish the script of one to the script of another, to start shooting to finish the editing, to, start the photography of this, to the release of this film's coming out - look at the posters of this now, we've got to get on to editing this one. And it's been this sort of ongoing relentless ten-year sort of pressure which is what we didn't used to have. In the old days, you'd make one film, finish it, release it, start your next film and it would be a sort of a slightly more civilised pace. And so I guess if anything we're deliberately trying to go back to that sort of, that sort of pace and lifestyle now. It's really just... And it just was a factor of ending up making these four very complex, huge films almost virtually back to back.

Question: Halo is a film that you're executive producing, is that...

Jackson: Correct.

Question: It's still going on?

Jackson: Yep.

Question: So, just to conclude, when you look back at the last ten years and you see these movies, and you reflect on your growth as a filmmaker, from those very early days in New Zealand, what do you see in yourself that has changed so dramatically?

Jackson: That's a very interesting question actually. I sort of don't tend to reflect back too much. I mean I feel like, I've been through a very intensive film school, in that everyday that you step on to the set, you're effectively walking into a film school and you're not ever kind of absolutely in control of everything one hundred percent of the time, but you're thinking on your feet, learning, making mistakes and you're learning by those mistakes. And so I look back on not just the last ten years but everything that I've done as being sort of an ongoing growing continual film school. I mean I don't think I've got to a point where I've achieved anything that feels like, a particular milestone, but there's still a lot more to learn and hopefully a lot more films to make."