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Known for his robust orchestral scores laced with lush sounds, JAMES NEWTON HOWARD’s compelling music for King Kong is a treasure destined to become another classic in his rich catalogue. Tracks such as "A Fateful Meeting" and "Defeat Is Always Momentary" take the listener on an urgent voyage to an undiscovered land, while "It's Deserted" and "Beautiful" evoke the lyrical beauty of the landscape created by Jackson and inhabited by the films memorable characters.
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Triple Academy Award® winner PETER JACKSON, whose The Lord of the Rings trilogy made motion picture history, now brings his sweeping cinematic vision to one of the screen’s most enduring classics and one of the greatest filmic adventures of all time: King Kong
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It is 1933, and vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Oscar® nominee for 21 Grams, NAOMI WATTS) has found herself—like so many other New Yorkers during the Great Depression—without the means to earn a living. Unwilling to compromise and allow herself to sink into a career in burlesque, she considers her limited options while aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan.
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Known for his robust orchestral scores laced with lush sounds, JAMES NEWTON HOWARD’s compelling music for King Kong is a treasure destined to become another classic in his rich catalogue. Tracks such as "A Fateful Meeting" and "Defeat Is Always Momentary" take the listener on an urgent voyage to an undiscovered land, while "It's Deserted" and "Beautiful" evoke the lyrical beauty of the landscape created by Jackson and inhabited by the films memorable characters. Howard perfectly compliments the feeling of suspense, love and compassion the film so powerfully conveys.
James Newton Howard is one of Hollywood’s most versatile and prolific composers, with more than 90 films to his credit. He has received six Academy Award® nominations, two Golden Globe nominations and one Grammy nomination. In addition, he has won 28 ASCAP Awards for film and television shows scored from 1994 to 2005. His credits include films as diverse as The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Fugitive, Pretty Woman, The Prince of Tides, Grand Canyon, Dave, Primal Fear, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Devil’s Advocate and Dinosaur.
Howard’s more recent projects include Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins; Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter; the horror sequel The Ring Two; the comedy Miss Congeniality 2; Michael Mann’s Collateral; M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, for which Howard received his sixth Oscar® nomination for Best Original Score; Hidalgo, starring Viggo Mortensen; and the live-action Peter Pan. Upcoming projects for Howard include Joe Roth’s Freedomland, Barry Sonnenfeld’s R.V., M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water and the as-yet-untitled sequel to Batman Begins.
Howard attended Santa Barbara’s Musical Academy of the West and the University of Southern California’s School of Music and completed his formal education with orchestration study under legendary arranger Marty Paich. Though his training was classical, he nurtured an interest in rock and pop. It was in his early work in the pop arena that he really honed his talents as songwriter, musician, arranger, producer and composer.
He spent two years doing session work for a variety of performers, from Carly Simon to Ringo Starr, and also recorded two solo albums. In 1975, he joined pop superstar Elton John’s band on the road and in the studio doing orchestrations and string arrangements. Having become one of the most sought-after musicians in the industry as a songwriter, record producer, conductor, keyboardist and film composer, he racked up a string of collaborations in the studio with some of pop’s biggest names, including Barbra Streisand, Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, Chaka Khan, Olivia Newton-John, Earth Wind & Fire, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart and Glenn Frey, among others.
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Triple Academy Award® winner PETER JACKSON, whose The Lord of the Rings trilogy made motion picture history, now brings his sweeping cinematic vision to one of the screen’s most enduring classics and one of the greatest filmic adventures of all time: King Kong.
Assuming directing, producing and co-screenwriting duties, Jackson turns his attention to the iconic tale immortalized in 1933 by adventurers-turned-filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack, who first conjured the indelible image of the gigantic ape atop the Empire State Building, protecting his human companion from an onslaught of attacking biplanes. Jackson refashions the tragic beauty-and-the-beast love story—infusing the spectacle of the tale with propulsive action and a poignant humanity—and gives us a Kong never before thought possible through the combined efforts and visual effects wizardry of the multiple-Oscar®-winning Weta Digital Ltd. and Weta Workshop Ltd.
King Kong is the culmination of the filmmaker’s near-lifelong dream—taking the best elements of the original story and adrenalizing them with up-to-the-minute effects magic and the alchemic talents of a superlative group of filmmakers, cast and crew.
It really comes down to one filmmaker’s continued fascination with a movie creature whose presence has impacted popular culture for nearly 75 years.
Jackson says, “It seems strange. I mean, King Kong has been part of my life for so long now. For 35 years, I’ve had this movie as my favorite film, and the fact that I’m remaking it now is an incredible dream come true. ”
Jackson’s decision to keep the tale in its original time and setting—the Depression Era of 1933—was a simple one, based on two deciding factors: “I just wanted to be able to have the climax of the film—which is obviously the iconic sequence of the biplanes attacking Kong on the top of the Empire State Building—and I couldn’t figure out a way that you could ever justify having biplanes attacking him if it was set in the modern day. Also, I think it gives the film a little kick sideways into a slightly fantastical realm as well. I think that there’s no real sense of mystery or discovery in the world anymore today. Yet in the 1930s, you could believe that there was one tiny, uncharted corner that hadn’t been discovered by man yet…this one tiny, little speck of an island on the ocean that could have slipped through the net.”
This world of 1933 New York is also of significance to the central female character of the story, Ann Darrow. As an actress in vaudeville, Ann earns a living by entertaining, by making people laugh—in songs, skits and with physical humor. Though her onstage persona is a happy one, her life away from the theater is hardly lighthearted. The inherent sadness in her character is palpable—in some ways, her outlook is mirrored by the Great Depression around her. (When she later meets Carl Denham, she offers a particularly character-defining line: “Good things never last, Mr. Denham.”) And now, Ann finds that her particular theatrical dedication has become a dying art form. She turns up to work one day and finds the theater shuttered, her job ended. It is this desperate situation that sends her out into the streets where she meets Denham, who convinces her to board the Venture…she just has to take the first step down a path towards her destiny.
When trying to find an actress who could play the multilayered levels of Ann’s character—the survival instinct, the grit, the underlying melancholy—the filmmakers had long wanted to work with Oscar® nominee Naomi Watts.
He says, “she’s such a great actress—she’s so true, so honest…every moment that she is playing she’s playing it from a place of complete emotional honesty. You can see it in her eyes. And so I really admired her work… But I’d never met her. And when the notion of doing King Kong came up, we knew that we had to cast somebody in the role that had been immortalized by Fay Wray.”
The draw for Watts was immediate.
It was later that Jackson arranged a meeting for Watts and himself—this time with the actress whose career became forever linked to the role of the beauty that bewitched the beast called Kong: Fay Wray.
When Jackson introduced Naomi as the woman playing Ann Darrow, Wray responded jokingly, “I’m Ann Darrow!”—Wray was still possessive of the role that brought her fame, despite the nearly 100 motion pictures she completed during her career.
At the close of the evening, when Wray whispered to Watts, “Ann Darrow is in good hands,” the actress felt that she had been blessed and entrusted to honor both the character and the woman who originated the role.
Wray’s failing health and passing in August 2004, ultimately prevented her from performing a cameo role in Jackson’s film.
If Ann Darrow is best remembered as the beauty of the story, then it is Carl Denham who must be classified as the brains behind the scheme that drives the events of King Kong. Whereas filmmakers chose to flesh out Darrow more than reinvent her, they were committed to finding a different take on the character of the flamboyant showman and auteur.
Then we started to think, ‘Well, maybe, he should be a little younger?’
That coincided with The School of Rock coming out and our children being obsessed with it—we ended up watching it 10 or 12 times over the Christmas holiday, and we liked Jack a lot in that. Then we started to think of the idea of him being Denham.”
“Jack brings a wonderful sense of humor—obviously, it goes without saying—to the role, which is important for the character because in some respects he’s flawed. We didn’t want him to be a villain. He’s simply somebody whose sense of excitement, his over?]ambition and his enthusiasm sometimes mean that he makes decisions that he shouldn’t really have made. And what Jack brings to the character is this wonderful sense of humor and this ‘rascalness,’ if you like, which means that we never judge him as being villainous…we just judge him as being flawed. In the context of the film, we wanted Denham to be somebody who’s not a bad person, but somebody who makes bad decisions.”
Black met with the filmmakers in Los Angeles and readily agreed to play the role.
Jackson, Walsh and Boyens went even further afield with their take on the character of Jack Driscoll (who in the 1933 version is the rough-and-tumble first mate to the captain of the Venture).
Once again, Jackson and the writers turned to other artistic figures of the time for inspiration, transforming Driscoll from an adventurous seaman to an intellectual, New York playwright, one who pens stage works of social consciousness and relevance…someone along the lines of Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller.
But as socially relevant works don’t sell as well as escapist entertainment in 1933, Driscoll has agreed to moonlight as the screenwriter of the latest exciting action yarn from his friend, Carl Denham.
“We thought of that approach first, without really thinking of an actor,” Jackson continues. “We just thought about changing the character. When we started to think about casting that particular character, Adrien Brody was right at the top of the list
Building a Shrewder Ape
Getting to the particular Kong at the center of Jackson’s remake was of paramount concern to filmmakers, and all involved had very strong ideas about how this Kong would be brought to the screen.
Philippa Boyens explains, “Very early on, right from the word ‘go,’ Peter wanted to make sure that the character of Kong was not a monster and was, in fact, a large silverback gorilla who happens to be 25 feet tall and 8,000 pounds. This Kong was not a monster and was not to be anthropomorphized.”
Jackson describes his central character: “We assumed that Kong is the last surviving member of his species. He had a mother and a father and maybe brothers and sisters, but they’re dead. He’s the last of the huge gorillas that live on Skull Island, and the last one when he goes…there will be no more. He’s a very lonely creature—absolutely solitary. It must be one of the loneliest existences you could ever possibly imagine. Every day, he has to battle for his survival against very formidable dinosaurs on the island, and it’s not easy for him. He’s carrying the scars of many former encounters with dinosaurs. I’m imagining he’s probably 100 to 120 years old by the time our story begins. And he has never felt a single bit of empathy for another living creature in his long life; it has been a brutal life that he’s lived.”
There was never any question what process would lead to the creation of Kong—he was always meant to be a wholly computer-generated creation. Yet after the groundbreaking, combined use of computer generation and motion capture (mo-cap) that led to The Lord of the Rings character Gollum, Jackson and his team began to explore a more advanced method of fashioning the Eighth Wonder of the World…and it would all begin with the involvement of the same actor who rendered Gollum such a mercurial, compelling and even (at times) sympathetic character: Andy Serkis.
“Certainly Kong himself was beyond anything we’d ever done before—just the huge complexity of what Kong is and what he has to be has been the most complicated thing we’ve ever done,” reflects Jackson. “Just giving him an ability to ‘act’ like an actor…but it’s not human, it’s a gorilla. And he has to do things the way gorillas do them. So, ultimately, you have to render it out as an artificial digital character. We’ve had to build a huge amount of emotion into his face and into his eyes. We’d literally been working on the digital model of Kong for nearly two years before we put him into shots.”
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It is 1933, and vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Oscar® nominee for 21 Grams, NAOMI WATTS) has found herself—like so many other New Yorkers during the Great Depression—without the means to earn a living. Unwilling to compromise and allow herself to sink into a career in burlesque, she considers her limited options while aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan. When her hunger drives her to unsuccessfully try to steal an apple from a fruit vendor’s stall, she is rescued—literally—by filmmaker and multiple hyphenate Carl Denham (JACK BLACK of The School of Rock).
It seems that the entrepreneur-raconteur-adventurer is no stranger to theft, having that day lifted the only existing print of his most recent and unfinished film from under his studio executives’ noses when they threatened to pull his completion funds. Carl has until the end of the day to get his crew onboard the Singapore-bound tramp steamer, the S.S. Venture, in hopes of completing his travelogue/action film. With that, the showman is certain he will finally achieve the personal greatness he knows awaits him around the corner…and although the crew believe that corner to be Singapore, Denham actually hopes to find and capture on film the mysterious place of legend: Skull Island.
Unfortunately for Carl, his headlining actress has pulled out of his project, but his search for a size-four leading lady (the costumes have all been made) has, fatefully, led him to Ann. The struggling actress is reluctant to sign on with Denham, until she learns that the up-and-coming, socially relevant playwright Jack Driscoll (Oscar® winner for The Pianist, ADRIEN BRODY) is penning the screenplay—the fees his friend Carl pays for potboiling adventure are a welcome supplement to Driscoll’s nominal income from his stage plays.
With his newly discovered star and coerced screenwriter reluctantly onboard, Denham’s “moving picture ship” heads out of New York Harbor…and toward a destiny that none aboard could possibly foresee.
Joining Watts, Black and Brody is an accomplished ensemble cast from around the globe. German star THOMAS KRETSCHMANN (U-571) portrays Captain Englehorn, commander of the Venture, who allows Denham and his ever-increasing bribes to persuade him to endanger the lives of his crew by searching for Skull Island. COLIN HANKS (Orange County) is Preston, Denham’s put-upon assistant and unwitting moral compass, who attempts to keep his boss in check and the production from spiraling out of control. Young actor JAMIE BELL (Billy Elliot) plays Jimmy, the youngest crew member, whose experiences onboard the Venture prove more fantastical than any old salt’s seafaring yarn. EVAN PARKE lends his talents to the role of first mate Hayes, keeping a watchful eye on young Jimmy and serving as Englehorn’s conscience.
KYLE CHANDLER takes on the character of Bruce Baxter, a “B”-movie-level leading man cast opposite Ann Darrow in Denham’s adventure movie. ANDY SERKIS (who performed the role of the CGI character Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy) provides both on-set performance reference and motion-capture performance for the “Eighth Wonder of the World”…the title character of King Kong; he also appears onscreen as the eccentric sailor in charge of the Venture’s galley, Lumpy the Cook.
To create the widely diverging worlds of two disparate settings—the urban jungle of 1930s Manhattan and the primordial environs of Skull Island, home to a lost race and a myriad of formidable, not-extinct creatures—Peter Jackson gathers an unparalleled team of film artisans, the majority with whom he enjoys longstanding collaborative relationships. These include: director of photography ANDREW LESNIE, who received the Academy Award® for his cinematography in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; production designer GRANT MAJOR, Oscar® winner for the third in the trilogy, The Return of the King; and film editor JAMIE SELKIRK, who likewise collected an Academy Award® for his artistry on the final installment of Jackson’s epic. Visual effects are again accomplished by New Zealand-based companies Weta Digital Ltd., under the direction of Oscar® winner JOE LETTERI (The Return of the King), and Weta Workshop Ltd., under the direction of Oscar® winner RICHARD TAYLOR (The Return of the King). The film is scored by six-time Academy Award® nominee JAMES NEWTON HOWARD (Batman Begins).
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1) King Kong
2) A Fateful Meeting
3) Defeat Is Always Momentary
4) Itís In The Subtext
5) Two Grand
6) The Venture Departs
7) Last Blank Space On The Map
8) It's Deserted
9) Something Monstrous
Neither Beast Nor Man
10) Head Towards The Animals
11) Beautiful
12) Tooth And Claw
13) That's All There Is
14) Captured
15) Central Park
16) The Empire State Building
17) Beauty Killed The Beast I
18) Beauty Killed The Beast Ii
19) Beauty Killed The Beast Iii
20) Beauty Killed The Beast Iv
21) Beauty Killed The Beast V
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NAOMI WATTS (Ann Darrow)
JACK BLACK (Carl Denham)
ADRIEN BRODY (Jack Driscoll)
THOMAS KRETSCHMANN (Captain Englehorn)
JAMIE BELL (Jimmy)
ANDY SERKIS (Kong / Lumpy the Cook)
PETER JACKSON (Director / Screenplay by / Produced by)
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD (Music by)
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