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Making the perfect
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.”
The screenwriters began to fashion
a mythology for Kong that dovetailed with the original 1933 concept, but
also gave them a wider playing field for their special silverback gorilla.
The Skull Islanders have long deified the giant gorilla species, though
none can even remember how this came to be. It is simply accepted that at
regular intervals throughout the year, a woman is lashed to the
sacrificial altar and offered up to the last remaining ape-god; the
gorilla is summoned, and he snatches the girl and leaves. Once Kong
returns to his killing ground, he quickly tires of the terrified girl and
kills her. When the presence of the strangers from the Venture—most
notably, Ann—triggers the islanders to offer this intriguing, blond
creature during a special ceremony, Kong’s Pavlovian response kicks in;
he is summoned and rushes away with the offering.
But Ann is different than the
other girls and is far from accepting of her lot. She fights, she flees,
she challenges her captor—and at the point where it seems that he will
soon kill her, she launches into a demonstration of her skill set obtained
from her career in vaudeville (a tough crowd is a tough crowd, whether in
New York or the jungles of a no-longer-lost island). She fascinates Kong
long enough that he starts to view her as something more than prey; his
curiosity is piqued. The solitary warrior’s existence is, momentarily,
no longer as painful.
Even with this more detailed story of the beginnings of the relationship
between Kong and Ann, the filmmakers were adamant that Kong always remain
a gorilla—an imposing, frightening, brutal beast governed by the laws of
nature and animal behavior and one whose, once he allows another living
creature to soften his predatory nature and introduce vulnerability,
eventual downfall is assured.
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.”
Casting Serkis as Kong gave
Jackson and his team not only an actor who could take direction and make
the creative process of filming a two-way street (digital creations hardly
ever offer thoughts on their motivations or suggestions for a bit of
blocking), but also someone physically there for his fellow cast members.
Jackson continues, “We cast Andy Serkis as Kong—which in itself may
seem strange—but I really wanted a human actor to be making the
decisions that a performer would normally make if they were playing the
role. I wanted somebody who I could talk to on-set who was Kong. I wanted
somebody to be on-set for Naomi to perform with. I didn’t want to get
into a situation where, because Kong was a digital character, he was
basically invisible—I wanted to make him visible. I wanted to make him
tangible. I wanted to be able to discuss the role with an actor. And I
ultimately wanted an actor to perform the part of Kong. And so all those
things were possible by casting Andy.”
Serkis remembers being invited
over to Jackson and Walsh’s house for lunch in April of 2003, during the
period when pick-up shots were being executed for The Return of the King.
During the visit, the hosts brought out pictures of Snowflake, an albino
gorilla from the Barcelona Zoo, and explained to Serkis their intention to
build on the advances achieved with the creation of Gollum in creating
Kong in a remake of the classic movie. Jackson and Walsh wanted to utilize
an actor to make decisions for the character, to provide on-set reference
for the other actors and to serve as a motion capture reference for the
final CGI creation…and they wanted that actor to be Serkis.
In the following months, work on the final film of Jackson’s Rings
trilogy was completed and the film was released. During that time, Serkis
considered the meeting that had taken place. He explains, “It sort of
dawned on me at that point that Gollum had been well received, and by then
we were aware that he had set a benchmark as a CG character that was
believable and that had an emotional content. And I knew that because Pete
was so passionate about King Kong, it was never going to be a monster
movie. The fact that he showed me pictures of Snowflake—who is a very
idiosyncratic gorilla—I knew that Kong was going to have character and
an emotional arc.”
During the nascent stages of the
project, the literary character of Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame
(particularly as performed by Charles Laughton in the classic film
version), provided some character references to which the filmmakers and
Serkis could relate. Serkis also began his own research, constructing a
mental model of whom Kong would be. He relates, “For this 2005 audience,
I felt it was very important that we made him quadrupedal and rooted in
gorilla behavior—we wanted to include, as much as possible, accepted
animal behavior research and the psychological research that had been
conducted on gorillas by such people as Dian Fossey. People know a lot
more about the gorilla than they did in Cooper’s time. So we made
decisions such as he wouldn’t eat the flesh of the dinosaur, because
gorillas are vegetarian—people know that.”
Even though the digital and effects masters at Weta had fashioned a
breakthrough creation with Gollum, filmmakers accepted that the same
techniques would not serve Kong as successfully. Certain limitations had
to be overcome. Jackson explains, “The Weta animators were going to have
to do a huge amount of work, because in many respects, the animation on
Kong is more important than Gollum—a lot of that character was motion
captured. But there is a significant number of things that Kong is doing
that Andy can’t do: a lot of climbing, running and dinosaur fighting.
And there is very little of Andy’s motion capture in there—a lot of
that is just traditional key frame animation. So Andy and the animators
had to work very closely to create the character.”
And while Gollum’s facial
expressions were modeled on human emotional responses (Serkis’ in
particular), Kong would be expressing his emotions through the facial
structure of a gorilla. So a straightforward motion capture of Serkis’
face during the eventual mo-cap stage of filming would not produce
realistic gorilla expressions by simple transference to the CGI
Kong.
This was an undertaking that perplexed the animators, but it was vital to
Kong appearing lifelike. To resolve the situation, Weta craftsmen built
Kong with the correct musculature and skeletal structure of a gorilla and
developed software that would translate human expressions into
corresponding (though not always similarly appearing) gorilla expressions.
With this solution, the mo-cap markers on Serkis’ face could communicate
most emotions that Kong would feel. For example, when Jackson wanted the
ape to express rage, Serkis’ angry expressions would be transmitted and
transferred into the gorilla facial expression that indicates rage.
Weta Digital’s senior visual
effects supervisor Joe Letteri explains, “The motion capture we did with
Kong was a new way of using technology. It’s a combination of things
that have been done in the past, but we’ve brought them together in a
unique way. We have created a system that’s based on emotional states.
It depends on us figuring out all the muscles of the face and
understanding the correspondence between a human facial system and a
gorilla facial system. What that allows us to do is to look at how muscles
work together to create believable expressions. We then extract this
muscle-by-muscle technique into something that’s much more emotional.
The facial animation system for Kong is the next generation of the facial
system we built for Gollum.”
This care and concern was key to the development of Kong, especially in
light of all of the behavioral data currently available on gorillas…and
all the research Serkis himself conducted into the species. Prior to the
start of principal photography, the actor immersed himself in books and
videos on gorillas; during that time he became convinced that he needed to
study them both in captivity and in the wild to get at the heart of
portraying Kong. He first ventured down to Howletts Wild Animal Park in
Kent (two hours outside of London), where the band of gorillas numbers
around 70—making it one of the largest groups (or “shrewdness” of
apes) in captivity. He then became a regular at the London Zoo in Regents
Park, where he befriended one of the keepers who allowed him to get close
to the four gorillas housed in the zoo. That closeness came at a price.
Serkis explains, “There are three females and one poor male named Bob,
who was brought up in a circus and therefore had no experience being the
alpha male…so the females were constantly giving him a hard time. Over
the course of a few months, I’d go in every two or thee days and spend
time with them and feed them. And I formed a relationship with one of the
females, named Zaire. When my wife came to visit with me, Zaire didn’t
like it one bit—she grabbed a water bottle and threw it at my
wife.”
Whenever the actor was in a
holding pen between the cages, observing Bob and Zaire, Bob would hurl
himself at the cage, punching the bars nearest to Serkis. Another time,
when the actor was videoing the apes, Bob pitched a handful of stones at
the camera, scratching the lens and startling Serkis.
Just prior to filming, Serkis traveled with a leading primatologist to
observe the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, visiting the same group that
Fossey herself had studied. It was during this visit that he gained
invaluable, firsthand insight into the animal’s vocalizations,
behavioral patterns and hierarchy, and methods of non-verbal
communication.
Serkis sums up, “I suppose the
most important thing that I learned from observing at the London Zoo and
in Rwanda was that when you talk about studying gorillas, it’s like
saying ‘studying human beings,’ because there are individual,
idiosyncratic differences. You will have a very moody gorilla, a very
loving gorilla, a very uptight gorilla, a very relaxed gorilla. And so,
apart from learning stock gorilla behavior in terms of physicality and
things like that, I was able to begin to make individual character
choices. In a way, I guess it was frightening—so who is Kong after it
all? It wasn’t like it narrowed it down…it opened it up. And I think
that was the thing that was we realized when we eventually started to
shoot Kong during the performance capture stage.”
But before shooting any of the
sequences where the gigantic ape was involved, Serkis would be utilized in
a much more human way, manning the galley of the Venture as Lumpy the
Cook. Jackson quips, “This is the first time we actually got to shoot
extended drama sequences together, in the full knowledge that Andy would
not be ‘painted out’ after the fact, as he was with Gollum.”
Next: Filming Kong
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