eter Jackson tells me that when he was nine years-old he saw the original 1933 version of King Kong for the first time. It is now 35 years later and Peter Jackson is now slimmed down, he was Oscars all over the place thanks to his recent success with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the movie that got his imagination going 35 years ago is back in the form of a brand new King Kong.

"It did inspire me to become a filmmaker, absolutely," Jackson said. "It had such a profound effect that I saw the original Kong on TV when I was nine on a Friday night in New Zealand, and that weekend I grabbed some Pleistocene and made a Brontosaurus out of Pleistocene and tried to animate the Pleistocene dinosaur. It was a moment in time that I wanted to do special effects, and do monsters and creatures, and ultimately lead to becoming a filmmaker. I didn't really know what directing was when I was nine; I was more about the monsters at that stage."

Whether he knew about directing or not doesn't matter. Jackson has already proved to the world that directing a massive production is well within his grasp, but what is it about King Kong that inspired him to remake such a classic film?

"The original Kong is just a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment," he said. "It has everything that is really cool about movies. A lost remote island, a giant ape, dinosaurs and it also has a wonderful heart and soul. It has this empathetic creature, that when I was nine I cried when he was killed on the Empire State Building, and that moment of shedding tears for him has stayed with me. That level of emotional engagement and pure escapism is what I personally like about the movies."

Hardcore fans of King Kong may be surprised at some of the differences between Jackson's vision and the original film. For starters Jack Driscoll is no longer the ship's first mate and even more noticeable is that Kong is no longer a mix of ape and man. Jackson and his visual effects team at WETA Digital wanted to make Kong a genuine silverback gorilla. Of course, filmmakers do take their liberties.

"Obviously as a filmmaker you are going to manipulate the character as you need to, to make the scenes work. I certainly don't deny that. We did set out to base him on a real gorilla as much as we possibly could." He continued, "Everybody thinks of him as being a gorilla anyway, so we studied silverback gorillas. Andy Serkis, who did a lot of the performance of Kong for us, especially studied gorillas in the mountains and he spent a lot of time at the zoo studying their behavior. So everything in the movie is based on some form or another of what a silverback gorilla would do, but obviously with a little bit of cheating and manipulation on the part of the filmmakers."

Even though Jackson went the route of making Kong a legitimate gorilla in his version he still had to find that delicate balance between human and animal emotion, "I didn't want to fall into the trap of making him too cute and making his behavior too cute. The point in the story where we wanted audiences to start to empathize with Kong I didn't want to stop him being dangerous. I didn't want to stop him at that point being a wild creature who can kill characters. It was interesting, the balance of wanting people to empathize with him but also keeping that edge to his character, making him unpredictable and always a wild animal at heart."

There is no doubt Kong is a wild animal as he takes on not one T-Rex but three and destroys 1930s New York, but for Peter Jackson the most important thing was making sure audiences were able to connect with Kong, even though the human aspects of the character found in the '30s version were no longer there.

"The biggest concern I had in terms of the film completely failing was if Kong wasn't completely believable, if you didn't connect with him. It was a difficult thing to pull off," Jackson continued, "it was much more difficult than the Gollum character that we did on Lord of the Rings. Gollum talked the whole time; so much of his character and so much of his role in the story and what he was, was able to be presented with his dialogue. You got to know [Gollum] a lot through what he said and yet Kong is completely mute and he has so much screen time and so many close ups. He's not only mute, but we deliberately reined him in and didn't want him to express very much most of the time. So that was the biggest challenge."

In order to create that believability Jackson not only employed WETA Digital, his very own effects house, but also gave Kong a beating heart, a heart that belonged to Andy Serkis.

"People would obviously think of Andy as the guy who does the motion capture for Kong, and he's in a suit and he acts out the role and we did all the motion capture of the character with Andy, but for me as the filmmaker, possibly one of Andy's greatest contributions was actually being on set with the actors when they originally shot the scenes. None of [his Kong performance] was captured on set, that was done in post-production, he wasn't even filmed. It was like Andy was just there for the other actors. Every close up of Naomi [Watts] when she is looking at Kong, she's actually looking at Andy. Andy would get himself into her eye line so that whenever she looked at Kong's face that would be where Andy was and he was acting his heart out as Kong. It was the beginning of the creation of that character that would then take it through the motion capture, into the animation and finally into the film."

Along with Andy Serkis and Naomi Watts, Peter Jackson also brings in Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll and Jack Black as the legendary Carl Denham as his new Kong is brought to life. Along with his cast he was also followed around set as the entire production was caught on camera for a series of online production diaries, which have now found their way to DVD.

With such a large cast, all the marketing and sheer size and scope of the production you would think his vision would get lost, or at least thrown off course, but Jackson contends he doesn't let any of that bother him as he maintains control of the production.

"That's the job of a director, to funnel all the creativity into one centralized point. The marketing is sort of something that really happens with other people, it's not something that I am at all an expert and I regard my job at the end of the day to making the best possible film I can and that's really where my job stops and marketing people take over after that."

Keeping all that in mind, Jackson is certainly being modest as he definitely knows how to get fans excited about his films. The production diaries aside it looks as if fans can be assured the same type of DVD treatment for Kong that we got from him for The Lord of the Rings.

"Even though the movie is three hours long there are quite a few scenes that we filmed that didn't make it into the finished movie. So some of those things that you're missing from the original film, I guess if we did an extended DVD, which hopefully we'll get a chance to do, we might see them popping up again," Jackson said.

One thing you will notice is that scenes from the initial teaser trailer didn't even make it into the final cut. The scene where Carl Denham asks Ann Darrow to scream for her life is nowhere to be found, but God willing it isn't lost forever, "That was a scene we had filmed and it obviously had been used as an important part of the teaser trailer but subsequently when we were dealing with this big length of film we started to refine it and started to look at it and trim it down as you do."

Jackson continued, "I think Universal is waiting until after the film is released before they decide what strategically they want to do. The tentative plan is to release the movie as it is in the theaters on DVD sometime in the middle of next year. Then there's certainly been talk of an extended cut, but we haven't started working on it yet.

"If I was putting in some other cool scenes we would have about another 30 or 40 minutes with additional stuff that we could do. There's some dinosaur sequences and things as well, it's not just drama and character stuff. There will be a two-disc DVD and if there is an extended one it will probably be three or four discs."

So with Kong in the can Jackson expects to take some time off from directing and get used to his new body and separate himself from the rigors of directing for a while, but I am sure you all know he is part of the producing team for the upcoming videogame adaptation Halo.

So why did he decide to produce and not direct? "I want to have all the fun and not the hard work. I just want to be part of the creative team."

When asked what attracted him to the film he said, "I'm a fan of the game," and when it was said that videogame movies suck he simply replied, "They do." So why do a videogame adaptation if they suck? "Well hopefully it won't suck."

Even though rumors of Guillermo del Toro directing Halo have begun floating around the Net, and word is that he has been approached regarding the film yet the deal is far from signed as Jackson answers whether there is a director yet by saying, "No, not yet, we're talking to some people."

King Kong opens in theaters everywhere on December 14, 2006.