  Director Peter Jackson tells actor Jack Black to go stand over there by the dinosaur while on the set of King Kong.
|
You haven't seen the last of Peter Jackson's controversial but thrilling version of King Kong, which launched on DVD yesterday.
The Kiwi filmmaker is preparing to edit an extended version of his three-hour, eight-minute epic about the Great Ape who ran afoul of human stupidity and died toppling from the Empire State Building in New York City.
"It's fun when we do the extended cuts on DVD," Jackson told the Sun by phone from his office in New Zealand this week, referring to the practice he started with extended DVD versions of each of his Lord Of The Rings films.
"I'm able to put scenes in that I cut out and we'll hopefully do an extended Kong cut at some stage in the future, because, even though the film is certainly long enough, there are some really fun scenes and some nice dinosaur action and some various bits and pieces that I'd love people to look at."
Not surprisingly, then, there are no deleted scenes on the two-disc Special Edition version of King Kong released yesterday by Universal Studios Home Entertainment (there is also a single-disc, stripped-down DVD version available).
"Yeah," Jackson says with a chuckle, "we're saving it."
The extended cuts of three of The Lord Of The Rings instalments changed the DVD culture, Jackson said.
"What you do is think about the DVD release and (ask the question): 'Is this the only DVD?' Some films have two DVD cycles where the original movie comes out with, hopefully, some interesting documentaries and some interesting extras features. Like the ones that we tried to put onto this one (King Kong). And then, much later on, there are the extended cuts."
On The Lord Of The Rings, Jackson heard from many fans and critics (including this one) that the extended versions were better films and paradoxically felt shorter because they flowed better with the extra scenes. "We put them in because we thought fans of Tolkien would like to see them, because they were part of adapting his books," Jackson said.
"So many people said that they preferred the extended cuts. That's what always used to amaze me. That's where it gets interesting with DVD, because I don't know whether they would have felt that if they had sat in a cinema watching an extended version for another 30 or 40 minutes or whatever.
"That's the factor of watching films in your own home, which makes the length of the film less important because you're in your own environment."
The home environment is also ripe for the extras, Jackson said. The Special Edition of King Kong includes the post-production diaries -- with the typical on-set making-of insights -- and also two impressive documentaries, one on New York during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the other a mythical natural history of Skull Island, where the Kong expedition finds the world's last surviving dinosaurs.
"They were ideas that came out of our extensive research and preparation for the film," Jackson said. "We thought it would be fun to take all of our research material and present it in a way that wasn't the usual behind-the-scenes."
