King Kong2005

A. Well there’s actually a story to that. Warner Bros have just released a beautifully restored version of King Kong on DVD in the US. While we were making our King Kong, we also got our visual effects technicians to build stop-motion animation spiders and crabs and octopus creatures, copying photos that we had from the original film. We re-created the spider scene using stop-motion animation, black and white film, travelling mattes, rear projection – all the old techniques – so that we provided a speculation on what that original spider scene could be like. So when they released this DVD about three weeks ago we had this separate little chapter that we were involved in where we recreated the 1933 spider scene which we almost did concurrently when we were filming our own one. It was a little bit insane for a while!

Q. You play up the ‘Beauty & Beast’ relationship in the film. Was that deliberate?