From the Mrshowbiz.com site

***Please note this article is old and the King Kong project isn't happeneing now!***

New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson is one

spooky guy

By Jane Wollman Rusoff

DIRECTOR-SCREENWRITER Peter Jackson was born on Halloween--a birth date
that may explain his attraction to the horror genre. Bad Taste, Jackson's first
feature film, was notable for its blood-and-vomit humor. (Naturally, it became
a cult classic.) Jackson followed up with Braindead (Dead Alive in the States),
a gruesome 1992 comedy about zombies, and Heavenly Creatures, the true story of
two teenage girls who bludgeon one of their mothers to death. His most recent
offering, The Frighteners, which opened last Friday, stars Michael J. Fox as a
con artist in cahoots with the ghosts he is paid to exterminate; the director
describes it as a cross between Casper and Silence of the Lambs. Despite his
résumé, Jackson refuses to be pigeonholed as a horror filmmaker. "I don't really
like horror movies as such," he says, "especially ones that take themselves
seriously. I'm more influenced by good direction--some of Martin Scorsese's or
James Cameron's films--good directors who really know how to tell a story."

Jackson's own story begins thirty- four years ago in Wellington, New Zealand. He
grew up the only child of a factory-worker mother and an accounting-clerk father,
and was seduced by scary movies at an early age. One of his all-time favorites
was The Premature Burial, a 1962 spooker directed by Roger Corman and starring
Ray Milland. ("If you got buried alive, you could pull a string and a little bell
rang on the top of the grave, telling people to dig you up," says Jackson.)

As a teenager, Jackson left school and went to work as an apprentice photo
engraver; after-hours, he worked on Bad Taste. In between the four films he has
since produced, directed, and co-written with his wife, Fran Walsh (Meet the
Feebles, Braindead, Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners), the versatile Jackson
did time as an actor (in a 1993 Swedish comedy called The Last Dance), a
production assistant (War of the Roses), and a stunt double (on Grampire, a 1992
New Zealand yukker about an American kid who discovers that gramps is a vampire).
Though audiences haven't exactly been flocking to The Frighteners, it's doubtful
that Jackson will be forced to fall back on those talents again.

The film's executive producer, Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis, bought The
Frighteners on the basis of a two-page outline. "We'd sent [the outline] to our
agent saying this was something we would be interested in developing one day in
the future," says Jackson. "Then, when Bob put out the word that he was looking
for a Tales From the Crypt feature, the outline was sent to him. But he didn't
want to use the story for Tales, because he thought it was unique and could stand
on its own."

Michael J. Fox was the only actor Jackson considered for the lead. "There isn't a
long list of actors that can play comedy and drama," he says. "This character is
grappling with his demons, and I didn't want to lose the audience's sympathy when
he does the dramatic stuff. I wanted someone who was likable, and Michael was one
of those actors who had an inherent likability."

Inherent likability might also describe the horror/sci-fi genre in which, despite
his protestations, Jackson seems most at home. "These things work in twenty- or
thirty-year cycles," says Jackson. "In the eighties, it was all those Nightmare
on Elm Street and slasher films. A few years ago, we had big-budget horror movies
like Frankenstein and Interview With the Vampire, but those were not very good and
not very successful. Now, we're at the very beginning of the aliens-from-space
cycle that was actually big in the fifties."

What's next? Well, for Jackson, at least, it's a remake of King Kong. He and Walsh
are working on the script now, and they hope to start filming next year. The 1933
classic, starring Fay Wray, stands as "one of the great films," says Jackson, who
has seen the original forty or fifty times. (He dismisses the 1977 remake, with
Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges, as "terrible.") "There's room for another Kong,
because ninety-five percent of the new generation hasn't seen, or has no interest
in seeing the original black-and-white film. So if we can try to recreate the
sense of wonderment of the original, it's like passing the baton and making sure
that King Kong doesn't fade away and die."