A King Kong for our time

By Jasper Rees

The history of “King Kong” is the history of cinema’s experimentation with technology. When he was first unveiled in 1933, he revolutionised the possibilities of cinema. The original Kong was the creation of Willis O’Brien, the godfather of stop-motion technology who fashioned a miniature ape from clay and rubber and secreted a football bladder inside to mimic his breathing. More than 80 years on, a new film, “Kong: Skull Island”, stars a rippling, raging CGI colossus.

For the first remake in 1976, Kong was played by an actor-animator in an ape suit, injecting life into his eyes and comedy into his lust for Jessica Lange’s sacrificial blonde. A giant model was also built for the film, at a cost of $500,000, but it was so lifeless that it was used for only 15 seconds. Spool on another three decades and Peter Jackson, whose version of “King Kong” came out in 2005, had access to computers. Thanks to his work on “Lord of the Rings”, he had spent several years at the frontier of special effects. As Kong he cast Andy Serkis, the actor who’d played Gollum, who wore extended prosthetic arms, a motion-capture suit and 150 3D digital sensors on his face to record every twitch. The result was an emotional ape of breathtaking naturalism. Serkis went on to do similar work in the “Planet of the Apes“ franchise alongside Terry Notary, Hollywood’s go-to movement coach who is the motion-capture performer now playing the monster in “Kong: Skull Island”.