Peter Jackson Talks 'King Kong' Spider Pit

[Friday, December 9th, 2005]
Peter JacksonPeter Jackson, writer and director of the upcoming King Kong remake, says that he couldn't resist the urge to resurrect the legendary 'spider pit' sequence from the original 1933 movie. "The spider pit scene is, obviously, [speaking] as a King Kong fan, ... a mythic scene that was a sequence in the original film that was cut at the last minute," Jackson told Sci-Fi Wire. "It's become mythic because no prints of it survived, and there's a couple of still images. I wanted to put it in [the new film] as a Kong fan, because I thought it would be really cool to see King Kong and have a version of the spider pit scene in there."

In the scene, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and Carl Denham (Jack Black) find themselves with other survivors at the bottom of a deep canyon, beset by giant bugs and disgusting slug-like creatures. "It was also a rare opportunity for us to show a little bit more of Skull Island, because one of the things that I really like about the story of Kong is the island and all the creatures and all the inhabitants of the island and the way that it's sort of [a] hell-on-earth kind of jungle that's survived over the years," Jackson said. "As much as I like the tyrannosauruses and brontosauruses and classical dinosaurs, I wanted to make sure we put in a few original creepy crawlies on the island as well. So the spiders gave us a chance to do that."

Jackson also revealed that he helped re-create the original spider pit scene as an extra on the current DVD release of the original King Kong, using 1930s-era film techniques. Jackson's King Kong opens on December 14th.

More On 'King Kong'...

E-Mail This Article » Share your comments on 'King Kong'