Peter Jackson Talks 'King Kong' Remake

The lead female, originally played by Fay Wray in 1933, would need to have a good set of pipes, [Jackson] said, given her part requires a lot of screaming. "That will be part of the auditions, I guess, asking them to scream. We'll have to do it in a sound-proofed room."

Two-thirds of the film is set on the mysterious Skull Island - which is supposed to be somewhere near Sumatra in the story - so location scouts would be looking for a jungle-type location and beaches around the country. The New York set for the last act of the movie would be shot in Wellington because filming in New York would be too expensive and too difficult to get the right 1930s look, Jackson said.

"We will build somewhere in the Wellington area. We'll just find some flat land and build a big back block set of New York streets and then use our computers to extend the buildings, make the streets longer and the buildings higher. It may just be a field somewhere on someone's farmland."

On a scale of one to ten, Jackson anticipates King Kong will be a nine-and-a-half, with mammoth special effects.

King Kong and all the dinosaurs will be computer-generated and as real as the wretched Gollum in The Two Towers, he said.