Peter Jackson To Take Hiatus After 'King Kong'

King Kong
Peter Jackson, who went directly from helming the epic Lord of the Rings movies to his upcoming King Kong remake, told SCI FI Wire that he's actually going to take some time off.

"We got to get through this and take ... time off and write some scripts, basically," Jackson said in an interview by satellite from New Zealand during post-production on Kong back in September. "Next year we're ... going to rest. ... I can't begin to describe how tired I am, you know?"

Jackson has spent the better part of the last decade working either on the three Lord of the Rings movies or his long-anticipated remake of 1933's Kong, which opens this week nationwide. Because he took no break in between, Jackson characterized Kong as "like a fourth Lord of the Rings film."

Jackson said that he wanted to go straight into Kong "because it just seemed crazy not to, in the sense that we had this ... incredibly well-oiled ... pipeline down there in New Zealand for doing big, complicated visual-effects films. And we were able to keep everybody on board. ... During the year that we did the post-production on Return of the King, we were doing animatics [animated storyboards] for King Kong, like the Tyrannosaurus fight. ... And then we were immediately able to finish off the miniatures on Return of the King and start shooting the jungle shots for the [King Kong] T. Rex fights with the miniature team."

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