When you're young, your favorite movies can leave quite an impression on you. For a nine-year-old boy in New Zealand, it set him on the path towards becoming a filmmaker. Indeed, Peter Jackson's first viewing of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 epic "King Kong" on a tiny television screen inspired him to make movies. In a 2005 interview with NBC News, Jackson said the film had a "profound effect" on him and described its titular ape as "a very special little chap" who captured his heart. When he was 12, he even made a rubber Kong and cardboard model of the Empire State Building and tried to animate it using his parents' Super-8 camera.
What was it about "King Kong" that Peter Jackson loved so much? In an interview with CHUD, he once described the film as "a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment. It has everything that's really cool about movies like a lost, remote island, a giant ape, dinosaurs, and it also has this wonderful heart and soul." Jackson was particularly drawn to the "terrible inevitability" of Kong's tragic fate on the Empire State Building that made him cry. "You feel almost feel ashamed to be a human being when you see what happens to him. I mean, he is ultimately a pure-heart," he reflected while speaking to NBC News.
How fitting then, that this little boy would grow up to make movies with all sorts of monstrous creatures, from zombies and orcs to ghosts and goblins. Much like the stop-motion animation of Kong in the 1930s, Jackson would also go on to create technological marvels with Weta Workshop, most notably the groundbreaking motion-capture design of Gollum, which would forever change the landscape of cinema.