Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson made his first film of King Kong when he was nine, using his mother's fur coat for his jungle monster. Now, after several years, and two failed attempts, his tribute to beauty and the beast opens next week. Steve Pratt reports.

Being an Oscar-winning director has taken Peter Jackson to places that the rest of us can't go - like the very top of the Empire State Building. Preparing to remake the classic King Kong movie, he decided to see for himself the iconic New York building where the story's climax takes place, as the giant gorilla clings to the top as planes try to shoot him down.

Jackson was allowed to climb higher than the public viewing gallery. "I asked if I could go to the top as a King Kong fan," explains the New Zealand-born director of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. "They unlocked these doors and I went up through a trap door to the very top - the flat bit about 6ft in diameter on the dome. That's the very top of the building."

The gorilla, of course, had to make do with climbing a model of the building in the big screen classic, not the real thing like Jackson. There's not much he couldn't ask for and get at the moment. The success of his Tolkien screen trilogy gave him the clout to achieve his lifelong dream of remaking the 1933 film King Kong. He's finally achieved that at the third attempt, delivering a three-hour epic that cost more than $200m.

King Kong holds a special place in his heart because the film inspired him to be a movie-maker. He first saw the beauty and the beast classic on TV as a nine-year-old. It made such an impact that young Peter decided to make his own version. "Three years later, when I thought I'd developed the necessary skills, I borrowed my parents' Super 8 movie camera and made a little model of Kong out of wire, rubber and my mother's fur coat," he recalls.

He didn't get very far, but King Kong stayed with him and he became a big fan of Ray Harryhausen, whose stop motion animation helped bring the gorilla to life on screen. "It was really wanting to be a monster-maker," he says. "I loved creatures and monsters, and eventually found out what a director was. I've always harboured this desire to one day, if I was ever lucky enough, to remake King Kong. That's what I really wanted to do."

He tried for the second time in the mid-1990s, only to have the studio cancel the project several months into pre-production. He went off and made The Lord Of The Rings instead. The worldwide success of that trilogy enabled him to be third time lucky and actually remake King Kong. He must be happy to have achieved his dream finally. "Yeah," he agrees, still bearded and unkempt but considerably slimmer than when the final Lord Of The Rings film premiered.

"As a film-maker, you're making films because you want people to enjoy them. There's no other reason. I'm not a film-maker with a message to tell or something I want to impart to the world. I just want to entertain people. I'm always pleased when a film I've made gets a reception and people enjoy it - and this particular film is sort of a lifetime ambition of mine," he says.

His obsession with King Kong extends to collecting memorabilia from the original film and he's kept an eye out for stuff coming up at auction and in sales. Some of his collection can be seen in the new picture, including original gas bombs thrown at the gorilla and shields used by natives. He also paid homage with little snatches of dialogue culled from the first King Kong. "I do have some of the original dinosaurs but couldn't think of a way to get them into the film," he adds.

He approached the project - scripted with regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens - emotionally rather than intellectually. "I felt I was a huge King Kong fan and to be that simple about it," he says. "If someone did a remake of King Kong today, I would be in the front row with my bag of popcorn and as excited as hell to see what they could do.

"As a film-maker I believe in collaborating with people and having as free a set as we can. At the end of the day, it's very selfish because all I am ultimately trying to achieve is the movie I want to go and see."

King Kong had already been remade in the 1970s with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges starring but flopped critically and at the box-office. Jackson's version emphasises the beauty and the beast element, with Naomi Watts' Ann forming a bond with her furry kidnapper. He sees the relationship between girl and gorilla as different in all three versions.

"Fay's (Fay Wray in the original film) character was an unwilling kidnap victim who always felt uncomfortable and was always screaming. There were no scenes in the original where she connected or understood Kong. The Jessica Lange one was kind of weird 70s innuendo. They camped up the sexuality, which we didn't want to do," he says.

"To me, the most interesting thing about a story like King Kong is to go through the reality door and say, 'if you were kidnapped by a gorilla, how would you respond?'. You're in his hands and your options are very few, but how would you feel and what would you do? If you can keep him curious and engage with him on some level, it stops you getting squashed. You have a minute opportunity to stay alive.

"Then you flip it around and think if you're a gorilla who's lived his entire life on this island, is the last of his species, has never empathised with a living creature and his entire instincts are to kill and survive. Suddenly Ann comes into his life when he's expecting to kill and doesn't. He starts to become curious and the relationship develops into one from Kong's point of view that he wants to protect her.

"There are no villains, there are no monsters. It's an interestingly complex story of people doing what they have to do to survive. Kong behaves in a way that's perfectly normal and we shouldn't judge him for it."

It sounds silly to be talking about motivation when the subject is a gorilla but Jackson's passion for his leading player, even if he isn't flesh and blood, translates on screen.

In his 187-minute version, Jackson has included a sequence cut from the original, in which the explorers on Skull Island fall into a ravine and are attacked by giant spiders, crabs and octopus-type creatures. He's even recreated the scene for the DVD release of a restored version of the original King Kong.

"While we were making our film, we got our visual effects technicians to build stop motion animated versions of the creatures, copying photos from the original. We recreated the scene using all the old techniques and it's been put into the film," says Jackson.

Now Jackson plans to take time off to recharge his batteries and brain cells, although he has scripts he wants to write, including a project with our own Film Four. "For a while, it's going to be a little bit of a holiday. We made the first attempt to do King Kong in 1996 and then did The Lord Of The Rings. It's been ten years of my career just working on two projects," says Jackson.

* King Kong (12A) opens in cinemas on Thursday.