I was just reading this interview with Peter Jackson on Dark Horizons when he talks about the King Kong DVD:
"Question: Do you think DVD has in some way then become a kind of saving grace for a filmmaker like yourself?
Jackson: Well... DVD I think has helped all studios because I think, it has given studios a secondary profit stream, that they've never had in the past. I mean you look at films that were made in the 1960s and '70s and, and, they had one or two ways of earning money which was the theatrical release and then obviously eventually to TV. But, there's been endless amounts of invention of income streams for films, not just DVD but I guess pay TV and airlines and hotels' TV and all that sort of thing, so I think everything helps because I think it allows - as the cost of films go up -the studios to sort of keep up with the rising cost of films. But I think it certainly feels it's getting to a limit now it's not going down but the rise of the DVD is obviously slowing down, which has got studios in a slight panic.
Question: When you were making the film, was DVD as much on your mind as getting a theatrical cut ready?
Jackson: No. No. I mean essentially the DVD that's being released now is the theatrical cut, so, no, you're always just making the film for the big screen.
Question: Can you talk about, some of the major add-ons in this DVD?
Jackson: Well the main thing that, that we've put into the DVD - which is something that the fans have wanted and asked for, is the postproduction diaries, which was never intended for the DVD at all. We did those obviously as a sort of online, event which picked up a momentum of its own. But there was this ongoing request to have them all on a DVD in the same place, and obviously at a much better quality. So we released half of them - because there were so many that they would have had to create an extra disc for them just to put them on this release. So we released the production diaries, concurrently with the theatrical film and then this release has the postproduction diaries so it completes the whole set. And then we did a couple of documentaries, because I guess so much of the making of the film has been covered by the production and postproduction diaries that rather than just sort of show an expansion of that - even though there's a lot of stuff that we have held back - we decided to create a couple of documentaries that are just a little different; the background to New York in the 1930s and then this documentary about Skull Island. So we thought it would just be kind of fun to do a couple of documentaries that were just a little different from the usual EPK type, stuff that you often see on DVRAB.
Question: And no major deleted scenes or anything like that?
Jackson: No, that's all been saved for, ... it depenRAB on Universal making a decision, but they seem to be pretty, keen on the idea of doing a 3 or 4 disc release, towarRAB the end of the year which would include deleted scenes and bloopers and a whole new raft of docos that would go a lot deeper into the technical stuff of the making of the film that we couldn't show in the production diaries."
