King Kong - Naomi Watts interview

Naomi Watts talks about the making of King Kong, what scares her and how she mastered green screen. She was speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. You grew up in England and Australia. Do you still consider yourself to be a part of both?

Naomi Watts: I’m very much both, English and Australian. I spent the first 14 years of my life here, only eight in Kent and then we moved around a lot.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, is Australian and my mother had just come back from a holiday there and thought it would be fitting to move there – much to my chagrin at the time. I was so young and just forming my peer groups, but I did go over there and lived there for about 10 years until I moved to America, so I spent longer in England than I did in Australia. I have a British passport. I haven’t been back to Kent since, though, I must admit.

Q. You once vowed never to do green screen work. So how did you find it now that you have?

Naomi Watts: I don’t think I ever vowed not to do it! What I said was that I thought it would be difficult. I’d only worked with it once before, a tiny bit on The Ring, and I found that challenging. It was actually ok and we mixed it up, there was some blue screen in there as well. But when I heard the way Peter talked about it, it was clear to me that he’d got it all worked out. The first thing he said, which was key to me, was that he would be using an actor to play Kong. I still didn’t get my head around it completely, until we got on set, but it just meant that I wasn’t going to be looking at a ball on a stick moving around the stage.

With Peter having done it for seven years I knew it was going to be very well done and that was the feeling when I got on set, the things they created to facilitate the imagination, the animated story boards, which were very helpful to me, and we used a lot of music in the scenes that were dialogue free.

They were very careful in the choice of music, to match it to the nature of the scene, because music can really play with your emotions.

Q. Did you have to become an expert juggler for the role? Or were you good at it already?

Naomi Watts: Yes absolutely, we did it in one take and I never dropped a thing [laughs]. I shouldn’t lie, I moved my hands like this [up and down] and Peter put the stones in afterwards!

Q. What scares you, heights?

Naomi Watts: I didn’t think I was afraid of heights until I went up the Empire State Building. It was a windy day and the ledge only comes up to your waist. I didn’t think I was afraid of heights but I’d never been up to such a great height before. Now, what else am I scared of? That’s private!