The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly includes an interview with "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy director Peter Jackson talking about his upcoming adaptation of King Kong. Naomi Watts will play the big ape's love object, Ann Darrow. Adrien Brody will play Darrow's boyfriend, former WWII pilot Jack Driscoll, and Jack Black will be blustery adventurer Carl Denham, who imports Kong to Manhattan.

"We are not reinventing it," says Jackson referring to the 1933 original film. "Our story follows the same structure. It starts in New York, goes to Skull Island, and there's dinosaurs on the island. Then it comes back to New York and there's the Empire State Building and the biplanes and the whole thing."

He says that one thing they're trying to do that the original didn't is to make it more "emotionally truthful. I put that ahead of anything else, including technology and the realism of the effects," he adds.

"Everybody's image of 'King Kong' is that it's this amazing beauty-and-the-beast love story. And when you look at the original film, there is as sense that Kong is feeling an attraction toward Ann-probably the first empathy he's felt in his life toward another living creature. But Ann is not giving him a thing. She just looks at him as an object of horror the entire time. She screams at him, she's terrified. Her relationship with Kong doesn't go beyond that. We're having a lot of fun making it more psychologically real."

King Kong will be headed for theaters in December of 2005.