NEW YORK -- Peter Jackson went ape over "King Kong" the first time he saw the film as a 9-year-old in New Zealand.

"It made me want to make films," says the Oscar-winning director of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. "It affected me in a way that I can remember today the night that I saw it.

"The very next day, I got my parents' Super 8 movie camera and started to do stop-motion animation with a clay dinosaur -- a clay Brontosaurus actually -- that I made, and I started to do frame-by-frame animation.

"I've always wanted to remake 'Kong' 'cause it's my favorite film, and it's a wonderful story. And as a film fan and as a 'King Kong' fan I really wanted to see it done with the technology that we have now. ... I've been trying to make it for about 10 years. I tried to do it before 'Lord of the Rings,' and it didn't happen then. I actually tried to make it when I was 12 on Super 8 and didn't do it then either. So it's a long ambition of mine."

Jackson's "King Kong," which arrived in theaters yesterday, tells the story of a scheming filmmaker, Carl Denham (Jack Black), who tricks actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) into joining him on a voyage to Skull Island, rumored to be the home of unusual creatures.

The residents of the island kidnap Ann and offer her as a sacrifice to the giant gorilla, Kong, who rules the roost. But Ann senses Kong's loneliness and finds a way to connect with him other than as a toy to be broken. As she works her magic on Kong, her comrades from the ship try to come to her rescue and run into all sorts of icky, prehistoric creatures.

Jackson, 44, says he didn't want to make a slavish re-creation of the 1933 film.

"I just approached it, I guess, in a similar way to 'Lord of the Rings' in the sense that I felt that I just wanted to make a film that I'd enjoy as a 'King Kong' fan going to see it," he says. "I didn't want to overly analyze what I should or shouldn't do vis a vis the 1933 film because in a sense the 1933 film is a classic movie. It is what it is and will always exist."

Jackson and his co-screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, used Orson Welles as their inspiration for Denham and Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill as their starting point for Driscoll.

"We always take the approach when dealing with these fantastical stories that ... the more of the real world you can put in, then the better the fantasy works," he tells reporters in a press conference at the Regency Hotel.

The sensuality between Ann and Kong that was in the original film is downplayed here.

"I think it's an interesting aspect of the first film," says Jackson. "I think it's up to personal taste, really. As a 'King Kong' fan, it's not really what I'm interested in in terms of the story. I'm interested in the big gorilla and the lost island and the dinosaurs and the relationship ... I just find it interesting that a brutal creature like Kong, who has never empathized with any living creature, starts to form an attachment with Ann.

"There's a gorilla called Koko, who's a gorilla they taught to speak in signs, and there's some great photos of Koko with a pet cat that she got, a fluffy white cat, and she's cradling the cat, and she loves it. You can just see the amount of love and affection that she's got.

"And I've always remembered those photos, and in my mind, that sums up more of the relationship between Ann and Kong. He's curious about her, and he comes to want to protect her. ... And of course the real tragedy of Kong is that that's the beginning of the end. That's his downfall."