“Grant and I had a lot of discussions to work out the lighting systems for the New York set,” says Lesnie. “He showed me black-and-white photos of 1930s New York at night that had the contrast I was after for this film. The stills were taken in available light, which, of course, was the artificial light of the city. I decided that a good night look for the set would emphasize practicals and have a weak ambient light, almost like a winter twilight. Grant and I designed the practical lights in the set — the lights in shop windows, the street lamps, the lights of the burlesque theater — and absolutely everything was routed to a single dimming control. To represent the iconic billboards of Times Square, we placed banks of colored Par cans above some buildings as interactive lighting.”

In creating the ambient light, Lesnie knew he would need a large, soft source that would prove durable in Wellington’s windy conditions. Gaffer Reg Garside designed and constructed what was soon dubbed the “UFO,” an upside-down hemisphere rig holding 200-400 Par cans; this worked on the principle that many multiple sources will create a soft effect. “We used Par cans because they’re durable and dimmable,” says Garside. “The whole system weighed quite a lot — most of the weight was the cabling — and it was supported by a 70-ton crane. We built five such units.”

Even in the 1930s, New York was characterized by building shadows cast down its seemingly endless main streets. The production created many of these shadows digitally, but in some cases Lesnie thought it necessary to create the real thing. “A distinctive feature of New York was the elevated train that ran over some of the streets,” he notes. “For an extended Steadicam sequence in which Ann [Naomi Watts] and Weston [David Proval] walk across an intersection, under the el tracks, I felt it was important to have shadows that would interact naturally. Re-creating that effect in post would have been very difficult and time-consuming, so we constructed a 20-by-20-foot gobo of the tracks, placed it above the street, and prayed for sun. It worked very well, and it had the additional benefit of providing Weta Digital a reference with which to digitally extend the shadows.”

Given the number of scenes set at pre-dawn or twilight, Lesnie worked to create camera and lighting systems that could be readily adaptable to changing circumstances. A particularly instructive situation arose while AC was visiting the New York set. In the sequence at hand, Denham sees Ann for the first time — outside a burlesque theater where she is contemplating taking a job — and realizes she is ideal for the film he’s making. The scene continues with Ann leaving the theater, turning the corner and stealing an apple from a vendor, who catches her in the act. In the script, the sun has just set and the lights of the theater are coming on. At the time of shooting, however, it was a bright, sunny day.

“I guess it’s ambitious to do something like this with Peter, because I know he may use up the daylight hours shooting the burlesque theater scene because it’s a pivotal part of the whole film,” says Lesnie with a smile. “To replicate twilight on a sunny street, I deployed the cranes to suspend two 20-by-40-foot diffusion frames. The all-terrain scissor lifts supported 20-by blacks to reduce the ambience and I had another two cranes with a 20-by-40 frame with a beige shade-cloth, plus silk for the fruit-vendor sequence around the corner. In order for the illusion of twilight to work, I needed to make the practicals the strongest source in frame.”

By the time the scene at the burlesque theater was in the can, however, the sun was well on its way down. Lesnie recalls, “It got to the point where the ambient light was not enough to match what we’d shot before, but because I had all the frames rigged and up, I was able to fire up some 18Ks and use the same elements I’d previously used as diffusion as sources of bounce light. In dailies, the two versions matched perfectly!”

Major believes there are significant subtextual parallels between Manhattan and Skull Island, Kong’s home. “There’s a distinct correlation between Kong’s lair, which overlooks much of Skull Island, and the view from the Empire State Building down to lower Manhattan,” says the production designer. “Also, the big towers of broken rock [on Skull Island] suggest the canyon-like streets and huge buildings of New York. It’s also a juxtaposition of scale — in both environments, the humans are dwarfed by their surroundings. Peter wanted Skull Island to be really dangerous from the moment [the human characters] arrive. The ship hits the reef in a storm at night, and when the sun comes up, the view isn’t much better.”

In order to shoot night-for-day and day-for-day scenes on this exterior set, complete control over the quality and amount of sunlight was essential. To that end, Lesnie and Garside used tri-truss frames to hold 12 12'x12' gridcloths, with blacks placed on top, that could be peeled back or pulled across. The textiles were secured against the wind by chickenwire and scaffold pipes, and the whole rig was supported by steel girders on scaffolding. Rigging gaffer Dave Brown also designed and built two carriages that would hold two 100K SoftSuns with 1⁄4 gridcloth and their ballasts on a 150-ton crane. “While we were filming on that set, the winds were so intense that the gridcloth vibrated hard enough within its tight confines to shred itself, and we had to replace the lot,” reports Garside.

One of the most enduring images in King Kong shows the filmmaking party plummeting into a deep chasm after attempting to cross it by walking over a massive log. “They all land in the bottom of a deep ravine that we called the spider pit,” says Lesnie. “The pit is really dark; the only source of light is the sunlight from above. I used a boom lift with a rig consisting of aircraft-landing lights to provide a strong toplight, and some 10Ks gelled with White Flame Green to give everything a slightly green, murky quality — the bottom of the pit is so far down that it’s developed its own luminosity. I didn’t put in any fill.

“When Driscoll throws a flare, the whole place lights up briefly, and he suddenly sees the nightmare before him,” Lesnie continues. “I originally wanted to use real flares, but the smoke they give off is toxic, so I instead created some interactive flare lighting and our practicals gaffer, Warwick Peace, designed a unit consisting of nine Photo-Lita bulbs on a dimmer. Some of the bulbs stayed constant, while others fibrillated slightly to mimic the fine vibration you get with flares. This also produced the effect of the shadows shifting position slightly.”