Dear Diary

Michael Pellerin first began working with Peter Jackson on "Lord of the Rings," where he shot and produced the behind-the-scenes footage of all three films over the course of several years. The extensive coverage yielded numerous documentaries and bonus materials for the trilogy, which Pellerin also produced.

Pellerin spent almost as much time covering the production of "King Kong," and that was just one movie compared to the three "Lord of the Rings" films. Like he did during the making of the trilogy, Pellerin shot behind-the-scenes footage and followed Jackson virtually everywhere he went. The footage became the "Peter Jackson's Production Diaries." He then regularly posted segments of the diaries on the fan site KongisKing.net, giving fans a sneak peak at the development of the film and a first look at some of the key sequences of the remake. Later, much of the work ended up on the best-selling King Kong DVD.

TG: How did you view the production diaries? Was it a way of keeping people in touch with the movie, and having control over what got shown to the public?

Michael Pellerin: The reality is there really was no plan. It wasn't like we sat and went, "Well, we're going to have this thing and we're going to have 90 production diaries and there is going to be blah, blah, blah." The truth is one day Peter just went, "Hey, let's throw something up on the Internet." We were collecting behind the scenes footage, and out of the blue, he just decided, "Why don't we just throw something up?" Then a couple of days later thinking we should make this a little more sophisticated, we [decided we] should start editing these things and keep it going. It evolved.

The truth is it really was a grass roots movement in that we started putting them up and a few weeks later Universal contacted us and said, "Hey, are you guys doing these things?" It was just a little experiment and then it just exploded into becoming this full-fledged diary thing. We were figuring it out as we went along, and it was truly a diary in that we didn't know what was coming next. We did know the production schedule but it kind of was based on, "Well, what's happening this week?" It literally is a log-book that way.

Peter was very hands-on with everything. Literally, he would help us come up with ideas, he would shoot all the intros for them, he would review all of them, he'd give notes and all this while he's making a movie at the same time! He would be shooting an intro or reviewing a cut in the middle of doing takes for the film.

Michael Pellerin