You probably can't picture his face, but the name Joe Letteri should sound familiar to you, especially if you love movies with great special effects. He's the guy who makes the magic happen.

So, what has he done?

Letteri, while at ILM, worked on computer graphics for the popular movies The Abyss, The Flintstones, and Jurassic Park, as well as working as the visual effects supervisor for various movies. He then left Northern California, heading to New Zealand, to supervise the visual effects for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The most recent film where his talents can be seen at work is King Kong.

DoubleAgent caught up with Letteri last week to ask him what it was like to work on King Kong. Here's what we learned.

DA: How did you get involved with working on King Kong as the movies visual effects supervisor?

Letteri: Because we rolled straight into it right from Lord of the Rings, where I was one of two visual effects supervisors. We started on it right as we were finishing Return Of The King

DA: What was involved in creating the King Kong creature? He took a lot to do.

Letteri: The hardest part was finding his character. We wanted something unique and recognizable. We wanted him to look as much as a mountain gorilla as possible, and have things like his posture, his walk, and his fur look right. Then we started to age him. We broke his nose, smashed his eye, cracked his jaw, pulled out some of his fur so it would look like he had a hard life on the island trying to fight off the other creatures while living there.

DA: How did you do the scenes with King Kong and other actors"was it hard to incorporate the two?

Letteri: We had Andy Serkis there. He's the actor who actually plays Kong. He was there on set the whole time. Wherever Kong had to be for the eye line, he was there. Andy was always there when the other actors where there and when the scene called for Kong. Andy came to the motion capture stage later on and performed all his actions as Kong, and that is what you later see in the movie.

DA: What was it like to work with Jack Black and Naomi Watts?

Letteri: We did a little bit more with Naomi than with Jack because she had more scenes with Kong. It was really the first visual effects film for both of them so they had to get used to it. They really understood the process. Its really a talent to get to do that. They were really great about it, as was Adrian. (speaking of Adrian Brody)


DA: What was the most difficult special effect that you created for this move?

Letteri: Besides Kong himself, I'd have to say creating New York. We had to create a whole digital New York as it existed in 1933.


DA: What is your next project?

Letteri: Waterhorse, with Jay Russell directing.

If you havent already seen King Kong, the DVD hits stores on March 28.