3. Finding The Fight

"The producer of the film, Ed Cunningham, who co-produced New York Doll with me, he met Steve Wiebe - Steve was a friend of a friend," explains Gordon.

"I wasn't present, but he met Steve in Seattle and told me about it and I knew it could connect back to Funspot, which I really loved. And then, really speculatively, we went to try and meet Billy, who we understood to be Steve's rival.

"I didn't think that Kong really had that much potential as a storyline, but I knew that video game rivalries was a rich topic, for the reason of the nostalgia and the intensity of the emotion.

"I know how high the stakes are for the gamers. I wanted to pursue a number of them at once. The original idea was Spellbound for video games. A portrait of different rivalries was what we were thinking.

"But the more we learned, the better the King story got. And because Billy was so remarkable and because his behaviour was so out there, once we were in post, we realised, 'this is going to be about Kong.'

"We did try cutting those other things together and nothing was as compelling as Billy and Steve.

"Once we went to the final competition and had a chance to review all the footage, it was pretty evident what the best way through the story was going to be and I still tried to stay faithful to the notion that we'd make a portrait of multiple rivalries, but this one, because it had such a clear timeline and had gone on for decades, it felt like the right one.

"It had the natural story beats of traditional feature film: the guy who has a thing he's trying to accomplish and he has obstacles to that. It just lent itself to that story.

"It sort of revealed itself as it went. We said, 'This is great! These guys are such opposites from one another and that'll make good storytelling.'

"In a documentary, you're trying to duplicate journalism, you uncover, uncover and uncover, you follow your nose and follow leads and Kong had this great legend around it: the original 1982 battle and it just made itself clear that it was the story we should be making. We listened, basically."

So who are these two very different rivals?

Next: Meet Billy