Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire director talks drawing influences from the Showa era and '80s toys for the new sequel

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(Image credit: Warner Bros/Legendary/Total Film)This article originally appeared in Total Film issue 346.Subscribe here and never miss a magazine. (Image credit: Warner Bros/Legendary/Total Film) This article originally appeared in Total Film issue 346.Subscribe here and never miss a magazine. ‘Yeah!’ grins Wingard, who challenges Kong in the hair stakes with his explosively unruly barnet and bushy, grey-streaked beard cascading down his chest. ‘For me, the starting point for this movie was that shot of them running into battle together. That was the very first image that I really had of this movie. That’s where you want to end up. It was like, “If we can make something that justifies this moment, then we know we’ve done it right.”’ OK. Rewind. Is ‘giving a bit of a hand’ to Kong a teasing reference to that bionic arm glimpsed in the trailer? Wingard tugs at his beard. ‘It’s kind of hard to say too much more than that without spoiling anything, because he has one of my favourite intros of any character I’ve ever shot in my films. What I will say is I’d want to play with that [action figure] if I was a kid! And though Apex isn’t in this story in a literal way, we kind of hint that Monarch absorbed a lot of the Apex technology after the last film. The glove Kong is wearing, it’s somewhat insinuated that’s Apex technology.’ Sign up for the Total Film Newsletter Bringing all the latest movie news, features, and reviews to your inbox ‘We meet Trapper being extremely up close with Kong,’ adds Stevens. ‘So for that sequence, they had a giant piece of Kong’s…’ He laughs. ‘I was going to say a giant piece of Kong’s anatomy, but that sounds really wrong. They had a real bit of Kong that I had to interact with. That was kind of wild.’ ‘The human storyline is all in one place this time,’ says Hall. ‘I really enjoyed getting to work with Brian Tyree Henry on this one, who I didn’t get to work with last time. Andrews recruits [his character] to help with something. And working with Dan is a blast for me, one of my favourite things to do. We were at college together.’ Stevens is laughing again. ‘We were friends, and then roommates after university, so we go way back. I hope viewers feel that. There’s a bit of history there, between our characters.’ Hall nods. ‘It’s an old friendship, though it’s alluded to there was possibly something else, at some point. But now they’re having an opportunity to work together.’ Doing what, exactly? Total Film is all for protecting key plot points to allow viewers to discover the spectacular surprises for themselves, but we need something. Anything. ‘It’s one big adventure. You’ll just have to wait and see,’ shrugs Stevens. ‘I can’t tell you much more,’ apologises Hall. Wingard, at least, offers a few crumbs. ‘This is very much a kitchen-sink Hollow Earth experience,’ he says. ‘We take you all over. You see all different types of environments, and lots of new creatures – and some familiar ones. At the same time, we still manage to get around a lot on the surface. We have scenes in Rio and Rome. The film still has this big, international feel. We cover a lot of ground.’ Monster Squad (Image credit: Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.) Now, you get the sense, Wingard’s making not just the fifth MonsterVerse movie and a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Kong, but the monster movie he wants to see, with his own mighty pawprints all over it. Wingard has been a huge fan of movie monsters since he was a kid, and says of these giant CGI creations, ‘They’re toys, basically. I’m an adult being able to play with hundreds of millions of dollars.’ His primary influence on the Godzilla side of things are the movies from the Showa period (1954-1975), especially the 60s and 70s, when Godzilla was primarily the good guy fighting other beasts. They are colourful and camp, and Wingard fondly remembers watching movies like Mothra vs. Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Hedorah on daytime TV. The flavour of these films rather lend themselves to Wingard’s own love of a vivid palette – The Guest was soaked in garish hues, and who can forget the climactic scrap of Godzilla vs. Kong, as they tusselled amid neon skyscrapers in Hong Kong? Well, now he’s doubling down… ‘Whenever I was talking to the visual artists, what I told them was, “I want the colour palette of this film to resemble the experience of what it was like to walk down a toy aisle in the 1980s, when you had ThunderCats, G.I. Joe and Transformers.” There was just this orgasmic feeling. So many colours and textures. That’s what I wanted to bring to this movie. This new, heightened reality. I wanted to find out: can you take that over-the-top toy-aisle experience, but then find a way to ground that into a reality?’ He grins. ‘Very specifically in the last film, I wanted Godzilla to have a continuity, to look the way that he had in King of the Monsters and the 2014 Godzilla. But then I didn’t get a chance at doing my version of Godzilla. So now I wanted to do different things with the spines, and try different colours. I didn’t want it to just be random; it’s part of the story. And similarly with Kong, I wanted to give him some sort of new look as well. We grew his beard out, and gave him a little bit more grey hair and stuff.’ The environments in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire will really pop. For Hollow Earth, the production shot in Greenland, Iceland, Hawaii and Australia – breath-snatching landscapes that are juxtaposed to fashion ‘a totally weird fantasy landscape’, as Wingard puts it. Production designer Tom Hammock and his team (‘On You’re Next, we had five people; here, we had hundreds,’ he says) built more than 60 sets for the production, and stresses that real locations were utilised whenever possible. ‘Hollow Earth is based on this living fossil jungle that still exists on Earth, in the far north of Australia, where it hits Papua New Guinea,’ he says. ‘The studio let us go to this place with leeches and snakes and constant rain and mud, and we built sets that could be carried into the jungle. Literally we shot where the road ends in northern Australia. In the last film we had the HEAV, the Hollow Earth Aerial Vehicle. In this one we updated it so it breaks apart into 14 pieces. We could crane it into a remote riverbed in the middle of the jungle and reassemble it. That way you can have characters exit the spaceship and walk fully around it then enter Hollow Earth. It was not easy!’ Wingard gives his beard a particularly hard tug, communicating concern. ‘It’s so scary when you’re out in the middle of nowhere, and people tell you these casual stories about: “Oh, yeah, some people went missing. A crocodile took them off, and they never saw them again.” You’re like, “That happened right over there? We’re shooting right over here.” But that’s the fun of it. Until somebody gets hurt, you’re all good.’ Hammock is again keen to stress that reality plays a big part. You thought these MonsterVerse movies were all CGI? Think again. ‘We’re trying to follow in the footsteps of Bond or Mission: Impossible,’ he says. ‘On the last movie, for the huge finale [in Hong Kong], it wasn’t a computer-generated city until later in the sequence. So if we were going to do a close-up on Godzilla, we went up in a helicopter 500 feet and did the camera move around a point in the city, then put Godzilla in. That commitment continued on this film.’ Beasts in show (Image credit: Warner Bros.) But now for the main event. Whoever you speak to on Godzilla x King: The New Empire, they’re in no doubt as to why punters spend good money to go to the cinema to see a kaiju movie. It even extends to the actors. Ask them about the importance of the human storyline, and they’ll give you an answer… then check themselves. ‘Andrews has had a bit of a promotion within Monarch, so she has a bit more power, but something I love about Andrews is this real-world aspect of mum-ing alongside this incredibly big, powerful job – she’s balancing that with an almost-teenage daughter, and all that brings,’ starts Hall. Then she adds: ‘It’s heartfelt but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We understand that the monsters having a big old battle is part of the fun.’ It’s a theme that Stevens takes up. ‘I do enjoy it when films like this are able to find character in among all these wild epic battles, but I’m under no illusions why people are coming to see these movies,’ he says. ‘They’re about two characters that are many times the size of me.’ It’s the reason that there have been 38 Godzilla movies since the atomic lizard first rose from the sea (and the trauma of WW2) to trash Tokyo in 1954, and why King Kong is still monkeying around 91 years and 10 movies after Willis H. O’Brien’s stunning stop-motion model scaled the Empire State Building in 1933. ‘Godzilla and Kong are these two iconic characters, so you owe it to the audience to give the best performances they’ve ever given,’ says Paul J. Franklin, the visual effects supervisor whose company, Double Negative (Dneg), worked on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire along with Scanline, Weta, and various other smaller vendors (Franklin says close to 2,000 people contributed to the VFX). Franklin has worked on such films as The Da Vinci Code, First Man,Blade Runner 2049andMission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and won Oscars for Christopher Nolan moviesInceptionandInterstellar. ‘There’s a lot of weight riding on it,’ he continues. ‘We’re always trying to go one better, in putting them into the world, making them feel believable, the scale, but also the personality. I call it a creative arms race. We’re always in ascent towards the ultimate goal of complete photorealism.’ ‘The trailer doesn’t tell us about why Skar King is this world-ending threat,’ he starts. ‘There’s a lot of mystery to be uncovered yet. It’s interesting, because, in general, these movies are always about the human threat – you know, that human beings are somehow responsible for a lot of the problems. Mechagodzilla is the pinnacle of that – we literally create anti-Godzilla to combat Godzilla, and then that’s just too much power for anyone to have. What’s interesting about this new film is that we go in a direction that I don’t think this series has ever seen before, which is that the Skar King is, in a way, the closest that that human threat has ever been juxtaposed onto a titan itself. The Skar King almost represents an upscaled version of the worst parts of humanity, just as Kong represents some of the best parts of humanity. I would say Skar King is the greatest threat that we’ve seen in these movies. It’s really going to take a full team together to bring it down because it’s too big for just one titan!’ Wingard is hyped now, swinging verbal haymakers as wildly as Kong trying to take down the Big G. on the aircraft carrier in the last movie. ‘We go bigger on this one,’ he promises. ‘This movie is high-octane. It’s non-stop. I can’t believe everything we’ve packed in. We’ve got some set-pieces, like…’ His eyes saucer. ‘But the most important thing – and I can’t stress this enough – is that this movie is doing something that no film has ever done before. We are breaking new ground with visual effects in terms of non-verbal storytelling. We have large sequences, almost eight minutes sometimes, where the film just follows the monsters, and the monsters are telling their own story. It really works. It’s not like you’re sitting there trying to figure out, “OK, what are they thinking? What are they doing?” These monsters are emotive.’ As is Wingard. His passion is palpable. ‘That is the movie I wanted to see when I was a kid. When you’re a kid, you barely even understand some of the human subplots. But when the monsters are fighting each other, you understand their alliances. You understand Godzilla and Mothra’s relationship. You understand Godzilla and Ghidorah’s relationship. Your imagination is interfacing with the movie. So I wanted to truly do a monster movie, and I wanted this to be my mic drop on the storytelling of monsters. Maybe I’ll do another one, or maybe not. But if I don’t, I wanted to make sure that I put everything in that I ever would want to see on screen.’ Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opens in cinemas on March 29. For moreupcoming movies, check out our guide to2024 movie release dates. This article first appeared in Total Film issue 346 -buy a copy here. 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