There was no question as to who the star of Godzilla x Kong: New Empire would be. It’s not Rebecca Hall or Brian Tyree Henry or Dan Stevens or any human being. As actors have known since the early days of cinema, in this case, it’s the star whose character’s name is in the title, even if he or she technically wasn’t on set.
“They’re the stars of the movie,” Hall told The Associated Press. “We are the scales.”
Or, as Stevens says, “We’re just a sideshow.”
Godzilla vs. Kong has no end credits scene, director talks about what this means for the MonsterVerse
The film, which will be released in theaters nationwide on March 29, is a sequel to 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong,” which pitted the 393-foot-tall Godzilla against the 337-foot-tall Kong. It’s also a sequel to Legendary’s Monsterverse, which dates back to 2014’s Godzilla and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. The path seemed clear to filmmaker Adam Wingard, even though there seemed to be an inherent question of “where do we go after the match?” He heard screams and cheers in the theater as the Titans joined forces to fight Mechagodzilla. He was convinced that they should team up in the sequel.
“The last movie, on the surface, seems like a kitchen-sink all-out movie. We’re fighting all over the world and doing all these crazy things. But there’s still a lot of work left to do.” ,” Wingard said. “These movies can treat the Titan, the monster, as a point of view.”
“Godzilla x Kong” includes long sequences of dialogue-free storytelling that focus solely on the monsters, especially Kong, who has found his home in the Hollow Earth but is a little lonely. He also introduces some new giants, including Skull His King (318 feet tall) and a mini-Kong named Sco (149 feet tall).
For Wingard, making a film of this scale was both groundbreaking and felt like a lifelong dream come true. According to him, this is the movie he wanted to see when he was 10 years old, when he first fell in love with Godzilla movies.
“My driving force as a filmmaker in making this film was to try to appeal to the 10-year-old inside me,” Wingard said. “That was my introduction to the whole thing, so I think I’m still trying to be that kid and try to show him a good time.”
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Godzilla (left) and Kong in a scene from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. (Warner Bros. Pictures, via AP)
human factor
Loving Godzilla movies and making Godzilla movies are completely different propositions. Just ask the actors.
“The first movie, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how big it actually was,” Kaylee Hottle, who is deaf, said through an interpreter. “And at the end, I thought, oh, that was cool.”
She was only 10 when filming the first film and 15 during the filming of the second, and worked most closely with Hall, who plays her adoptive mother.
“There was a very steep learning curve and she was able to fully scale up very quickly,” Hall said. “In her latest production, she’s much older, wiser and just generally smarter.”
Hall was also excited to finally share some scenes (and dialogue) with Henry, who returns as monster fanboy and conspiracy blogger Barney Hayes.
“I remember being so sad that we only had one day to shoot the end scene with Brian on the first film,” Hall recalled.
Henry agreed, saying, “There were a lot of plays in this game that we wanted,” and that they knew they were in good hands with Wingard, who is “a kid at heart.” On Halloween, he arrived on set dressed as a 1930s director.
The newcomer was Stevens, who starred in Wingard’s 2014 thriller “The Guest.” His character, Trapper, is a Titan veterinarian who wears a Hawaiian shirt.
“I think his pitch to me was one particular scene where my character pilots this crazy spaceship through electrical buzzing creatures and says some cool lines,” Stevens said. Ta. “I thought, ‘That’s great.'”
Henry said the character is a bit like Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse.
Stevens added, “I sprinkled Ace Ventura in there.”
(Out) Shooting with monsters
They kept each other sane through the days of filming on green screen or blue screen with a guy with foamy fingers and a tennis ball on a stick to keep his eyes in the right place. Everyone agrees that “kong necking” (getting your neck at the right angle to stare at a titan for an extended period of time) can be extremely difficult.
And just as actors aren’t formally trained for “Kong Neck,” directors aren’t given any instructions on how to make a film like this either. Wingard said by the end of the first game, he just started getting comfortable.
“You can read every back issue of Cinefex Magazine in existence, but you can actually create these things and have the eyeliner of a character looking up at a 300-foot-tall monster and trying to elicit an emotional response from it.” “Until you learn the framework, you’re also limited in how you can create these monsters,” he said. “About half of it is fully animated sequences. It’s like making an animated movie, and it’s very realistic.”
That’s part of the reason he takes his actors and crew to real-life locations, including Australia’s Daintree Rainforest, at every opportunity. There were giant anacondas and cassowaries around, but my biggest fear was that they would harm the environment. There were a lot of meetings about not touching anything, which is especially funny for a Godzilla movie. But it was worth it.
“It’s so easy to shoot everything in front of a green screen,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there’s something artificial about it.”
Hall and the other actors noted how important the set and location were to the experience. This was especially true for the two no-show stars who had to be added later.
“Kong and Godzilla don’t show up on set, so we had to make them believable,” Hall said.
“I was in the trailer all day,” Stevens joked.
There is no competing Godzilla.
If it seems like there’s been a lot of “Godzilla” in theaters lately, that’s because it’s true. Godzilla Minus One, Toho’s first Godzilla film since 2016’s Shin Godzilla, won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It did well in US theaters in December and January, but had to gracefully exit by February due to a licensing agreement with Legendary.
That doesn’t mean there’s bad blood between the works. Godzilla His Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki and Wingard spoke passionately together about monsters and how their cat inspired Godzilla. However, it may take some time before “Godzilla Minus One” is available for streaming in the United States, at least until the controversy surrounding “Godzilla x Kong” subsides.
Warner Bros., which has released a string of hits in recent months including “Wonka” and “Dune: Part 2,” is releasing “Godzilla x Kong” exclusively in U.S. theaters. Like the first Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong was also part of the company’s same-day release strategy for 2021. Still, it continued to do business both in theaters and on streaming, and at one point became the streamer’s biggest hit.
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Wingard liked being part of the moment when theater owners were reassured that audiences still wanted to come to the movies. But he’s excited to get a regular release this time without any pandemic warnings. After all, both Godzilla and Kong are some of the oldest movie stars still active today.
“The scale is so big. It’s so grand,” Henry said. “This is the kind of movie you go to the theater because you don’t want to fool Kong.”
