Adam Wingard, the director of 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire', anticipated working on a sequel after the success of 'Godzilla vs. Kong' in 2021, a rare hit during the pandemic. He was close to finishing the previous film, with only a few shots left, when he realized his knack for making giant monster movies.
Remembering a comment by Quentin Tarantino, Wingard decided to pursue another project immediately after 'Django Unchained' just as Tarantino did with 'The Hateful Eight', feeling a sense of unfulfilled potential and confidence after 'Godzilla vs. Kong'.
After gaining confidence in portraying monsters as fully developed characters and telling stories from their perspective in 'Godzilla vs. Kong', Wingard was eager to work on a visually-driven film that reflected his childhood dreams.
As a child, Wingard always wanted more screen time for Godzilla and the other monsters when watching them terrorize cities.
His film, 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire', which recently premiered and earned a massive $200 million globally in its opening weekend, delivered exactly that. This seems to be an incorrect or incomplete phrase from the original text. The film brings together all the monsters of the MonsterVerse as Godzilla and Kong must unite to face a new threat from Hollow Earth. Godzilla has new enhancements, and Kong has added a mechanical glove to his weaponry.
Returning actors Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry from 'Godzilla vs. Kong' are joined by Dan Stevens, who portrays Trapper, a veterinarian for the kaiju, in an entertaining and unique role within the MonsterVerse.
Wingard and Simon Barrett, the writer of 'The Guest', devised the character of Trapper specifically for Dan Stevens, wanting to highlight both his leading man qualities and his character actor versatility.
In the beginning of the movie production, Trapper had to do a long speech that told about his past; Wingard recalls it was about him being stuck alone with hyenas in Africa. It provided a lot of information about the character in a short time. But Wingard also really wanted to introduce Trapper with the Greenflow song “I Got’Cha” from 1977, whose lyrics are also the name of the song. They played the song on set and Stevens sang along to it. “When we got to the editing phase, it was like ‘you can have Dan tell a monologue for two hours about his past’,” Wingard said. “And you’re not going to understand his character better than just having him sing ‘I Got’Cha’ for 15 seconds of the movie, because that just says everything you need to know about him.”
When creating the story, Wingard and his writers (Barrett, Terry Rossio and Jeremy Slater) were guided by a single principle: Simplicity is important. “And that’s not just about the human stories, but about the monster story, too. We wanted there to be a simplicity of the actual plot and how many characters that there were so that you could get more intimate with them.”
Wingard learned on “Godzilla vs. Kong” that there were too many characters, which not only led to some tough choices during the editing phase of the movie — a character played by Jessica Henwick was eliminated completely and performances from Lance Reddick and Eiza González’s were dramatically reduced — but gave the movie a structure that left little time to get to know any of the actual characters, and this includes the monsters. “Because there was so much going on there’s only the little moments where you really got to get super intimate with the monsters,” Wingard said. Here, the number of characters was reduced and parallel narrative paths were forged that feed into one another instead of competing with each other.
Certainly, “Godzilla x Kong” is opening immediately after “Godzilla Minus One,” which takes a very different approach to the King of the Monsters, and became an unexpected box office hit and an even-more-unexpected Oscar winner. (This marked the first time any Godzilla movie had ever won an Academy Award). The Godzilla in “Godzilla x Kong” has a very different look and feel, one that original rightsholder Toho was surprisingly okay with.
“We didn’t do anything that was so out of left field that they would balk at, because ultimately, the changes to Godzilla are relatively subtle,” Wingard said. “There’s some proportional changes or some extra spikes. Obviously there’s the pink, which is the biggest thing.”
For Wingard, it was important that the Godzilla in “Godzilla vs. Kong” retained continuity from “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019) because “King Kong vs. Godzilla” had always annoyed Wingard. In particular, the fact that King Kong went from a stop-motion wonder to a guy in a fairly cheesy suit, felt jarring to the young Wingard. “When it came to this film, as a fan, I love all the different iterations of Godzilla over the years. I like that each era is defined by different looks and I was eager to do my own spin on it,” Wingard said. It was important for them to update Godzilla not “for the fuck sake of it,” in Wingard’s words. “I wanted the evolution of his design to be a propulsive point for the story,” Wingard said.
One particular moment that stands out is when Godzilla decides to take a nap in the Roman Colosseum, which was inspired by Wingard's own cat Mischief. He took some pictures of his cat in her little cat nest, which helped him decide where to put Godzilla to hibernate in the film. Wingard later found out that Takashi Yamazaki, director of “Godzilla Minus One,” also took inspiration from a cat. his Cats are having a big influence on the current versions of Godzilla. Wingard doesn't know why, but he mentioned that his own cat was an influence on the movie.
Apart from his own cat, we wanted to know what influenced “Godzilla x Kong.” When re-watching “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the opening scene, where Kong wakes up in Skull Island, takes a bath, and walks around the island, is very similar to the way Mel Gibson is introduced in the first “Lethal Weapon” movie. Wingard said he was generally inspired by buddy movies of the 1980s, especially in the “dysfunctional friendship” between Kong and Godzilla.
John Carpenter’s 1988 “They Live” is Wingard’s favorite movie and it had a huge influence. The sequence in “They Live” where Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David are fighting over whether or not David will wear a pair of magical sunglasses, served as the perfect template. Wingard said that the best sequence in that movie was not a hero fighting a villain, but two heroes fighting over a misunderstanding, and he knew right away that this would inspire the rematch between Godzilla and Kong. “It’s not just a straightforward battle. It’s more complicated than that.” who can winIt’s more complicated than that.”
As for whether or not there will be a third Wingard-directed MonsterVerse movie, he hasn’t shut the door, and that $200 million opening weekend probably makes that idea more likely. “I’ve done two movies now and there’s definitely a draw of the idea of making it a trilogy, but we’ll have to wait and see,” Wingard said. “I definitely have some ideas. We do a lot of easter eggs and hinting at where the series would go. There’s a definitive idea of the direction and the potential monsters that could be appearing in the next one.”
Hopefully whatever monsters show up, Dan Stevens is ready.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is in theaters now.
