I'm guessing you've already started planning the designs and scales of other monsters in the kaiju movie universe. Is it difficult making a character like, say, Mothra scary to a modern audience?
I can't be specific about who we're introducing. But you might have said the same about Godzilla and King Kong - but with the artists and technology we have today, and the filmmakers' passionate love for these characters, there is something that transcends those initial designs. Whatever the core foundations of those designs are, rendering them with modern artistry, like at ILM with Kong, that becomes less challenging.
The most challenging thing about it is having them feel authentic to the characters we all know. We want Kong to feel like Kong, and that means he should feel like Kong to someone who loves the 1933 version, and someone who loves Peter Jackson's film, and hopefully somebody who likes our film. Even though they're different versions of that character, they see a throughline in him.
Kong: Skull Island is clearly the next step a larger movie universe you're building. So what are the challenges of building that, and do you have one person who's overseeing it all from a top-down perspective?
We have a team within Legendary who are crafting it together, and our next film will be Godzilla: King Of Monsters, which starts shooting in June and comes out in 2019. Look, the most daunting thing is in reintroducing these characters in a new way that also feels authentic to their roots. And again, these are characters that people have loved for generations, so it's taking those foundations and then having them feel fresh and new. That's the biggest challenge. Then it becomes about making, as we said before, the characters' thematic and social resonance - weaving that in with the story. We aspire to make movies that work for audiences now as well as they did for us when we were kids.
Godzilla was largely set in the present, while Kong: Skull Island's set in the 70s. Do you think future films will take a similar approach, where they'll alternate between past and present?
Um... the timeline of Monarch and the universe will allow us to play with some of that. Right now, because Godzilla re-emerges in the 2014 film, that means the world is now aware of monsters. We're pushing forward from there, but there's always the chance that we could take a side trip.
So are Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larsson contracted for any more of these films?
Uhh... I can't say. Sorry, sorry!
