Adam Wingard has always had a flair for the most ultra-vibrant and loud segments of the color spectrum. Growing up in the ’80s, the golden age of movie tie-in merchandise, the director vividly remembers the neon palette, the yellows, blues, and reds of seemingly every toy from “Transformers” to “Thundercats” to even just “the mellow yellow NASCAR” from “Days of Thunder.” Bold visuals and bright colors were a staple of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” Wingard’s inaugural entry into the MonsterVerse, and now he’s turned it up to eleven with “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” the franchise’s latest entry and a sequel to his earlier film. It’s the biggest, most unashamedly bombastic entry in the franchise yet. In “The New Empire,” Godzilla and the almighty King Kong face a colossal threat hidden deep within the planet, challenging their very existence and the survival of the human race.
READ MORE: ‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’: Adam Wingard Says He’ll Likely Do A Trilogy
Wingard’s mission as a filmmaker is to utilize spectacle to drive character and story. During the release of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” Wingard expressed a desire to let the monsters carry the film, to let their perspective be the film’s. With “Godzilla x Kong,” he pushed that even further, affording real emotional weight and empathy to two of cinema’s greatest icons like never before. I had the pleasure of speaking with the Monster Master himself, Adam Wingard, to discuss all things “The New Empire,” along with the art of movie merch, ’80s nostalgia, and more. Here is our entire conversation.
It was an absolute blast seeing this in full-fledged IMAX. The entire time, I was thinking, you made something that was even more exhilarating than just Godzilla fighting Kong.
Well, thank you. I’m glad to hear that because, when you’re doing a giant monster movie, the given is that you’re going to have big monster fights, and that’s obviously very fun to do as a director. But what was exciting to me was creating the world around those fights, creating the emotional drive of the monsters, seeing the moments of the monsters in between fights, and them relating to each other. That was my main drive, giving the movie an even more expansive feel. There’s never been a monster movie like this. And to me, that was always the thing that kept me going. I’ve been working on Godzilla-Kong movies for seven years, from when I came on pre-production for “Godzilla vs. Kong,” and having serious discussions about Godzilla and King Kong every day since.
I’m sure it’s fun just being a fan of this property. You get to play with the toys of your childhood in a sense.
It is. It’s like playing with toys in slow motion over the years because everything takes so long to develop in terms of animation. But it’s such a pleasure. It’s a sandbox that you can’t play in any other genre. In some ways, you’re making an animated movie that’s hyperrealistic. You have to approach it like an animated film, and those are skills that you can’t prepare for until you’ve done them as a filmmaker. And so making “Godzilla vs. Kong” for me felt like the warm-up round to this movie. I could have never known really what the experience was and what all the challenges would be until I did them. And really, even understanding how to harness the technology as well and be able to communicate with all the different artists. You’re working with literally thousands of people on a movie like this, and at a certain point, it becomes about knowing what you can and can’t ask for that’s realistic, and that’s something you can only do with the experience.
I recently spoke with one of your MonsterVerse peers, Gareth Edwards, about his work on “The Creator.” We discussed ensuring you’ve perfectly planned everything before you go into production to give those scenes the total weight and quality you want to achieve as a filmmaker. Did that help guide you along with the process of this film?
Yes. One of the things that I’m most proud of is the fact that we came out of “Godzilla vs. Kong” without doing any reshoots. We were able to plan it out, and part of that is because I understood, with the type of movie we were making, that if we did need to pivot, we have all these fully animated sequences, and we knew that we could make it happen in its own way. So, you still have to think smartly as a filmmaker. No matter what your budget is, you never have enough money.
Every movie you do will always be more ambitious than what you’re budgeted for, and you must think that way. And then it becomes a matter of, well, how do you pull it off? We made a much bigger film this time. There are almost twice as many full CG moments in the movie. It’s not like we did that with necessarily more resources than on “Godzilla vs. Kong.” We just knew how to push what we had as far as possible. So much of doing a big movie like this is just knowing how not to waste money because it’s easy for people to say, “Well, we’ve got all this money. We’ll do this stuff just in case, and we’ll figure it out later” or something. You have to say, “We’re going to be smart, and we’re going to plan this out from the beginning and then go for it.”
We often talk about how certain franchise films can be designed with merchandising in mind. But what’s fascinating about your process here, is seeing how it was the opposite of that. It was like the merchandising of your youth went on to inspire your sensibilities, specifically in this film. So I’m curious what you make of that symbiotic relationship because, as adults, we’re able to get super jaded on the idea of movies as marketing, as branding.
I know what you mean, and the main thing is I don’t want people to misconstrue that I was ever doing anything to try to sell toys because I don’t make a dime from the toys. I wish I did.
I think back to whenever you hear the stories about George Lucas, who’s obviously one of my main inspirations in life, about when they did “Return to the Jedi,” they created the Ewoks to sell toys. And whether that’s true or not, that’s the narrative that went along with it. That was never how I thought, but it is interesting because the toys were on my mind when I was making the film. It was from an inspirational standpoint because I know that when I was a kid, toys meant a lot.
Toys were the gateway to my imagination. Having the toys and playing with them, as well as all the art that went along with the toys, And even that experience of being a kid and walking down a toy aisle in the 80s with all these neon colors surrounding you, was such an information overload. It was like, what a great time to be a kid—Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, Transformers, G.I. Joe, all those things. So whenever I was designing, for instance, the creatures in this movie, I was thinking, when creating the design for these creatures, I’m picturing that toy on the 80s shelf, and what would stand out in that ’80s design kind of way. What would appeal to me if I was a kid and this movie was coming out? And that’s where, right out the gate,
I knew I wanted Scar King to have this cherry red painted coat of fur. On an ’80s toy shelf, it would pop out. I wanted Shimo to be exactly the opposite. I wanted Shimo to have this stark white kind of skin. I wanted her to have a pearlescent quality in the film, not like a straightforward look, but a subtle iridescent sheen. I wanted these things just to be able to pop in that kind of way. Even the beast glove that Kong had was something that, again, I could picture on a toy shelf. And so it was exciting because, in the early phases of making this film, we had this “war room” set up with all the concept art in Burbank Studios.
We brought the toy company Playmates, which we’d worked with on “Godzilla vs. Kong,” over, and I walked them through the entire movie and all my influences. I talked about all the ’80s toy stuff, and I’m just so proud that they took that and ran with it. You look at the box art for the toys they ended up doing, which are gorgeous. There’s neon pink. It stands out in precisely the way we talked about it.
So, to your point, it was cool to see that not just in the examples you had there but also in the film, that vibrance and the color played such a massive part in fleshing out the world and the immersion of it all.
Well, it’s easy to forget that these things are meaningful to you when you’re a kid. I can still remember when “Days of Thunder” came out, and they had a tie-in with Hardees and all these little matchbox versions of the NASCARs. You were always trying to get the Mellow-Yellow one, and that was the hardest one to get. But as silly as it seems, that was fun as a kid. That kind of collectible thing is just very exciting to you.
One of my favorite films of all time is “Aliens,” and the only reason I know about “Aliens” is because, in the early 90s, they created that toy series, which is hilarious that they created a toy series for such a violent, scary series. But I remember I was peripherally aware of the Alien series, and they were suddenly just at Walmart. There were all these toys for “Aliens,” and it wasn’t just the xenomorphs; there were the Space Marines, and it was like, “Who are those Space Marines? These guys are f*cking awesome.” And so I and my brothers bought the toys before we saw the film, and then we went back and watched all the Alien movies, which totally blew our minds. It was one of the few times that I can honestly say, especially with “Aliens,” that the movie lived up to my dream of the film, and that all started with the toys.
It’s funny because “Godzilla vs. Kong ” obviously had a big toy element in the movie, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was busy making the movie, and it was only when the film came out that I started going to Walmart to see the toys on the shelf. It was one of the few ways I could see the movie in public during the pandemic, and it suddenly reminded me of all these influences I had as a kid. That’s why it became a big influence on me in this film.
I feel that the artifice you play with, that ’80s nostalgia, stems from those early experiences. Like your signature red and green lighting, the synth-wave score completely fits the vibe. Is it all about capturing a mood or a feeling?
Yeah, you could say that I’m a nostalgic filmmaker because many of my films are about recapturing my childhood in different ways. So those influences come through. I am a child of the 1980s, and that is imprinted on me for better or worse. Maybe I stopped maturing around 1994. I peaked, never grew up any further, and now here we are.
Two of the longest-running franchises in cinema history are Godzilla and James Bond. James Bond has endured for as long as it has because it is malleable. Godzilla has a similar thing with those gritty, almost horrific earlier films, and then you get into the late Shōwa era, and it’s heightened; Godzilla is less of a menace and more of a hero. I just wanted to get your take on the malleability of Godzilla as a property and why you think it’s endured.
It’s funny that you mentioned that because I never really put the correlation between Godzilla and James Bond together, but you’re right. They were both created in the ’50s. And you’re right, Roger Moore is like the James Bond Shōwa era; it was campy, and then they got a little bit more serious with Timothy Dalton in the ’80s, the same way Godzilla got brought back in 1984. Both are the longest-running franchises of all time—Bond with 25 and Godzilla with over 30.
The recipe for both series’ success is that they can fluctuate. They’re like Madonna in her early career, when she kept reinventing herself. It’s still the same person, but something about it keeps it fresh all this time. Even within the MonsterVerse, we’ve gone through a major fluctuation. A lot of times, you can define the Godzilla series by the different eras. The Toho era, Shōwa, and the Millennium era feel like very definitive moments but very consistent in terms of the amount of movies that took place in that time. Now, here we are, ten years into the MonsterVerse, and there are already so many different versions of it. We’re on that Shōwa era tip now, but I’m sure these movies will eventually swing back around into being closer to what 2014 was like. It’s going to depend on the filmmaker.
Even if I did another one, my approach would be different because you can’t just do the same thing forever. And to a certain degree, it’s like, how do I amp up that Shōwa-era vibe after this film? It’s hard to go crazier from here without completely jumping the shark, but you can still do plenty of amazing things and show that we haven’t done yet. At the end of the day, these are characters and these are character-driven movies, and by that I mean character-driven monster movies. There are many things to explore with these characters to see where they go.
Thank you for your time. It was such a blast to see, and I hope you come back for another one. Honestly, I feel like you get this franchise and know how to evolve it in exciting ways.
It’s so great to hear you say that. Not many people have seen the film yet, so this is one of the first reactions I’m getting. Thank you so much.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire“ arrives in theaters on March 29th, 2024.