It’s a good time to be a Kaiju fan. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is on the horizon. Godzilla just recently celebrated its 70th anniversary and picked a Visual Effects Oscar for the incredible Godzilla Minus One. In addition, the MonsterVerse is one of the few non-Marvel cinematic universes currently going to maintain fairly solid critical and commercial success. The most recent cinematic entry in the series, Godzilla vs. Kong, saw the two icons facing off on-screen for the first time since the 60s and managed to be a big hit, even despite releasing in the throes of the pandemic.
This time around, the one-time foes are teaming up in the upcoming Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Returning to the director’s chair from Godzilla vs. Kong is Adam Wingard. A long-time Godzilla fan, Wingard made his name in horror/thrillers, directing cult hits You’re Next, The Guest and segments in the V/H/S franchise.
CGMagazine had the chance to see Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and sit down with Wingard to talk about creating a new villain and the importance of the human element.
While in Godzilla vs. Kong, you had the two of them fighting each other and then coming together to face Mechagodzilla. This time, in Godzilla x Kong, you have the two [titular creatures] teaming up to take on the Skar King, a new original villain. What are the main things you look for when coming up with a villain big enough to take both of them on?
Adam Wingard: The cool thing about Skar King is that he’s kind of the first time Kong’s ever actually had an arch-nemesis. I mean, Godzilla’s had plenty of major villains like Destroyah, Ghidorah, you name ‘em. But Kong, customarily, hasn’t really had that in his run. And so, we knew we were kinda making the anti-Kong with the Skar King. Physically, Kong’s got the strength, but what he doesn’t have, Skar King’s got some real advantages in terms of his agility, his intelligence, and his special weapon, the whip-slash that he has.
Because we knew we were making an anti-Kong, we [also] needed an anti-Godzilla, and that’s where Shimo comes in. And so we always looked at the film’s threat being a double threat. Skar King on his own isn’t enough, but him teamed up with Shimo become [two] of the most dangerous foes that either one of them have ever faced before.
One of the main themes I noticed in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the search for connection. In Kong’s case, it’s him travelling the Hollow Earth searching for any kind of family and then with Jia [played by Kaylee Hottle] looking for her own place of belonging. When you’re coming up with the story, is the theme something you think of right away or is that something that develops over time?
Adam Wingard: I’m glad you mentioned it that way, too, because that’s how we designed it. If you have a human story with the monsters, it has to reflect the monsters’ journey in a thematic way for them to feel connected. It wasn’t important to me to have Kong and Jia in every scene together, but what was important was that their journeys connected as the film goes. They both feel lost; they’re the last of their kind, and they don’t know where they fit in. Both of them are on this journey that connects them with almost ancestors brought to the present.
I think that’s important when you’re creating a film like this because you can do a story about humans going through anything anytime you want. You can do a story about monsters dealing with whatever, but if they’re kind of disconnected, there’s no glue there. I think the human story should always be enlightening us on the monsters’ story as well, and vice versa.
Godzilla films—really, giant monster films in general—have a unique effect where one movie can be dark and character-driven (i.e. Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla 2014), and the next movie could be a total WWE-style brawl, and fans will be perfectly willing to accept both styles. What is it about this genre specifically that brings that kind of [reaction that screams] “We’re here for all of this”?
Adam Wingard: I think it’s because the Godzilla films have been spread out over 70 years, and there’ve been so many different incarnations of it. Like you said, sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s light. Sometimes Godzilla’s good, sometimes Godzilla’s bad. That’s what keeps it fresh: He means so many different things to so many different people and he can be all of them at different times. I think it’s one of the things that will help in the long run to keep the MonsterVerse fresh. I don’t think it’s ever going to go in just one direction, even within itself.
Even taking Minus One out of the picture, we’ve gone through so many different tones within these movies, and they all work in their own different ways, and they all have their fans. For me as a filmmaker, I’m making my version of Godzilla and Kong from my own inspirations and that comes from whenever I was a kid experiencing these movies for the first time. I’m making a movie for that version of myself and primarily what I wanted to see was a movie told from the monsters’ perspective.
