Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts Talks Kong: Skull Island
Staci Layne Wilson
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Kong: Skull Island (review) is in theaters NOW; and to learn more about the film, which follows a team of explorers and soldiers who travel to an uncharted island in the Pacific, unaware that they are crossing into the domain of monsters, we sat down with director Jordan Vogt-Roberts to talk all things Kong.
Dread Central: What’s the upside of having such a huge, big-name cast?
Jordan Vogt-Roberts: It’s a great thing to have a cast like that, I was very, very honored and fortunate. It’s less about any specific personalities and more about… I remember I showed the movie to a filmmaker friend of mine at one point, he was watching a scene and he turned to me afterwards and was like, I just kept thinking how many hair and makeup people, how many props people, there’s like twenty people in the scene or something and I come from movies that have three people and so you just forget how much of an ordeal it is to facilitate that many people. But for me the bigger thing is, when I make a movie and the way I give my performances, is like… I like to build a family. Going off to make a movie is like going off to war, so you find your people that will become your brothers in arms and compatriots, and so you find those people, you bind together and you move forward.
DC: Why cast Tom Hiddleston?
JVR: Have you seen how handsome he is? Tom is amazing because he is one of the most committed actors that I have ever known or worked with. He genuinely wants things to be great and like myself, who is a perfectionist. You know, Tom and I… when we were on set, we’d always joke with one another and say, when we were debating, it’s like okay, do we want to move on, he wants to do another take or I’d want to do another take, and if I’d want to do another take he’d be like no, we got it, we got it and I would look at him and say, it’s only forever, or if he wanted to do something else and I’d say no, we’ve got to move, we’ve got to move and he’d say, it’s only forever.
He’s the type of guy who genuinely cares so much, not just about that movie in general, but the medium and the art as a whole. He’s one of those guys who has that burning flame in him that forces him to do this and he cares about the history of it. There aren’t a lot of actors who care about the history of this art form, film history, cinematic history; and he’s just one of those guys who cares so much. It’s rare to find people like that.
DC: When did you realize you could do a big blockbuster movie like this?
JVR: The day I was born. No, never. From talking to a lot of other directors who had gone through this before, because there are times on set where you are like, I’m fucking this up, oh my god I’m fucking this up, and I really think creatively in general, if you are doing a project that you care about, and you’re sitting there on set or on the project saying, I’m doing a great job, I’m killing it, I’m so great at this right now, chances are you’re not doing a great job and you don’t care enough. Talking to a lot of other directors, guys who have gone through this before… guys like Coogler, talking to those guys who had done it, they all kind of reiterated the same thing, yeah when we were making that movie, we didn’t think we could do it. I think if you have a good soul, you are emotionally sensitive and in tune with yourself, most creative people are pretty self-deprecating, and so I wanted to do it, I knew I would make it through it but I think that sense of fear, that sense of shit, the stakes are so high, what if I fuck this up, I think if you don’t have that, chances are it’s not going to be memorable. I think you need that little bit to drive you and to push you and to always make you work that much harder, to better yourself, to make sure the scene is a good, as subversive, as memorable as it could be.
DC: We heard about the helicopters on location.
JVR: We had three flying helicopters and it was important for me to have them, the actors, go up in those helicopters and see what they were like. It’s important for me… you know, I did a lot of improv with the actors and I like to do as many things that are as sort of immersive as possible, to me that goes back to what I said about building a family, where I want them all to have a camaraderie where we’re all in the trenches together, and so a lot of those pilots we took up in the air and the guys who had to sit on the edge of the helicopter, just strapped in there with that one belt, no safety harness and the other actors are like, in the co-pilot seat, you take that stick of the helicopter and you do this, those things are no joke, but it was just important for them to understand the reality of what they were getting into as much as possible, plus it’s one of the few perks of the job, oh I flew a helicopter today.
DC: So, the studio was okay with that?
JVR: There was one time where I disappeared and got in the helicopter and didn’t tell anyone I was going and I remember looking back and seeing some people getting yelled at, just because I was like bye, I’m going in this helicopter now, flying around Hawaii, and then when I’m up there I’m like, I’m going to crash this helicopter into Walmart. The pilots up there are the best pilots in the world and they knew that was part of what I wanted to put them through so they were supportive of that.
DC: Tell us about the creation of the look of Kong.
JVR: Sure. When I came on the very first thing that I wanted to do was not have him be a quadruped, not have him be a twenty-five-foot silverback gorilla, I wanted him to be a movie monster, a classic movie monster. I wanted him to be a biped, I wanted him to walk upright, I wanted him to have the posture, even when you put him upright it’s really easy for the animators and people to assume he’s going to have very simian motions and I then beat those ideas out of a lot of people because I wanted him to walk with the nobility of a god, with a regal nature, but then rumble with a sadness and I wanted him to have these morose qualities.
So I wanted it to be a throwback to the 1933 film, but then in terms of design, the cartoonish designs where it just doesn’t look like an ape or a monkey but the Willis O’Brien design, the exaggerated brow and the really big eyes and the exaggerated features and I wanted him to be a movie monster and a god and I wanted him to move fast. He moves more in line with something from a Japanese anime at times than of something that should be of that size. For me the guiding light was, I just want a third grader to be able to doodle this Kong and to be able to say, that’s the Kong from that version but I wanted to pay honor to what came before but to go back, this is the first Kong where his fur is brown and that sort of riffs off the puppet in the ’33 film, the actual stills of it. That fur was brown but you just don’t know because it was a black and white film and there was a gorgeous poster done from back in the day with sort of brown fur on it and I wanted to find something iconic, something fearsome and something godlike. When you really get into his eyes, you feel the color in them but I wanted his eyes to be black most of the time, like a diseased god, until he is slowly awakened.
DC: About Samuel’s line “Bitch, please…” That wasn’t scripted, was it?
JVR: Actually, that was… Sam did not say… we’re a PG movie, people are sometimes afraid of swearing and that was an improvised moment but he wasn’t saying, “Bitch, please.” He was saying, “Woman, please,” or something like that. And then I went up to Sam and was just like, “Sam, ‘Bitch, please.’ Just go for it.” And I never thought it was going to make it in the movie because it’s such an insane thing to say, even though it’s not anachronistic at all. “Bitch, please” stems from pimp slang from the Seventies, but to me those are the exact type of moments that I love in movies like this where it’s like, in a normal scene in a movie you would not be getting a line like that to laugh at, but I love the idea of subverting the moment of what should be. That breathes emotional life, everybody listen to the thing I’m going to say at this point in the movie, “Bitch, please.” So that was improvised… that sort of a fusion of Sam improvising something and me asking him to say “Bitch, please.”
Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ Kong: Skull Island reimagines the origin of the mythic Kong in a compelling, original adventure from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts.
Kong: Skull Island stars Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, and John C. Reilly. The international ensemble cast also includes Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell, and Eugene Cordero.
Vogt-Roberts directs the film from a screenplay by Max Borenstein, John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Derek Connolly. To fully immerse audiences in the mysterious Skull Island, the director, cast, and filmmaking team filmed across three continents over six months, capturing its primordial landscapes on Oahu, Hawaii; on Australia’s Gold Coast; and finally in Vietnam, where filming took place across multiple locations, some of which have never before been seen on film.
Kong: Skull Island will be released worldwide in 2D, 3D in select theaters, and IMAX beginning March 10, 2017, from Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
Synopsis:
A diverse team of scientists, soldiers, and adventurers unite to explore a mythical, uncharted island in the Pacific, as dangerous as it is beautiful. Cut off from everything they know, the team ventures into the domain of the mighty Kong, igniting the ultimate battle between man and nature. As their mission of discovery becomes one of survival, they must fight to escape a primal Eden in which humanity does not belong.
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