Writer Max Borenstein Talks Kong: Skull Island
Staci Layne Wilson
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Set in the 1970s, Kong: Skull Island 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, including the mythic Kong. Who came up with that scenario?
Writer Max Borenstein played a big part in crafting the script, and we had a chance to chat with him about the process.
Dread Central: Where’d you get your inspiration to tell the story this way?
Max Borenstein: Here’s the story: I was on Godzilla, in post-production, and Tomas Tull, he was the head of Legendary at the time and is a huge fan of Godzilla and Kong, came to me and said, King Kong, what do you think and eventually Kong versus Godzilla? I was like what? Okay, that sounds challenging but cool so I went off and thought, and part of the challenge was okay, Kong traditionally was this Beauty and the Beast story and it dies, so how do we do that in a way where he doesn’t die but still respects, and also probably isn’t a Beauty and the Beast story, for various reason but also we’ve seen it a lot and so how do we do it in a way that respects the fundamentals, this thing that’s misunderstood, that’s not a monster but seems to be a monster and also make him a character that’s going to be of a scale that could potentially interact with Godzilla and in the same universe?
So my initial idea when I came back before I wrote anything was I said look, I love Apocalypse Now, it’s one of my favorite movies, what about if it’s a journey up river movie and the initial idea was, in the beginning of the movie section, almost the way this movie has a World War Two section, the beginning of the movie is going to be in the Sixties during the Vietnam War and someone lands on the island, and then you cut forward to the present day, the movie takes place in the present day and Thomas is very much a science-driven thinker, he likes to think plausibly and his question was, wait a minute, how do you plausibly explain how an island couldn’t be discovered today? Okay, good question, so we took that idea and basically put it before the original Kong during World War One, it’s a similar thing, a soldier returning home and that’s also the era of Heart of Darkness, so it was this Heart of Darkness thing about going up river.
Then I was having lunch with Jordan, who was not yet on the movie but was going to talk to Thomas about potentially doing the movie and I was telling him what it was and he was like Kong, I don’t know, it’s just the same story and I said well actually, it’s not the same story, what I was doing was writing the present day version of it. What we’re doing is writing this Apocalypse Now thing, where we’re going up river and whatever and he said I don’t know, that’s kind of interesting so he went and talked to him and comes out and was like, his big idea was, well let’s actually do it in the Seventies and not go present and not go in the deep past but it’s funny because that aspect was the first thought, which we then overthought our way out of, which is so typical, and he was like no, the look’s cool, the music’s cool, it feels cool, we should do it and that aspect of it is really interesting and fresh and stayed throughout the movie.
DC: Is the movie set in Vietnam or a metaphor for it?
MB: It’s interesting because it is Vietnam and we often think of the Vietnam War more in a very narrow perspective, as being the first war that was modern in the sense that there was no clear good and bad, but actually it’s not the first war like that. There’s probably only two wars in the history of wars that I can remember that there’s a clear good and bad, The Civil War and World War Two and I don’t know what else. I can’t think of another war personally, I’m not the biggest student of history but I like it. I think everything else is about some wedding or some land or money, it’s bullshit and that’s the way it’s been since and Vietnam was the first after this conflict that World War Two was and prior to that, World War One was a meaningless conflict, in many, many ways and yet, for soldiers it’s all the same, it’s not about meaning, the meaning is the people you’re fighting with and there’s meaning in heroism and bravery but the coming home because it was a more modern world, now is the same ever since Vietnam, people are not afraid to say that war didn’t mean anything and then you as a soldier who lost lives, that sits uneasily.
You want to believe the people you cared about died for something so for Sam’s character, who is such a core of the movie, here you come out of this world that is this grey area, you go in thinking you’re a soldier, he was probably a young guy in Korea, grew up thinking of World War Two, here he goes to war and comes out and nothing seems to mean anything anymore, are we the bad guys, I thought we were the good guys. You land on an island and this giant monster destroys so many of your men, suddenly it’s clear, he’s a bad guy, it’s black and white again. That’s bad, I’m good, and we’re going to destroy that thing, and everything seems clear. And of course the story is it’s not clear, the story is it’s gray area, that’s what the world is. And in the case of Kong he’s misunderstood and he’s actually a villain but that seems to me to be a very universal thing and it’s not just about people returning from war, like we’re dealing with it right now, it’s like anything there’s a very real temptation in the world, anything that seems scary or different you cast as this other and the world’s problems will be solved if you destroy this thing when in fact, the reality of the world is that life is more complicated and that empathy is required. The key to Kong is that he’s not a scary monster if you have empathy for him.
DC: John Goodman’s opening line, did you write it? It seems very topical for right now.
MB: I wish I did, I love that line. Actually it’s funny, I don’t know who wrote it, I wrote that scene but I don’t know where it came from but it was shot really late and shot after the election.
DC: How far along do you plan out your writing, with more Kong movies to come?
MB: Well, Kong versus Godzilla is still just a glimmer in the eyes of everyone. A lot of people are putting their heads together on these movies, you’d like to think about the larger arc but stories take shape and with the process, you never know, you’re not thinking beat by beat in terms of the micro but you’re thinking okay, how are we going to set this up in a plausible, credible way where we can eventually get Godzilla and Kong into the same room. The monarch is the key, the connector in the first Godzilla we did, and the whole idea of that was to be able to facilitate this larger universe and allow a plausible reality that these things have existed, some people have known aspects of it but it’s been largely kept quiet so it’s refillable in that way, it’s given us enough leeway, enough connective tissue to be able to do these other things.
DC: How do you take on writing for an older era and modernize it in regard to the different ethnicities represented?
MB: It’s a combination of both, in this movie it was the idea from the beginning to get away from the tradition, it was very traditional in the Kong movies, apart from the damsel in distress thing that’s a bit uncomfortable and old fashioned, there’s also this weird and very old fashioned and not mildly racist thing of the white Westerners arriving on some exotic island where there’s some natives with spears, and so we didn’t want to do that. So there are people who live on this island but they’re not, I think and hope, treated that way and also, you’re not coming there and oohing and aahing at the people, you’re there about the nature, we’re here because an international group of people representing modern humanity has discovered something that is strange and uncanny and seems impossible from a nature perspective and all of these people are coming there to study it basically, so it’s not about the West meeting the East or whatever. It’s about people discovering something about the world they were unaware of, so that cast sort of just becomes: that makes sense, that’s what the world looks like, and that’s what it should be.
DC: Was there a backstory to John C. Reilly’s character?
MB: Not all of it but I think yeah, the character itself answers that question because he’s such a teddy bear, there’s just some sense of the fact that they are able to co-exist in nature over time with Kong without seeing Kong as a villain speaks to the fact that they see the world in a way that’s less individualistic and adversarial than modern culture tends to, so they don’t come in thinking how do we get ours and mow the lawn? They think about that we are a piece of this larger puzzle and Kong is at the top of it and we’re in it somehow and so his challenge was, how does a guy who eats hot dogs at Wrigley Field manage to liberate himself to be part of this old world fashion and more in tune with nature and its existence.
DC: On Kong using weapons…
MB: The thing about Kong is he’s a primate and it’s the thing that makes him more relatable than Godzilla, more human-like, and so that’s what people do. We as humans, you wouldn’t look at us naked on a savannah and say shit, they’re going to win but somehow, a little bit larger brain and opposable thumbs matter and he’s are actually opposable, more than your normal ape but anyway, tools are a big part of that. He’ll never be as big as Godzilla but, and moreover, the challenge of that movie is going to be neither of them is a bad guy, neither them is out to hurt, or by the natural course of their existence, hurt people so the challenge is going to be how to get them into that movie and have them fight but maybe that’s not the end of it? Maybe there’s a misunderstanding there, too, where they’re not in fact at odds.
DC: How much fun it was writing all those grisly death scenes?
MB: Yeah, that was fun. Sam was like, well he has to be saying you motherfucker before being killed, so it’s fun thinking about people getting destroyed in different ways by cool monsters, that’s always fun.
DC: There are so many monster fights; how do you keep them fresh?
MB: Yeah, that was always the fun of this, of Skull Island, it’s not just a movie about the King Kong myth, he’s not getting taken back to New York so it’s about the island, what are these other creatures there and the creatures evolved, the version of the skull crawlers they’re called, because they have different names over the course of time, a version of that has always existed. They were never supposed to be dinosaurs, we always wanted to do something a little different, just keeping in the vein of theses massive unidentified terrestrial organism things that we had in Godzilla, these strange and different creatures that pre-dated some. I mean, we had a thing in mind, at least I always did, that there was a… I think it was in the Godzilla comic that I wrote, there’s an actual asteroid that actually pre-dated all the dinosaurs. It destroyed all life on earth pretty much, except for cellular and small things, and it’s cool to imagine that that’s where these creatures existed, then the surface world became less habitable and maybe they’ve been here all along. And so that’s the kind of underlying mythology but on this island and other places potentially, it’s like their little emergence points, and there are other things there that beg the imagination.
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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