Pure Imagination: Adam Wingard on Godzilla vs. Kong | Interviews

Would it be fair to say that this movie was almost therapeutic? 

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s like an understatement to a certain degree, because this is a life-long goal and ambition. The whole reason I exist as a filmmaker is these types of films. I still remember the moment that I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, in terms of, I wanted to be the person that makes these movies. I believe it was ’89, ’88 I think. I remember that “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” was coming out, and I was so excited about “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” I was obsessed with the trailers, it had everything I wanted in a movie. And I remember a trailer came on TV, literally I was in a box when I asked my mom this, it was one of those things where my parents figured out, if they got these big refrigerator boxes and just put them in our living room and we’d turn it into a play palace. And I remember sitting in this box and watching the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” trailer and turning to my mom and asking her, “Who is the person who decides where they put the camera? Is it the director or the producer?” I heard these labels but I didn’t know which one they were. And my mom says, “Ahh, I’m not sure. Maybe a producer?” And I was like, “I want to be a producer when I grow up!” And then you know of course later on, I learned that it was different. Well, maybe not all of the time, producers do tell you where to put the camera, but that was the moment where I had never backed down. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. 

It’s funny you mention producers as telling you where to put the camera, because with "Godzilla vs. Kong" you’re making a massive, collaborative movie, in which I imagine you had to fight for a few things. I was curious about a couple ideas: I know that you've previously said you wanted to do the water fight scene since the very beginning. But was it your idea to have Kong punch Godzilla in the face in that wide shot? Can you tell me about coming up with that?

Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because there’s a couple stories I can share about this. So, the first would be that the first time I read the treatment, it wasn’t even a treatment. Terry Rossio wrote it based on a writer’s room they were in, and it was so loose that he called it “a proposal,” which is probably a way of just making like executives feel more comfortable. They're more like, “Oh this isn’t defined, it’s a proposal. We love this.” It felt good, and I’ve actually used that, me and [Simon Barrett] when we’re doing our “Face/Off 2” treatment; we just ripped off exactly what Terry Rossio did because it was brilliant. We called it a proposal, makes people feel nice. 

So I’m reading the proposal and it gets to all the action scenes, and it gets to the ship battle. And it’s very vague: “Here we are at the ship battle, you’re going to see Kong do things you’ve never seen him do before, he’s going to jump from ship to ship, Godzilla and Kong fight on an aircraft carrier, it’s going to be amazing.” And that’s basically how we left it. And the first thing I thought was, “Can Godzilla and Kong fit on an aircraft carrier?” I know that people aren’t coming to seek these movies for the ultimate depiction of reality, but I thought that it can’t strain credibility so far, right? I worked with my production designer friend, Tom Hammock, and he put together a little guide that showed a depiction of an aircraft carrier, and the actual size and weight of Kong and Godzilla as they existed in the Monsterverse films. And he showed me that the length of an aircraft carrier is over a thousand-something feet, and the monsters themselves are about 300, 350 or so. And so we kind of looked at that and you can actually see they can fit on there. And then the next step was the art department people—they put together a size test of some kind, and so obviously there’s no way to actually measure how heavy Godzilla and Kong are, but estimating the amount of space they take up and the size, the weight that they have together, versus the weight of what an aircraft carrier can supposedly handle, it worked. The math works. And then I thought about it further, I was like, “Well, if you took two bears and put them on a rowboat, the rowboat is not gonna sink to the bottom of the ocean, you know what I mean?”