‘Godzilla x Kong’ Director Adam Wingard on ‘Making a Film That the 10-Year-Old Version of Myself Dreamed About’

“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” director Adam Wingard knew he’d be back for a follow-up after making 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong,” one of the rare blockbusters of the pandemic era (even with a simultaneous release on what was then known as HBO Max). He was nearing the end of production on the earlier film; they only had 30 or 40 shots left to complete. “I just figured out how to make a giant monster movie,” Wingard told TheWrap. “And here I was at the end of the journey.”

He thought about something Quentin Tarantino said about following “Django Unchained” up with another western, “The Hateful Eight”: that he wanted to make another western right away because at the end of “Django Unchained” he had just figured out how to make one.

“I really felt like there was a lot of unfulfilled potential that I knew now how to approach, and I was excited right out the gate into jumping back in because I felt like, having made ‘Godzilla vs. Kong,’ I had this newfound sense of confidence in terms of how to approach the monsters as fully realized characters and how to tell a movie from their point of view,” Wingard said. “It really excited me, the idea of being able to do a film that was very visuals-driven. We have large sections without dialogue and that was my big drive, making a film that the 10-year-old version of myself dreamed about.”

When he was a child watching Godzilla terrorize cities, Wingard always wanted as much Godzilla (or the other monsters) as possible. “That’s what I tried to lean towards,” he said.

And that’s exactly what he did with his film. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” which just opened and made a whopping $200 million worldwide (in its opening weekend!), is the oops, all monsters of the MonsterVerse. When a threat from Hollow Earth emerges, Godzilla and Kong have to put their differences aside to deal with this new menace. Godzilla powers himself up and has new glowing pink spines; Kong has a mechanical glove to go along with his magic ax. It’s deeply insane and hugely enjoyable.

On the human side of things Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry return from “Godzilla vs. Kong” and are joined by Dan Stevens, who Wingard worked with before on the cult hit “The Guest.” Stevens’ Trapper, a veterinarian for the kaiju, is an absolute hoot, easily the most enjoyable human character in the entire MonsterVerse.

“I’ve always been looking for another movie to work with Dan on and there wasn’t a project that had a character that he fit in,” Wingard said. Simon Barrett, who wrote “The Guest,” was working on “Godzilla x Kong” and together they decided to write a part for Stevens to play, instead of trying to fit him into some already established architecture. “That’s where Trapper came from,” he said. “We wrote him knowing that he could be your handsome, charming, charismatic leading man, but he’s also excited about all the quirks that go along with that and leaning into the real character actor-y kind of stuff. We knew we could have our cake and eat it too with Dan.”

Early in the production, Trapper was saddled with a monologue that revealed his backstory; Wingard remembers it being about him being stuck alone with hyenas in Africa. It was a moment that provided a ton of information about the character in a fairly condensed amount of time. But Wingard also really wanted to introduce Trapper along with the Greenflow song “I Got’Cha” from 1977, whose lyrics are also the name of the song. They played the song on set and Stevens sang along to it. “When we got an editorial, it was like ‘you can have Dan tell a monologue for two hours about his past’,” Wingard said. “And you’re not going to understand his character better than just having him sing ‘I Got’Cha’ for 15 seconds of the movie, because that just says everything you need to know about him.”