The stars of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire aren’t the humans – director, actors on sharing the screen with monsters

Or, as Stevens put it: “We’re just the sideshow.”

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“The last film on the surface looks like an ‘everything in the kitchen sink’-type movie: We battle all over the world, we do all these crazy things. But there’s still so much left to do,” Wingard says. “These movies can hold up with the titans, the monsters, as the point of view.”

Godzilla x Kong contains long sequences of dialogue-free storytelling focused only on the monsters – especially Kong, who has found his home in Hollow Earth but is a little lonely. He also introduces several new titans, including Skar King (318 feet tall), and a mini Kong named Suko (149 feet tall).

For Wingard, it felt both groundbreaking to do a film of this scale and also like a lifetime dream come true. It is, he said, the movie he wanted to see at age 10, when he first fell for Godzilla films.

“The whole drive I had for myself as a filmmaker in making this movie was trying to appeal to the inner 10-year-old in me,” Wingard says. “Because that was my initiation into the whole thing I think I’m still sort of aiming towards that kid, trying to show him a good time.”

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“The first movie I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how big the movie actually was,” says Kaylee Hottle, who is deaf, through an interpreter. “And at the end I thought to myself, ‘oh, that was cool’.”

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She was only 10 during the first movie and 15 while filming the second, working most closely with Hall, who plays her adoptive mother.

“There was a very steep learning curve that she completely scaled in no time at all,” Hall says. “In this one, she was that much older and wiser and smart to the whole thing.”

Hall was also excited to finally share some scenes (and dialogue) with Henry, back as the monster fanboy/conspiracy blogger Bernie Hayes. “I remember on the first one I was quite sad that Brian and I only had one day of filming together for the end scene,” Hall recalls.

“I think his pitch to me was a particular scene where my character gets to fly this crazy spaceship through electrical buzzing creatures, saying cool lines,” Stevens says. “I was like, ‘that sounds great’.”

The cast kept one another sane on the green or blue screen days of filming with a guy with a foam finger or a tennis ball on a stick to help get their eyes looking in the right place. All agree that “Kong neck” (getting your neck at the proper angle to gaze upon the titans for extended periods of time) can be a real struggle.

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And just as actors do not quite formally train for “Kong neck”, directors also do not get instructions on just how to make a movie like this. Wingard says by the end of the first, he had just started to feel comfortable.

“You can read every back issue of Cinefex Magazine [dedicated to movie visual effects] that exists, but until you’re actually making one of these things and learning how to frame eyelines for characters looking up at 300-foot-tall monsters and trying to get emotional reactions out of that?

“There’s only so many ways to create these monsters too,” he explains. “Almost half of it is fully animated sequences. It’s like you’re making an animated film, it’s just hyperrealistic.”

That is part of the reason he made sure to take his actors and crew to real locations every chance they got, including the Daintree Rainforest in Australia.

There were giant snakes and flightless cassowaries around, but the biggest anxiety was doing any harm to the environment. Many meetings were had about not touching anything, which is especially funny for a Godzilla movie. But it was all worth it.

“It’s so easy to shoot everything in front of a green screen,” he said. “But at the end of the day there’s an artificiality to that.”

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Hall and the other actors noted how important the sets and locations were to the experience – especially with two no-show stars who had to be added later.

“Kong and Godzilla wouldn’t show up to set, so you had to make believe,” Hall says.

“Stayed in their trailer all day,” Stevens quips.

Warner Bros is rolling Godzilla x Kong out nationwide and exclusively in cinemas.

Wingard likes being part of that moment when theatre owners were reassured that audiences still wanted to come to the cinemas. But he is excited to just get a normal release this time, without the pandemic caveat. Both Godzilla and Kong are some of the oldest movie stars still in action, after all.

“It’s so massive in scale. It’s so grand,” Henry says. “This is the kind of movie you go to the theatres for because you don’t want to be the only one Kong necking.”

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opens in Hong Kong on March 28.