By Gill Pringle
“I think Kong still endures because everybody on this planet is misunderstood, in their own way, regardless of whatever image they present on social media, or Instagram, or whatever,” said Jordan Vogt-Roberts on the Hawaii set of Kong: Skull Island in between giving orders to his a-list cast and crew. “Everyone’s hurting on the inside [Laughs], the way Kong is, and so when I saw that original film, it blew my brain open a little bit. It’s just such perfect genre storytelling, storytelling in general.”
Yours seems like a bit of a Cinderella story, in a way. You’ve come from The Kings of Summer to a $180-million-dollar budget movie! What was the process?
For a start I’m fitting into the slippers. Filmmaking is filmmaking. I grew up on big movies and I always wanted to make big movies. Those are what thrust me into art house cinema and foreign cinema and film history. And so, when I got done with The Kings of Summer, I wanted to make a big movie, because when I grew up, the output in the late ‘70s, and ‘80s, and early ‘90s, those movies were big, where they didn’t have any negative connotation to them. They didn’t have that stink that people want to put on these movies now, because those movies are unequivocally great, and they also happen to be genre films. It’s just great storytelling, with great characters, and great set pieces, and great worlds. I was just super interested in doing that! That’s what made me fall in love with the language of film. It has been a crazy process, and a crazy journey. But at a certain point, you wake up and you’re like ‘Wait, this is my life right now!’ It’s almost like it takes these moments to actually take a step back and say ‘Oh my God! We just built a 35-foot skull!’ I’m just so bad at enjoying my present, just because I’m a neurotic Jew, so I overthink everything! You have to take those moments, to step back and pinch yourself and say ‘Oh my God, this is incredible right now!’ And then also, we are playing with film history. We are playing with an icon, and that’s super exciting stuff.
Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Growing up in Detroit, with the idea of being here right now, seemed impossible! I was always a kid making stop motion movies in my basement with action figures, and I always thought about things thematically. I always had these weird scenes in my head, and just thought about things visually, but Hollywood seemed a million miles away, so, it never seemed achievable.
Did [fellow Michigander] Sam Raimi inspire you?
I didn’t realise that Sam Raimi was from that area until much later, and ironically, it wasn’t even Sam Raimi, but Bruce Campbell wrote a book [If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor], that really delved into his process of making the Evil Dead movies, ‘Oh, maybe this is achievable!’. And I went to college, and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. I went to Arizona State because my parents moved out there, and I was like ‘I don’t know if I want to study philosophy, or sociology, or history, or psychology, or what?’ And so I dropped out of college, and then went to a film school. It didn’t feel achievable still! It seemed fake! It didn’t seem real. It was like a pipe dream! Like, growing up in Michigan, of all places, LA is like a million miles away! I was just making shorts in Chicago with a bunch of comedians. Thought I wanted to make documentaries at first, so I was making two very serious documentaries. And then eventually I fell into comedy, realising that humour is how I decode the world, and how I think everyone decodes the world, to some degree, and started making those shorts. But all those comedy shorts were always very cinematic, and then that just started to snowball, eventually I went to L.A, and even then, it was like, ‘I’m never going to get a movie, this will never happen’. And then I made a short [Successful Alcoholics, co-written with TJ Miller], and that went to Sundance.
Your film is a complete spin on the whole Kong myth!
We’re explicitly not doing the Beauty and the Beast story. We’re not taking Kong back to New York. We’re still playing with a lot of that imagery, and that iconography, and those themes, but recontextualising them, and doing them differently. It’s more about understanding the workings of this island, and the symbiotic relationship, and a take on the relationship between the island and people, and people and creatures, and creatures and creatures, and to some degree, it’s a throwback to the ’33 Kong, in terms of this character, and his berserk or classic movie monster mentality. It’s also this pulling back of the curtain of sorts on who this guy is, and what his plight is, and this slow, lumbering God of a man, who is simultaneously like a little boy, and then a cranky old man at the same time. And so, it really becomes a survival story, and just a story where you’re finding out about what Kong’s life is along the way.
Can you talk about the Australian shoot?
When we shot Australia, Hawaii and Vietnam, they all had different vibes to them, and they all had a different energy to them. Everything in Australia will kill you! (Laughs) as it turns out. In a weird way, the ecosystem of Australia was an inspiration for Skull Island, where it was a closed ecosystem, that just developed a bunch of crazy things, that just don’t exist elsewhere. It was great being in the jungles of Australia, and being surrounded by these insane snakes and these odd Gympie Gympie, as the Australians would call them. Gympie Gympie is actually a plant. It makes you limp, so they call it a “Gympie Gympie”, because it sticks into your leg. But, the bigger thing beyond Australia, was honestly Vietnam. I wanted to shoot this as practically as possible, and I don’t want it to look like Jurassic Park. I feel like Jurassic Park owns the aesthetic of Hawaii, and that look is so clearly associated with those films. And we wanted this to feel raw, out there, primordial, and Vietnam is one of the most beautiful raw places on the planet, and we were lucky to basically be the first film ever of this scale, by a long shot, to shoot there.
What did setting the film during the Vietnam War allow you to do?
I think it’s a lot of things! But just what was going on at the time, with political scandals, wars we were losing, racial riots, sexual revolutions, are not that dissimilar from what we’re living in now. And being able to take characters who, much like now, are caught between worlds, and broken, and thrust them into something greater than themselves. When you’re caught in the midst of where you fit in the world, and then suddenly you’re presented with a God, or with these beasts. What does that do to you? Do you turn out to be the agnostic, or the atheist, or the believer? Do you call the action, or do you crumble? What does that do to you mentally? And there’s just something about that era of filmmaking, and just the possibility still present. You’ve seen Kong in the ‘30s, and you’ve seen that weaponry against him. And yeah, there was technically a Kong movie in the ‘70s, but that didn’t really play the ‘70s like we are. And so, I didn’t want to set the movie modern day, I was interested in more modern technology and machinery, but still having it be slightly more analogue and updated. And so, to me, there was just a plethora of things that came from that, aesthetically and otherwise, that helped give this Kong something different.
You’ve said before that you were not going to play hide and seek with the monster, that we were going to see him right away, unlike Godzilla.
I said that the other day, and a handful of others took that as me throwing shade at Gareth Edwards, which is completely wrong. I think the game he plays in that movie is great! However, that’s not the game that I wanted to play. He does a phenomenal job in that film, constructing that world, and that slow burn is incredible. It works so well in that movie, however, I don’t think you can simultaneously address the battle of ‘Why make another King Kong movie and then play the same game?’ It’s just too much! I think both these movies are equally cinematic, and don’t feel “cookie cutter”, as a lot of blockbusters I think feel these days. That sense of scale was a big thing, and just the commitment to the world. Our movie is much more willing to delve into absurdity, and have fun with that world. But Gareth did an incredible job on that movie, and I think having the reverence for Godzilla, that you feel in that movie is important. I hope people feel that same reverence for Kong.
Kong: Skull Island is in cinemas from March 9, 2017.
Read our review of Kong: Skull Island
Read our interview with Samuel L. Jackson about his role in Kong: Skull Island
Read our interview with Brie Larson about her role in Kong: Skull Island
