Ever since Godzilla was rebooted cinematically for American audiences in 2014, there were plans for the iconic kaiju to battle his longtime counterpart King Kong. Director Adam Wingard makes those plans a reality in this year's Godzilla vs. Kong. Serving as the direct sequel to both 2017's Kong: Skull Island and 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong more than lives up to its title as the two Titans battle across the globe with humanity caught in the middle.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, Wingard talks about the sequences and sensibilities he wanted to bring to the film, not as a filmmaker but as a lifelong fan, his inspirations from each of the cinematic icon's long history and the key ingredients to making this movie work.

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One of the things I love about this movie is you hit the ground running; it's all killer, no filler. How was it maintaining that pace and opening with the table already set between these two Titans?

Adam Wingard: It's funny you mention that because I remember, just a couple of weeks ago, the running time came out about the movie and the running time is under two hours but, as you know, we fit a hell of a lot of movie in under two hours. [Laughs] A lot of the Godzilla fans got up and were like "What's going on? This is the shortest of the MonsterVerse films! Is there going to be a director's cut?" The thing is, this is the director's cut, there is nothing left out. The funny thing is, if there was a three-hour-long version of this movie, you wouldn't get an extra hour of the monsters fighting, you'd get an extra hour of people talking about the monsters, it's just the way it would work.

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I wanted this to be a totally dense thrill ride from start to finish. Obviously, we're a sequel, there's a little bit of setup that I do at the beginning of the film. You've got to get the state of the world out of the way, you've got to introduce the characters. We do all that in 30 minutes, set up all the stakes, and then BOOM, you're off to the races. For me, I wanted to watch a movie that the seven-year-old in me wanted to see because, when you're a kid, you just get bored easily. It's got all the adult shit and you want the movie to feel like it's made for adults when you're watching it but, at the end of the day, you want it to appeal to you in its pacing as a kid.

That's sort of what I wanted to do with this movie. I wanted to get back to that kind of vibe where you're just thoroughly entertained from start to finish, there's never a dull moment and you can rewatch this movie a million times. Rewatching this movie is very important to me too. I'm one of those guys still catching up on Oscar movies from 2012... but what I do is wind up watching movies over and over and over again, I get obsessed with them. So when I make a movie like this, that's the goal. I want to give you an experience that you're going to want to repeat over and over again and will keep you captivated.

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As a lifelong kaiju fan, this is a movie you've been thinking about since you were a boy in the schoolyard. With something like the aircraft carrier fight, that delivers on the promise of the title. How was it storyboarding and pre-visualizing that and then working to top yourself in later fights in the movie?

Wingard: With the ocean battle fight, we always kind of knew this is our Empire Strikes Back AT-AT battle, this is the one to beat. The reason it jumped off the page right away was because the stakes are really clear. It wasn't just like, "Here's an environment, and it'll be a cool environment for the monsters to fight and do stuff." The topography of the battle dictated what we were going to do with the fight in a really interesting way because Kong is already kind of at a disadvantage in terms of fighting Godzilla. Godzilla just has a lot more special abilities, he's stronger and all those kinds of things. On top of all that, you put Kong on a terrain where he's at even more of a disadvantage: He's on the ocean, he can't swim that well, he can't hold his breath for unlimited amounts of time underwater.

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That was an interesting kind of starting point because just the idea of seeing Kong jump from boat to boat was really cool and something we'd never seen before. And you're constantly asking yourself those questions when you're making a movie like this, "What have we not seen the monsters do?"

That one was probably the most fun of all the sequences because the script went through all these different changes over all the years and there are so many moving pieces but that sequence never changed so that was the most pre-visualized thing we had from the get-go. It was sort of like that was the piece we showed people as a proof of concept, this is why this movie is going to be amazing, we always had that kind of thing. Just like any other VFX sequence, you start with the storyboards and you go into animation and you just keep working from there.

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Like we were saying: As kids, we just want to see monsters beat the hell out of each other but you do need human characters; as a storyteller, you need to have that perspective. How do you balance that and what was important about bringing in these new characters?

Wingard: For me, it was most important to make sure that the human element was always intertwined with the monster element. I never wanted it to feel like humans are over here, monsters are over here and we kind of go from one to the other. I always wanted to feel the humans were always focused on whatever monster they were focused on. There's Team Godzilla with Millie Bobby Brown's portion of the movie and then you have Team Kong which is Skarsgard's, he's kind of the lead in that [portion of the] film, and they intertwine but are always focused on the monsters.

We're just at a point where it's so obvious that that's what the fans want. It's just what you said: They want to see the monsters fight and the technology is there. It's important to keep the characters proximities to the monsters, they're always focused there. But when the monsters are fighting, you don't have to cut back to the characters anymore. You can let the monsters fight, you can see it, we're not trying to hide anything. There they are all for everybody to see. It's all trying to deliver what people want to see and what I want to see.

When I think back to those original Godzilla movies, maybe some of those films have too many scenes where you hang out with the humans too long. But you know what those films always did: Whenever Godzilla was fighting a monster, they pretty much stayed with Godzilla fighting a monster. [1962's] King Kong vs. Godzilla has got some pretty boring scenes, the original with the news reporters and that kind of stuff, but when they start fighting, it's exactly what you want. They're on-screen doing their thing and it's awesome. And that's the lessons I tried to keep in my mind just thinking about it, not just as a fan but as a kid. I tried to always stay close to that inner child as I was approaching these sequences and what would engage me and keep me coming back for more.

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As someone who's a storyteller, working with one of the original American cinema blockbuster characters and the original Japanese cinema icon, what did you want to say about these two characters?

Wingard: For me, I just wanted to put my own spin on the whole thing anyway. But I wanted to see the monsters in environments I hadn't seen them in before. The first image I had in my head when I was talking to Legendary about potentially doing this film, right away I said, "I want to see Godzilla chasing Kong, with his nuclear breath, around a neon-soaked, futuristic city." I just wanted to see what Godzilla would look like with neon all around him and Kong the same, reflecting off of all their fur and scales and all those kinds of things. On an aesthetic level, that was something I wanted to see right out the gate, with synthwave music playing and all that stuff.

But the thing I wanted to see more than anything, just as a storyteller, I really wanted to experience the monsters from an emotional experience. When I was talking to Legendary initially, I went back and watched all the Godzilla movies in chronological order. I hadn't seen some of them and some of them I hadn't seen since I was a kid. It was a really cool experience but, when I got to Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1995... you're really deep into the Godzilla films. So here I am, watching Godzilla movies nonstop over the course of three days and it's an endurance test. I'm having fun but I'm just sitting on the couch watching Godzilla movies. And Destoroyah comes on and I'm watching it and I like the opening and the visuals of it -- it's a good Godzilla movie, very solid -- but then it gets to the end of the film when Junior dies and, subsequently, Godzilla dies.

The music was so effective and so emotional -- I had been on my phone throughout the movie --  these scenes start happening and I had tears in my eyes. I was barely following the plot of that movie and still, the effectiveness of the juxtaposition of the nostalgic music and the visuals of Godzilla, the director of that movie nailed it so well that I had an emotional response.

And I had a similar thing when I rewatched King Kong '76. When I had those emotional responses, I was like, "This is what I have to bring to this. I have to make sure these monsters, our characters, are first and foremost, that is 100% the most important thing about this movie. It's Godzilla vs. Kong and we have to bring that out." The emotional experience is what I wanted. That said, it's still a really fun movie. It's not as sad as Destoroyah but the emotional feeling is what I wanted to bring to it.

Directed by Adam Wingard and written by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein, Godzilla vs. Kong stars Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry. The film arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on March 31.

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