One of the most titanic films of the year was Godzilla vs. Kong, starting out the summer blockbuster season in earnest and providing movie theaters worldwide with a much-needed lift at the box office, resuscitating the entire movie industry. To help bring the film's kaiju confrontations and new designs to life, Bryan Hirota helmed the visual effects team for VFX studio Scanline VFX on some of the biggest, most memorable sequences in the film as well as redesigning the kaiju character models since their last, respective appearances.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Hirota spoke about developing the epic ocean-based showdown between the two, designing a much older Kong than the version that was last seen in the '70s-set Kong: Skull Island and getting to deliver the first cinematic meeting between Godzilla and Kong in nearly sixty years. Along included are process shots of some of the film's gorgeously rendered sequences and designs, from initial character models to how they appear in the finished movie.
The big action scene that first got everybody talking this year is Godzilla vs. Kong's ocean fight. I was talking to Adam Wingard and he said that was the fight that was pre-visualized the most. How was it developing that scene?
Bryan Hirota: Like Adam was saying, he had pre-vizzed that before he even hired [overall visual effects supervisor] John "D.J." Des Jardins]; that was one of the first things that I had seen after joining on to this movie, D.J. showed me this viz. I remember saying to D.J. when we were finishing up the movie six months ago, or whatever, that it must be nice for Adam because a little bit might have changed but the big beats and general idea of this ocean battle were what he had pre-vizzed way back when.
The shot of Kong punching Godzilla on the aircraft carrier was in the pre-viz from way back. I remember my first impression of seeing that viz: That shot, that's the movie. One of these monsters punching the other in the face standing on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. This sort of heightened ridiculous, in my opinion, is what the movie should be.
This scene has water, light, fire all around. What were some of the big challenges developing that sequence?
Hirota: You have these two gigantic creatures so you have to maintain their scale, one of which has fur. You have to deal with considerations with their musculature and their skin but they're also on top of a very dynamic battlefield: They're on ships traveling through the ocean, they affect the ships with their weight. If they smash things on the aircraft carriers, the boats sink and they're able to go under the water and above the water. You have a bunch of different factors and different simulations that you have to take into account throughout the whole sequence. It's kind of like every kind of simulation that you could come across, you come across.
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You've also got this new design for Kong: The last time we saw him, it was the '70s and he was just a juvenile simian; now he's about fifty years older and bigger. How was it developing this new visual model for Kong in the MonsterVerse?
Hirota: That was one of the things that they wanted us to explore: How do you take the Skull Island Kong and what is he like today? There was this idea of Kong with a bit of world-weariness to him. Early on, internally, we started calling him Old Man Kong and we liked the idea of a boxer or MMA fighter or powerlifter a bit past his prime. He maintains that old man strength but he's not in peak fitness. If you were to shave our model of him, he's got some fat rolls on his back but his musculature is vastly more developed than it was in the '70s. All of his major muscle groups are bigger, he's a bit broader in the pecs, shoulders and lats. He's got a bigger, sort of V-shape to his back.
We looked at primates and how they age -- and Kong's not exactly like a gorilla or chimp, he's a bit anthropomorphized -- but we did study how primates age, with the silverback males; we took some of those influences and some human influences. We definitely wanted him to have a beard and did a bunch of different stylings with the beard and coverage of white hairs to mix in with the brown and black from the Skull Island groom.
We were conscientious of tracking all the wounds he had from Skull Island and fading them back into his body -- they had been there for fifty years -- but we wanted to keep him connected to Skull Island. And then we added some other damage to his body because we figured, in the fifty years we hadn't seen him, we were sure he done some other crazy things; we gave him some additional scars and wounds from that. It was very important to everybody that he felt like the Kong from Skull Island but we just picked up his story from half a century later.
How was it getting to work on the original American blockbuster icon and the original Japanese cinematic icon?
Hirota: Awesome! When I was a kid, growing up in Southern California, KTLA would show these kaiju movies on Saturdays. The original King Kong vs. Godzilla from the '60s? I love that movie! The opportunity to circle back as an adult and contribute to that in a remake...we had a test screening for it pre-pandemic, the visual effects weren't finished and it had temp sound [design]. We showed it to an audience and, afterwards, me, D.J. and Adam were talking in the lobby and the audience responded really well to it. Some of the animatics and pre-visualizations were still in there and they responded to the things that you hoped that they would. It was nice to see that reaction but Adam said "It's been over fifty years since this movie has been made. When are they going do this again? How awesome is it that we get to do this!" It's not like Spider-Man or Batman that's constantly in play, who will know when someone will want to do this again; I feel super lucky that we got the opportunity.
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 is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max.