“We’re also fundamentally not playing the same game that Gareth Edwards’ ‘Godzilla’ did and most monster movies do, which I’m sort of sick of, [namely] the notion that a monster movie needs to wait an hour or 40 minutes until the creature shows up. Kong traditionally does not show up in these movies until very, very late, and the monster traditionally does not show up until very, very late in a monster movie, so a lot of these movies tend to have this structure that’s a bit of a slow burn. Something about this movie made me want to reject that and play a very, very different game.”
Speaking just for me, "Oh thank goodness." Nothing against Edwards' Godzilla which was a decent enough film, but I wanted to see the monster throughout. I enjoyed the teasing and the mystery, but we had already seen so much of him in photos and video that hiding him in the movie felt pointless. Now I just want to see Kong destroy stuff, so it's good to know we won't have to wait around for it.
Roberts also talked about his vision for the monster visually, revealing that he went back to the 1933 version for inspiration...
“With Kong, there’s been obviously so many different versions of him in the past, and ours needed to feel unique to our film. I had a mandate that I wanted a kid to be able to doodle him on the back of a piece of homework, and for his shapes to be simple and hopefully iconic enough that a third grader could draw that shape and you would know what it is. A big part of our Kong was I wanted to make something that gave the impression that he was a lonely God, he was a morose figure, lumbering around this island...“We sort of went back to the 1933 version, in the sense that he’s a bipedal creature that walks in an upright position, as opposed to the anthropomorphic, anatomically correct silverback gorilla that walks on all fours. Our Kong was intended to say that this isn’t just a big gorilla or a big monkey. This is something that is its own species. It has its own set of rules, so we can do what we want and we really wanted to pay homage to what came before… and yet do something completely different. There’s subtle nods. [The ’33 film] is black and white, so it’s really easy to assume that the fur on the monkey is black, but there’s actually a lot of forums and things that you read [where you can see] some real poster artwork where Kong’s fur skews more brownish, so we actually pushed his fur in more of a brown as opposed to the traditional black. It really was trying to create this feeling so that when these humans look up at him, they hopefully have a visceral response, saying to themselves, ‘That’s a God, I’m looking at a God.’ ”
Starring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Toby Kebbell, Corey Hawkins, and Jason Mitchell with Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Eugene Cordero and Tian Jing, Kong: Skull Island opens March 10th 2017.
