The Big Picture
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a collaboration between Legendary Pictures and Apple TV, expanding on the material in the Godzilla Monsterverse.
- The creators discuss their partnership with Legendary and the enthusiasm to explore new MUTOs in the series.
- Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell share their experiences working on the show, including the challenge of playing the same character and the importance of having a talented filmmaker on board.
In a universe first created by Toho with Godzilla in 1954, Legendary Pictures has since expanded on the material in their Monsterverse with a new emergence of the iconic Titan. Now, in a collaboration with Apple TV, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters tells a new story that dates back to the ‘50s when Monarch was first founded and spans to the aftermath of the attack on San Francisco in Godzilla (2014). Ahead of the series premiere on the streamer, Collider’s Steve Weintraub hosted a Q&A after our early screening for Episodes 1 and 2 with director Matt Shakman, creators and EPs Chris Black and Matt Fraction, and surprise guests Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell.
If you had to miss out on the screening, check out the full interview in the video at the top of this article, or you can read the full transcript below. During their conversation, the creators discuss their close partnership with Legendary to find where their narrative belongs throughout the timeline and Legendary and Toho’s enthusiasm for Monarch to explore new MUTOs. Fraction explains why fans of the Godzilla franchise can rest easy with the Titans in their hands, how they map out their season, and why it’s okay for there to be questions at the end of Season 1.
On the other side of the lens, Kurt Russell shares what it was like behind the scenes for his first television production since 1979 (Elvis), what Monarch has in common with John Carpenter’s The Thing, which creature is his favorite from Season 1, which co-star gave a standout performance and tons more. Wyatt Russell gives his perspective on the challenge of playing the younger version of his father, why filming on location can be dangerous—and why he prefers it to sound stages—and how his core castmates, Mari Yamamoto and Anders Holm, made Monarch such a special project.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Set after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans, revealing that monsters are real, follows one family's journey to uncover its buried secrets and a legacy linking them to Monarch.
Release Date November 17, 2023 Cast Christopher Heyerdahl , Mari Yamamoto , Kurt Russell , Qyoko Kudo Main Genre Sci-Fi Seasons 1COLLIDER: Kurt, you haven’t done a television series, I believe, since ‘76 with The Quest. What was it about this that said, “Oh, I'm doing this actually?”
KURT RUSSELL: Actually, it’s interesting, the last thing I did in television was ‘79. It was Elvis. You guys haven't seen that, I’m sure. It was a long time ago before any of you were born. But I remember John Carpenter once said to me, he said, “What was the moment you said yes?” I said, “I pulled it out, and it said “Elvis,” so I thought, ‘This is gonna be interesting.’” [Laughs] When we were notified about this, it was, “Okay, well, what is it?” “It's Godzilla.” When you do that, it's a double-edged sword. For some people, it’s like, “Okay…?” For us, it’s like, “Whoa. Wait, what? Godzilla? You mean Godzilla Godzilla?” “The Godzilla.” So I was interested in that, honestly, and then the opportunity to maybe do something that I'd never seen, which was known actors, father and son, playing the same person.
Wyatt Russell on Playing Kurt Russell in the '50s
What is it like to do a show with your dad playing the same character, and you're gonna have no scenes with him?
WYATT RUSSELL: It was a challenge. It was a really fun challenge to try and meet because you can't hit the nail on the head with certain things, and go, “We're gonna do this. We're gonna raise our left eyebrow just like this, right?” You're not gonna do that. But what we all wanted to make sure was as long as the architecture of the character was in a place where you knew where you were going at the end of the show, that was gonna inform who Lee was and who Lee became, then you could just play the reality of the scene, which is something that we both stand by as ways of being as actors. Just play the scene and it will come across as the same person because, well, we do have the same genetics. [Laughs] But there were some really cool things that everybody came up with, like there's some face blending things and interesting things that you'll see throughout the show that I think were really well placed and planned and helped sell that well.
KURT: We understood that the one character that was gonna connect the times was Lee Shaw, so you had to connect him. You could never make the mistake of becoming father and son. We looked out for that.
Kurt, I saw in Episode 2 that your birthday on the show is in 1924. Do you just really look good for your age, or is it one of these things where it's gonna get into how you are still so active and spry at that age?
MATT FRACTION: Do the line! Do the line!
KURT: That's not a spoiler, is it?
CHRIS BLACK: It is a plot point at one point.
KURT: It is a plot point, but at one point, one of the characters says, “Don't let this go to your head, but you look really good for 90-something.” [Laughs]
Reaching the Apple TV Sci-Far Bar
First of all, I want to give a huge thank you to Apple TV for partnering up to do the screening tonight, but I also want to give a shoutout to Apple TV for putting on such incredible sci-fi. Between Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, and now this for you guys, can you sort of talk about Apple as a partner in this? They really are throwing in great resources and making it so something like this just could be shown on a movie screen and it looks like it belongs on a movie screen.
BLACK: I can't really speak to those other shows. Our relationship with Apple, it wasn't about it being a science fiction show. It was really just about, “We have to make the absolute best version of this that we possibly can, and it has to look great.” It has to tell the best story. It has to be about these characters. It has to be driven by their journey and their story, and who they are. There’s a bar that they set that is sometimes intimidatingly high, and there was never any time where we felt like, “Well, this is good enough. We're not gonna worry about it. This can slide through.” It was like no, everything from the casting, obviously, to the script work, to the cinematography, the whole thing, it's just gotta be great.
FRACTION: And it's got to stand side by side with the feature films that our partners at Legendary make, right? There are Monsterverse movies that we all know and love, and it's got to stand side by side with that stuff. So when those moments happen, when those big monster moments happen, it's gotta be of that par.
WYATT: A big part of it was, too, you don't know what you're gonna get. A lot of times you do a movie, and you do not know what you're gonna get unless you have a good filmmaker. It needs a good filmmaker. If you don't have it, you can be like the best actor in the world, and then you see a shitty movie. It happens all the time. So when we, my dad and I, were like, “Well, who's gonna do the first one?” They were like, “Well, Matt Shakman is gonna do the first one.” It made such a huge difference because you knew that it was gonna be done in a way that was gonna meet the needs of what Godzilla needed to be. That gave you confidence in our ability to act the character in certain ways because you knew it was gonna be in good hands. It's very important, and obviously he’s amazing and did an incredible job. So, that was huge.
MATT SHAKMAN: Thank you for saying that. Can I also just acknowledge two parts of this incredible filmmaking team who are here today which is Nona Khodai, who edited both [Episodes] 1 and 2, and Jess Hall, who is the cinematographer for Episodes 1 and 2, as well?
KURT: I'm pretty objective about this. I've done it for a long time, and I'm very careful. It's like a doctor lowballing it. This is a real slow burn, and I mean that seriously. This does something that is very hard to achieve. It's really wonderful to be a part of when that achievement is made. It gets better and better and better and better and better and better and better! Like that. It's gonna be interesting to see how people respond week to week to week. I would have to binge this myself because you're going back in time and you're finding out about characters. The mysteries become doubled and tripled, and they're always dropping Easter eggs everywhere.
These guys did something that was virtually next to impossible. When you're doing a movie, you're doing an hour and 45 minutes, two hours. You take three months to do it. But since 1979, since the last time I did a show that was on television, I've never worked on a show that I didn't know the very last line of the movie because I reverse engineer everything. I don't know how you can do it without that. We're starting shooting on [Episodes] 1 and 2 and we don't even know what 6 and 7 are gonna be. And these guys are working on that, and they're trying to build something while the actors are trying to completely commit to something that they never want to make any violations to. If you tell the audience something in [Episode] 4 that you completely violated in 6, I'm out, and I’m hardcore in that. I'm no fun in that room.
So, they were having to deal with us at the same time they were dealing with things like, “I don't know what we're gonna do there.” And they couldn't give answers. They didn't know. They were working to be able to get that within that framework, to get that movie. These are five movies back to back to back if you consider this a two-hour movie, a two-hour movie, a two-hour movie. Matt Shakman did two hours, and Hiromi [Kamata], and Mairzee [Almas], and Julian [Holmes], and Andy [Goddard], and they all did fantastic jobs. But guys, to do five movies back to back to back to, back to back? It's suicide. So, stick around for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. [Laughs] That's all I'm gonna say.
BLACK: And it requires a lot of trust for these guys to come in with the careers that they've had the talented people that they've worked with, to look at us and go, “Well, I hope these guys don't make us look like idiots.”
KURT: we wouldn't let you. [Laughs]
BLACK: It was for us to have those conversations. “We're not 100% sure where it's going yet, but have faith. We'll get there together. We're gonna work together. We're gonna figure it out.” It was a journey.
KURT: Absolutely. Mix that in with the fact that when you're out there shooting something for four months, many people don't understand that when you're shooting on the set, you're not making the movie. You're just putting shit in a can for them to make the movie later. All movies are made in the editing room because you're gonna find things in there you didn’t know. All movies have a life of their own as you're doing them, so they're also dealing with that. Impressive job, guys. Way to go.
I'm fascinated by the editing process because that’s where it all comes together. How did this actually change in the editing room in ways you guys weren't expecting?
FRACTION: It was a three-camera half-hour sitcom when we started. It wanted to be something else, and Godzilla’s got a mind of his own. You just gotta let him go.
SHAKMAN: We played around with structure a lot. When do you cut to the past? When do you cut to the present? Those things changed.
BLACK: Yeah, the first episode didn't end where it ends now, where you see it with them losing Keiko and the reactor. There was a whole additional scene after that.
SHAKMAN: And the second episode didn't end the way it ends now. It ends now with you guys and the creature, and I think it had ended with the reveal of Kurt.
BLACK: Yeah. And in that first episode, when we watched it in the cut, we had a scene that we were going to shoot. We watched the cut, and we saw that moment she falls, and we were like, “Show’s over.”
FRACTION: You're not coming back from that.
BLACK: We’re not putting anything on after that.
SHAKMAN: We spent several days shooting a bar fight, which now appears in a sort of lyrical flashback in the middle of your meeting.
WYATT: The way it started out is Matt and I were like, “Well, how should we introduce the character?” And I was like, “I don't know…” I was smoking at the time, I quit smoking…but I was like, “What if I light a cigarette?” I was like, “Yeah, that’d be cool!” So, we started out lighting a cigarette, and then, like a day later, it was like, “Apple didn't really love the fact that we started the character with you smoking a cigarette, so we're gonna have to work around that part.” [Laughs]
KURT: See, that's stuff that you have to understand. I played Santa Claus twice, and to find out that Netflix can't – he smokes a pipe! The guy lives with a pipe in his mouth, you know? This is a different world. [Laughs]
WYATT: But all that to say, it’s just a testament to how Matt was able to get around that. I should have been smarter and been like, “This is probably a stupid idea. Don't do it.” But again, a testament to how he was able to nimbly move, and that was just a lot of fun and that bar fight was a blast.
KURT: Don't you guys find that in the editing room it's the first time you say, “Yeah, I didn't think that was gonna have that much power, that relationship,” or, “God, I thought that was funny. It's not funny at all,” or, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait, roll that back. Oh my god. Wait a minute, if you flip and you start…?” I mean, it's the magic room. You can't believe what you can do in editing. Well, you guys love this world, so you can imagine. But you find those things, and that's exciting. You go home at night, and that’s what you love about being part of the circus, right?
BLACK: It's your last chance to tell the story.
FRACTION: There's something that happens, too, when there's a scene, like maybe you love it on the day, you love it in assembly, and then at some point, it goes away, and you don't even notice it. You're like, “But that was the part. That was the thing. Oh my god, I didn't even notice it was gone.” And suddenly, it's like it doesn't need it anymore, right? It slowed it down. The right calls are made, and you don't even miss what you thought you would miss.
What Are the Monsters in 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'?
I'm curious for myself and for the audience, what can you tease about some of the creatures this season or the monster?
FRACTION: There's lots of them.
SHAKMAN: There are ones you know, like Godzilla, and others that are familiar. Then there are some new ones, which are really cool, like new bugs you met tonight, new dragons you met tonight. I think that was the fun of this. For those of you who love the Monsterverse and the Toho films, you'll see creatures that you know and then you'll also see creatures that you don't know.
KURT: What's the name of—the no spoiler because they haven't seen it yet—the thing that has all the [gestures].
BLACK: The Bramble Boar.
KURT: There you go! Heads up for the Bramble Boar. [Laughs] That's my favorite. That thing's awesome.
BLACK: Obviously, there's Godzilla. He's a presence. He's not in every episode, but he has a presence throughout. But we had a lot of latitude from both Toho and Legendary and Apple to say, “Just let your imaginations run. We want new creatures. We want the classic pantheon of monsters. We wanna see those characters.” And Toho does refer to them as characters, not creatures or monsters. They're like, “These characters have a history. They have a legacy. We want to see them in the show. But also, we want to expand that pantheon and meet new ones and create new ones.” It was a lot of fun. We had a great visual effects team headed by Sean Konrad. Amazing. They helped design new things. And Matt Shakman can speak to the opening sequence in the first episode.
SHAKMAN: Oh, yeah. It's fun to design creatures. We had a whole different plan for how John Goodman was gonna be attacked, and then we found this really cool rock formation in Hawaii called Lānaʻi Lookout. When I went down there, there were all these little crabs that appeared that had been blending in, and they were running for me, and I thought, “Oh, we should just have a giant crab.” So then we designed that big crab based on what we found, which I think is the fun of a lot of the monsters in the Monsterverse, especially in Skull Island. They mix the flora and the fauna. They clearly went and found the creepiest critters that exist in the world and then just made them really fucking big. And that's a lot of fun.
Filming on Location for 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'
One of the things I think adds so much to the series is that it's not all sound stages. You're on location a lot, and that location shooting just makes it feel like it's real, and you're there, and it's authentic. Can you talk about being on location filming and how much that added to the show?
WYATT: Having done both, for an actor, when you're actually looking at the thing that you're supposed to be looking at, it makes quite a big difference. Now, what they can do is you don't have to be acting to a tennis ball all the time. What was so fun about doing some of the stuff that we did when we were in Hawaii with the Lawton dragon, and we were diving into holes and stuff, what was so fun is we were talking with Matt and going, “Okay, now where is it coming from?” And I'm not on a sound stage. We're actually diving into a real hole, and you can imagine that a real dragon is behind you. It's not like in a sound stage where you're just running on a treadmill. That's not fun and exciting to do, so that makes a huge difference to me.
SHAKMAN: And you guys went to a glacier. Isn’t it the same exact glacier?
KURT: From The Thing? No, we were in a different place. We were in Hyder, Alaska/Stewart, British Columbia. But this was an interesting location. We were all up there. It was very warm, and the snowpack had come down from the sky.
FRACTION: There was a foot less of everything.
KURT: The first day we were there, we were taking helicopters up there, and I get off and everybody's getting their bearings and stuff. About two hours later, I looked over quite a ways away, maybe 400 or 500 yards away from where we were shooting, and I see this guy with a group of other guys and he's got a long 20-foot pole and he's doing this [gestures]. He’s not moving fast. So, you had to be very careful where you were going. When we saw that, when they roped some areas off, I started looking at the guys. I said, “They aren't kidding, man. Do not go past that rope.” It was pretty weird, that location. It was a fantastic. You were out in the middle of nowhere, but you were really in the middle of nowhere and that was weird.
FRACTION: This show was for Apple TV’s global division. We wanted a show that looked like the world, and that meant getting out into it as much as we could – Hawaii and we were in Tokyo for two weeks. We lost half a day to a typhoon. That was exciting. We're like, “Oh, we lost half a day to a typhoon.” It's a good reason to lose half a day. But we wanted it to look like everywhere. We just found amazing locations all throughout British Columbia. It was hugely important for the kind of scope and scale of the show to not be on a volume. We did use a drone once for eyeline, remember that? Out at Cache Creek, there was a drone used so everyone could track it in because there was a motion. That was fun. We were like, “How are we gonna make everyone do this? We've got a drone!”
BLACK: You couldn't hold a tennis ball high enough for Godzilla.
That's actually genius when it comes to filming with a monster, having the drone right there. Everyone sees it. Everyone's looking at the right eye line. That's actually great.
KURT: It's kind of hard to imagine some of that stuff when you're out there. In some of those takes where Godzilla's tail is sweeping over you, you're saying, “Now exactly how big is the tail?” “It's really big.” [Laughs] “From here to way over there, and he’s getting bigger and bigger here.” Then you got the wind machines going and stuff. It's fun making movies.
When to Use VFX in 'Monarch'
The thing about Godzilla and the monsters is that they all cost a lot of money to put on screen, so I'm curious in the writing process of the 10 episodes, how much were you like, “Okay, it cost X number of dollars to do this, so we need to pick and choose where we're gonna deploy these kinds of big resources in what episode and when?” Can you talk about how you decided where and when to deploy the big VFX?
BLACK: It's always a balancing act. We felt we were, a little bit, serving two masters with this show. We knew it was the Godzilla show, and there's an expectation, particularly working with Legendary and the big movies, that the fans of this universe expect to see their big monsters. But we also didn't feel that we could sustain a television series both on a production level because, as you point out, they're very expensive, but also from a storytelling level. From the very beginning, we didn't want to make a show that was a show about monsters; we had to make a show about people who inhabit a world with monsters. So, where the monsters appeared was largely driven by the story. We had a group of characters on a quest pursuing something, looking for their father, trying to solve a mystery, and the monsters kept getting in the way. And they would appear, as Matt Fraction points out, at the most inconvenient moment for our characters.
FRACTION: Right when they're about to get the thing, that's a perfect time to have a giant set piece happen, right? But we were very conscious of not letting production concerns guide the writers’ room in that process. There's a crazy location and set piece in Episode 3, and then in Episode 4, we're on a glacier. We were like, “We're gonna build the story, we're gonna build the place, and then we're gonna figure it out.” And our tremendous production team made it happen and marched us around the world and across many trucks, vans, a few helicopters, and airplanes. But, oh god, it had to be like planning a military invasion, like just the logistics. We were trying to figure out how to get a Jeep to Hawaii. There was a whole thing about how much money it was. There was a whole thing. But there are people who live for the challenge of, “What's that? You need a Jeep in Hawaii on Tuesday?” And they make it happen, right?
BLACK: “How much money do you have?”
FRACTION: “Carmax!” No, but we had a tremendous production staff who aided and abetted us in making this giant, giant show.
BLACK: Yeah, as Matt says, when we're working in the writers’ room, I always told the writers, “When you're first thinking about telling the story, just don't write to the budget. Write to the story, and we'll figure it out.” And sometimes stuff is just way too big, and then you have to come back, and you have to pull it back in and find out, “Okay, what is a producible version that tells the same thing that you want?” But I don't want the team to be thinking about dollars and cents. You have to think about, “What's the best story that's serving these characters?”
FRACTION: I am proud, though, that I wrote a pre-outline for an episode and was told, “This would be more expensive than the entire season. Start over.” So, I took the unlimited budget of imagination and I topped it.
BLACK: Yeah, I think it was Episode 109, and they said, “This is Episodes 109, 110, and 201.”
FRACTION: It was fair. It was tough but fair.
Is There a 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters' Season 2?
Speaking of 201, I am curious, when you are pitching Apple on a series like this, they obviously are not thinking one and done. How much are you guys in the bible, if you will, of the show? They wanted to hear you have a three-season plan or a two-season plan. You know where you ultimately would like this to go, you know what I mean? I'm just curious if that came up at all.
FRACTION: Never in such a definitive way, but we love these characters and we love their stories. It was clear that there's more to tell. We take this spectacular journey this season and I think it resolves really wonderfully, emotionally, resonantly, and then there are about 10 million other questions about what's next. I think it was always understood that we weren't crafting a limited series, but like, “Hey, in success and with good luck, we could keep doing this a long, long time.” We've really come to love who these people are and love throwing giant monsters in their way right when they're about to get that thing that makes them happy. So hopefully, if that makes you guys happy, watch early and watch often.
BLACK: When you're in the thick of it trying to figure out what Season 1 is, you're not always thinking about what Season 2 is gonna be. [Laughs]
KURT: All I know is it was our job to try to get them to Season 2. [Laughs]
FRACTION: You guys don't wanna let Kurt down, do you?
For all of you guys, when you looked at the shooting schedule for what you were involved in, what was the day you had circled in terms of, “I cannot wait to film this scene,” or, “Oh my god, I am dreading filming this scene?”
KURT: Those days are gone. I don't feel that anymore. I don't get that one. If you do that, then you're asking for trouble. I have said this to actors: at a certain point in your life, you have to say, “Yeah, you know what? I have done 1,000 of these, and actually, I can be helpful here.” I always say the last three days, you feel that it's like the end of a season in baseball. If you got a chance of making the playoffs, yeah, nobody has to say anything to anybody. Everybody's going for it. But when we're doing this, you don't know what's going to be there and what's not going to be there. You're only putting stuff in the can for them to work with. I always say this the last three days, “I promise you this: everything we shoot now will be in the movie. Otherwise, they wouldn't be shooting it. They need this, so do not let down.” But you gotta do that the first day. The first day, you gotta go in there, you gotta make that team every single day.
WYATT: I have an answer.
KURT: [Laughs]
WYATT: When we went into the submarine, the Lawton, on the first day—I think that was one of the first days of shooting—in the submarine, it was like they put it on this gimbal and it was cool, it was exciting. You're like, “Oh, first day shooting, this is gonna be awesome!” And the submarine was on a gimbal that shook, like if the San Andreas Fault happened right now.
FRACTION: It wasn't Star Trek, man.
WYATT: It was shaking like fucking crazy. It looked great, and it was awesome, but we were on there all day. So it was like, “Holy shit.” I go home and in my bed, and I'm like doing that [shakes]. Then I got the call sheet, and the next day it was like “interior Lawton submarine.” I was like, “Fuck, I don't wanna go to work tomorrow.” It’s safe to say that was probably the only day that I was like, “Oh god. Okay. I'm good.” But no, the shaking came down a little bit.
SHAKMAN: Yes, I'm sorry.
WYATT: But it was great. It looked awesome.
FRACTION: Everyone was like, “Well, how was it?” It’s like, “It's like fighting a bear every single day, but every day it's a different bear.” I only felt that on the first day because it wasn't real until we started.
WYATT: Were you guys there the day we saw the bear?
FRACTION: Yes! The whole crew, we had to scare away a bear.
WYATT: That just reminded me of that. This is like a separate story, but we’re shooting…
SHAKMAN: The scene with the kid and the rifle in the first episode.
WYATT: Yeah. I went, and there's a starting mark, and it's kind of down a little bit behind a trail, like, “Just keep going that way.”
SHAKMAN: And I was like, “Go back further. Further. Go back further.”
WYATT: And, and I had a gun on…
SHAKMAN: Fake gun.
WYATT: So it was a false sense of security. Someone turns around and goes, “Oh my god, there's a bear.” And I turn around and I'm like, “Holy shit. There's a bear like right there. Like fucking right there.” And I know you're supposed to make yourself big, so I was like [awkwardly lifts arms], “Go away, bear.” I literally reached for my gun.
FRACTION: “Hey, Apple, bad news. Wyatt got eaten by a bear… How are we covered for insurance?” [Laughs]
WYATT: Then of course, a grip, like an actual tough person, comes over with an air horn and scares the bear off. But it's really fucking like, “Holy shit! There's a bear right there.”
FRACTION: Then we had the rats. We had the amorous rats that blew a tank in Tokyo.
SHAKMAN: Oh yeah. That's right.
FRACTION: We interrupted some rats’ honeymoon. Wildlife aplenty in our show.
Kurt Russell's Favorite 'Monarch: Legacy of Monster' Episodes
There are eight episodes that everyone has not seen yet in this audience. Which of the eight are you most excited for people to see? Is there one of those eight that you're like, “Oh, I can't wait?”
KURT: Alright, it goes, for me, [Episodes] 9, 6, 8, and then go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7. That's it. Oh yeah. It’s good.
WYATT: [Episode] 9 for me.
KURT: 10 is good!
BLACK: I love all my children. But Kurt’s right, though. It builds momentum. You only get to meet his character at the end of the second episode. Trust me, there's a lot of Kurt coming. Don't worry about it. Those episodes he mentioned are all great, but I think there's something special in all of them. At a certain point, it's on rails to the end, and it was incredibly exciting to get to the end of that journey and see how the first season concluded. I couldn't be more proud of the work everybody did, and particularly our cast was incredible and made us all look good.
SHAKMAN: Great cast.
WYATT: Yeah, in my group, Mari [Yamamoto] and Anders [Holm], you had to create a rapport with your fellow cast mates. In a way, we were in these pods. It was like the young Lee pod and the older Lee pod. A lot of the mistakes that happen in these types of movies, I think, are people go, “Oh, the CGI will make it,” and then they just come to work and just don't show up, or you have an idea, and you're like, “Well, I'm not gonna say it because whatever…Fucking, I don't want to get into it.” But we're not that way. It was important to us that you're involved and you're always in it, and you're always pulling for the right thing because even sometimes if it's the wrong thing, at least you were pulling for something, you know? And I think that's an important thing. And Mari and Anders, I can speak for my crew, they were so right there with absolutely everything. Mari was so game, like on the ropes where she was getting beat up all the time, and the ropes were hard. Doing action is a legitimately difficult thing that most people find out when they do action. You're like, “Holy shit, I gotta climb up this rope 17 times? My hands are gonna fall off.” And Mari went, like every take, she was gung ho, wanted to do everything. Anders, too. It was awesome. That was very nice to see because it is not all the time that you get your cast mates who are as into it as sometimes you are.
KURT: I had a great group with Kiersey [Clemons], Anna [Sawai], and Ren [Watabe]. Ren's very authentic.
FRACTION: He's the Japanese James Dean.
KURT: He's a very quiet guy, but he's really fun, and he's always thinking. I think he's terrific. I think he's got a great future.
BLACK: This is his first real professional acting gig.
SHAKMAN: He was a chef right before.
FRACTION: In one of his auditions, he was like, “Yeah, I only had time to learn the one side. I was working last night.” We're like, “Oh, what are you shooting? What are you filming?” And he was like, “No, I'm a line cook.”
KURT: The progression of his character, he took the progression of his character and did some of the best stuff. But yeah, [gestures to Wyatt] he and I both have a favorite in the show. It doesn't ruin anything. He plays Hiroshi, Takehiro Hira. He’s a great actor. I mean, like really great.
Kurt Russell the "30-Year Guy"
Kurt, I wanna ask you a question that has nothing to do with Monarch. You have done so many amazing things in your career. There are going to be kids or whoever out there who have never seen anything you’ve done. Besides Monarch, what is the first thing you’d like them to watch and why?
KURT: Well, you would start with the Disney days… [Laughs]
FRACTION: The Kurt Russell Collection, available on Blu-ray now, just in time for holiday shopping.
KURT: Somebody once said, “His career looks like it was handled by a drunken driver,” and I think that's really well said because I was behind the wheel. I don't know. What's fun about getting older as an actor is you've had the opportunity to work with really good directors and actors, and some ideas that at least you loved. Sometimes you have to make a decision, “Is this something I'm gonna do because I would love doing it and I wanna do it, but it's probably not really gonna be loved by that many people right now, but I think in 30 years…” I was always a 30-year guy. I couldn't help it. I was just like, “I don't really want to do that. I want to do this because I think that with that guy or that girl, we can make something that can be fun for somebody to watch at any time in the future from now to then.” And in that regard, the one thing that's fun for me now is I hear all kinds, anywhere from Tombstone to The Thing to Used Cars, to whatever. I was fortunate.
I don't know how to answer any other way than that. I was just fortunate, and I continue to be fortunate. I continue to be excited about it. When you get to work with people that are willing to dig in, it's no fun when they don't want to dig in, but when they do want to dig in, it's like, “Yeah, that's why I joined the circus, man.” That's it. I just wanna keep doing it because it's fun. I mean, it probably stunted growth somehow in that regard.
BLACK: I think all of us are.
FRACTION: In the States, it's base camp, where the trucks are and the camera stuff is in the grips go, it’s base camp. In Canada, it's the circus because it really feels it, and that's like, “Oh, it should be the circus. That's so much better.”
Staying True to the 'Godzilla' Franchise
How much did you guys in the writing process figure out sort of a show bible in terms of figuring out all the major moments between like 1945 and 2014, all the things with Monarch and trying to lay it all out, so in case you do three years or four years, you have it all figured out? And how much were you like, “We're just gonna worry about this, and we'll fit it in later? We’ll worry about other things later?”
FRACTION: We take it seriously. I'm a comic book guy. I know what it's like to care about this stuff, and when somebody's faking it… I'm not faking it. I'm gonna be like, “Wait a minute, how does that…?” I knew going in, like, I had a lot of this stuff in my head.
BLACK: He had a lot of it in his head.
FRACTION: It’s a thing we take really seriously and we work with our partners at Legendary. These movies and everything are gonna kind of dance and weave. But the kind of fascinating thing is there's enough big raindrops that there's big spaces between them, and it's okay to still have some question marks because that's interesting for us, right?
You're gonna see Monarch at the pinnacle of its golden age when Monarch was like NASA in the show, and it was the coolest, most cutting-edge science kind of place in the world They do this incredibly huge, massive thing. Then, chronologically in the story, the next time you see Monarch is in Skull Island when John Goodman has his hat in his hand and is begging for a ride on a helicopter. Like, that's a spectacular fall, right? So part of the art is there's like, “Oh man, how did that happen?” We'll find out. It's part of the joy of this is, is there's a lot of questions, and writing is the answer.
BLACK: Yeah, a lot of it was established. We had the mythology, the kind of canonical sandbox that we had was the Legendary movies, was the four, now soon to be five, feature films. That was the world that we had been given to work within. So, a lot of that was established. There was a history, there are characters, there's a timeline, there are Titans, there was a camp that we needed to be faithful to. But as Matt pointed out, one of the great things about working with Legendary was they gave us a lot of latitude to sort of carve our own lane and make our own show, and there's a lot of space between those movies. I mean, between Godzilla in 2014 and King of the Monsters in 2019, there's five years. There's five years where you don't know what's going on in that world.
FRACTION: That’s five years of screen time, right? You meet Monarch in 2014, and they're the mysterious kind of X-File-y monster, CIA thing that nobody listens to, and then in 2019, they're like civil defense. The sirens go off and everyone knows, “Go to the Monarch bunkers. Look for the guys in the Monarch hats.”
BLACK: They're testifying before a congressional committee.
FRACTION: Right. So, it’s like, “Oh, that's fascinating. How do they do that? How does this top secret mega-covert underground thing then become the public face of safety and responsibility?” That’s sort of where our show lives.
KURT: One of the things that's cool about this, that I like about science fiction and Westerns, is in science fiction and Westerns you can ask the big questions without looking silly. You can talk about, “Where did we come from? Is there a God? Is there justice?” You can talk about those things without, I don't know, looking like a bad TV show, which I think there's a lot of. But when you do sci-fi, and you have the opportunity to explore these things, you have a great thing to take advantage of. It gives you the chance to do something other genres cannot do well. They just can’t do it.
One of the things that I find fascinating about watching the 10 [episodes] is every once in a while you do something, and the timing of it is, it becomes relatable to what you're living through. There are monsters in our world, and there are monster people in our world, in our show, and in both. You live it. You can relate to it. So, when you do an interesting sci-fi that happens to connect by chance to humanity and what's going on that's relatable to you, that's what makes sci-fi so exciting, I think. I think to a sci-fi fan, that’s what they’re really feeling, that's what they're seeing, that's what they're understanding.
I think The Thing, for instance, is one of the greatest sci-fi ideas there could ever possibly be. I mean, they're actually beginning to say some of it now when, you know, the concept of something being able to imitate you so perfectly that you don't even know yourself if you're you? Well, they're now beginning to look 30,000 years into the permafrost and ask some questions. So, with Godzilla, Mothra, the Bramble Boar, the Ice Aardvark, whatever, who's to say we just haven't seen them yet? For those of us who haven't seen them. For those of us that have seen them, well, I just think that it's unique to sci-fi.
BLACK: Godzilla has always stood in for our worst existential fears. It's like, what era of Godzilla? Is it the post-war ‘50s? Is it the ‘60s, is it into the ‘70s? There are certainly things that he can represent that we can be afraid of today.
SHAKMAN: Post-pandemic.
BLACK: We were shooting the show in the middle of a global pandemic.
KURT: I mean, Godzilla was born out of the atomic bomb era. That was all about us. I love that about Godzilla. I think that's really cool.
Monarch: Legacy of Monstersis available to stream in the U.S.
ncG1vNJzZmibn6G5qrDEq2Wcp51kurC6wKuaoWWcmrSir9hmpp9lnaS7tMDEq6pmo6WnwW6%2B1KyqnqScYrSwsNmio6WZXw%3D%3D