Interview (Written): Max Borenstein

A conversation with the co-screenwriter of Godzilla vs Kong.

In terms of spectacle, movies don’t get much bigger than this: Godzilla vs. Kong. What is it like to be a screenwriter working on such an epic story? Here is a Forbes interview with co-writer Max Borenstein (co-writer Eric Pearson, story by Terry Rossio and Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields).

MARK HUGHES: The previous entry in the Monsterverse franchise, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (which you didn’t write), was critically and financially a disappointment for the studio. So when you wrote Godzilla vs. Kong, were you keenly aware of how much it needed to hit a home run in terms of being so crowd-pleasing and having so much heart (even for the monsters)?

MAX BORENSTEIN: I think Godzilla vs. Kong was sort of part of the master plan — the hope and aspiration — for the franchise from very close to the beginning. When I first started with the franchise on Godzilla, the question was, “Can we create an American Godzilla that would capture the spirit and what we love about the franchise, and transmit that to an American audience the way that hadn’t quite worked before?”

But once we felt like that was working, and we were feeling confident about the vibe we’d captured and were in production and then in post on that, Thomas Tull (who ran Legendary at the time) came to me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a script for a King Kong movie that would be in the same universe. And right then he said his dream as a fan — and he’s not at the company anymore, but he’s the reason the franchise exists — he said his dream was to get to Godzilla vs. Kong.

Built into the DNA of that is, I think, a lot of what has worked so well in the film and what Adam [Wingard] managed to capture as a director is the fun of seeing these two iconic, gargantuan — both literally, and figuratively in the public consciousness — titans come clashing and coming to blows, and obviously over the course of the franchise I grew really affectionate for both of the characters in different ways.

So it felt like this film was an opportunity to hopefully add as much heart invested in the monsters, if not more, than any humans could ever have in this franchise.

One thing that’s unique about it is, we are trying to give the monsters their due. They’re never gonna be human — Kong is slightly more anthropomorphic than Godzilla because he’s a primate of sorts, but they’re impossible to fully grasp or anthropomorphize, and yet we can empathize because there is heart. So to me that felt like part of the mandate from the get-go that we were trying to build toward.

I got to know Max when we were in Las Vegas for several days in 2014 for the 2nd Black List Feature Writers Lab. I’m not surprised to read this comment from the Forbes interview: They’re impossible to fully grasp or anthropomorphize, and yet we can empathize because there is heart. In our conversations, it became apparent we shared a passion for character-driven storytelling. You can have a movie with all the spectacle in the world, but if the audience doesn’t care about the characters, it is meaningless action.

I will be interested to see how Max and the filmmakers tapped into the “heart” of both Godzilla and Kong, and how they elicit the audience to “empathize” with the monsters.

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