Kong: Skull Island
Films that shaped it
-
That movie is the foundation of so many things in modern cinema. From how it does scale to how it does body horror to how it does scope and design. Every time I watch ‘Akira’, there’s always something new I appreciate about it, in terms of animation, design, scale or narrative. The design of that film is just unbelievable. I look at things like Akira [...] and things that have a larger than life sense of scale. A lot of those anime films just have a scope that I think sometimes live-action cinema is afraid to lean into.
-
In 2017 interviews, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts cited Bong Joon-ho's The Host (2006) as the template for the Skullcrawlers, creatures designed not as monsters but as displaced inhabitants. Vogt-Roberts studied Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke for how to treat the island's fauna with spiritual reverence, the collision between nature and human conquest. The result is a blockbuster that breathes like an ecology film.
