Brace yourselves for an interstellar journey as we unravel the cosmic secrets of Rebel Moon! In an exclusive interview with Gayety, mastermind Zack Snyder talks creating an intricate universe, actor influences, and hints at how “freaky” this epic sci-fi adventure is about to get.
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00:00 - Hello.
00:00 - Hello.
00:01 - Caitlin, how are you?
00:02 - I'm good, how are you?
00:03 - I'm real good.
00:04 You been?
00:05 - I'm amazing, I'm so excited.
00:07 - Are you from Los Angeles, California?
00:09 - Not originally, but I live here now.
00:10 - Oh, good.
00:11 - Yes.
00:12 - All right, Caitlin,
00:13 would you please say your name and your career?
00:14 - Okay.
00:15 I'm Caitlin McDaniel, I'm with Rainbow Media Co.
00:18 I'm so excited to be talking to you, Zach.
00:20 I really enjoyed the film.
00:21 - Okay.
00:22 - And I'm eager for everyone to see it tonight
00:24 at the Los Angeles premiere.
00:26 So, just starting off, I know you created
00:29 an entire universe, and that is no easy feat.
00:33 So, just going into that,
00:34 what did that process look like for you?
00:35 - Yeah, it was funny because, well, funny.
00:38 It was interesting because once we had
00:40 the sort of premise, the basic concept
00:42 for the way the world, the villagers,
00:45 and that there would be, the mother world would invade,
00:48 we really went back mostly on the mother world, right?
00:52 And we went back to, and we wrote an entire history
00:55 for the mother world.
00:57 It's, or stuff that's not in the movie,
00:58 you'd never see in a million years,
01:00 but maybe in some years, but anyway,
01:02 like the origin story, its origin myths,
01:05 its early religions, how those religions
01:09 were transformed into different ideologies
01:12 and different warring factions,
01:13 and then finally that the royal family, you know,
01:18 gained power and then how they have been in power
01:22 for thousands of years and that through their,
01:25 the reign of this monarchy on the mother world,
01:29 that they've been able to expand out into the galaxy
01:32 and do everything that they're doing.
01:34 So, that was important because we really had
01:37 to have the psychology of the mother world
01:40 really cleanly represented because we knew
01:43 that Korra and Balsarius and Noble,
01:46 they all were products of that philosophical origin.
01:52 And because our villages were pretty easy,
01:55 you know, they're like culturally like of the land
01:58 and they're really like earth people
02:01 and they love their harvest
02:02 and they have their like traditions.
02:04 And so that was the different, that one was,
02:07 we did the same work with it, but it was a lot easier
02:09 because like, they're not as,
02:11 I don't wanna say complicated.
02:13 They do have their own origin myths, of course,
02:14 and their own same exact, but they're a lot more
02:18 just linked to the natural cycles of their planet
02:21 and of like summer, spring, and winter
02:23 and the harvest and all that.
02:24 So that was really, and we did a ton of research,
02:28 sort of mixed the Scandinavian, you know,
02:31 cultures with other agricultural cultures around the world
02:37 to just kind of find like commonality
02:39 and that was really, that was fun to do too.
02:41 - And I did hear that--
02:42 - Sorry about the ranting.
02:43 - No, it was so much information, I loved it all.
02:46 I did hear that you brought in also,
02:48 like the actors' backgrounds into these characters
02:51 and kind of--
02:52 - Yes, for the main characters,
02:54 we brought some of their cultural sort of like touchstones
02:56 into their characters because I felt like
03:00 it'd be a really, well, first of all,
03:02 if we were basing the mother world
03:04 sort of on like Victorian England
03:06 or like sort of using that loosely
03:08 as the sort of cultural and iconographic,
03:11 you know, touchstone, that it was an easy thing to say then
03:17 as you go out into the universe, you know,
03:20 if Cora's character was she,
03:25 Sofia is Algerian, French-Algerian,
03:29 can we use some of her sort of,
03:33 what would be her sort of,
03:37 almost her personal backstory and cultural interactions
03:41 with civil war, with empire or whatever
03:46 to sort of tell the story of like iconographically
03:49 of what she might feel.
03:51 And that way, we were able to kind of use
03:56 the actors' real experiences and/or cultural experiences
04:01 to tell sort of the larger iconographic story.
04:05 And the good thing about that was that it,
04:08 I think it really sort of locked them into,
04:12 their point of view was really clean and clear
04:14 about like who their character was
04:16 and their relationship to the mother world,
04:17 I thought was really.
04:18 - Absolutely, I really felt that it helped to create
04:20 just like well-rounded, perfectly relatable characters.
04:23 And I also heard that you kind of brought,
04:26 you had like more room to kind of play with this.
04:29 And you even said the word that you kind of got
04:30 to be able to bring in a more freaky element
04:33 into this kind of movie.
04:35 So I wanted to--
04:35 - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the movie is like,
04:38 if you could think about it in the context of,
04:40 if you want to think about it in the context
04:41 of like "Star Wars" or whatever, that cultural experience,
04:44 like I kind of, I grew up, right?
04:49 Aesthetically and sort of emotionally
04:52 and all those things happened to me.
04:55 And so the sort of the "Star Wars" universe
04:59 and or sci-fi universe that I have now cultivated
05:03 tends to reflect the sort of now larger experience
05:07 that I've had as a grownup.
05:09 So it tends not to be as, it's a little darker
05:13 and a little weirder than you might get away with otherwise.
05:17 And you can imagine that the director's cuts
05:21 that will come later in the summer are again, that again.
05:26 And so, but yeah, but I think that this movie you're in for,
05:31 probably a little bit edgier of a thing
05:35 than you would necessarily expect.
05:37 - Yes, absolutely.
05:38 Well, thank you so much.
05:39 That's all the time I have.
05:40 - Thank you.
05:41 That was fun.
05:42 - Go ahead and cut please.