Director James Wan lights up when talking about his Aquaman star Jason Momoa. Back in 2018, the two had an unexpected box office smash with the first film and are hoping to top even that with this month’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, out December 22. This time around, that relationship between director and star seems to have only gotten stronger, as Momoa received a “story by” credit on the film, after several of his suggestions about where his character would go made it into the movie.
Speaking with io9 last month, Wan explained how Momoa got that credit, laughed when asked about this signature, guttural “Yeeeaahh’s” the actor is so well known for, and explained how digging deeper into the character’s relationship with his brother was the key to making a sequel to the billion-dollar original. Read all that and more in our chat with franchise-making blockbuster director and producer, James Wan.
Germain Lussier, io9: After the first film was such an incredibly huge success, did you feel pressure to return for the sequel? Was there ever a moment where you were not going to return?
James Wan: No, I didn’t feel the pressure or the need to necessarily return, but I felt like I wanted to [return] because in the first movie, I only sort of scratched the surface with the characters and I felt like I had at the very least, one more story to tell.
io9: Right. That movie set the tracks for this one with where it left Orm [Patrick Wilson] and Black Manta [Yahya Abdul-Mateen II], among others. With those pieces in place, what was the hardest thing to crack to sort of meld everything together into that story?
Wan: I mean, obviously the tricky thing about sequels is how do you get around sequelitis? How do you come up with new stuff [audiences] haven’t seen before so it doesn’t feel like we’re just rehashing the first movie? And ultimately, what was important for us was that we just wanted to continue growing the characters and exploring where they would go now. It was pretty obvious at the end of the first movie how Arthur was going to start in the second film. And so it was about finding what his journey is. He hates his job as the king of Atlantis. No one listens to him because people still don’t quite see him as one of them. And so he’s dealing with prejudice from that world. Meanwhile, he’s trying to stop this evil from destroying the planet, so he gets to reach out to his arch-antagonist, his half-brother from the first movie, and then try to bring him together to try and stop this greater evil. That for us was the fun part. And the thing that we knew we wanted to crack was just the relationship between Arthur and Orm.
io9: It’s not every day that the lead of a movie gets a “story by” credit. So can you talk a little about Jason’s contributions to the story to earn him that?
Wan: Yeah. Jason, he’s such a such a big filmmaking fan. When you get to know him, you actually realize that he has aspirations to do more stuff behind the camera. He really wants to direct, he wants to write, he wants to produce and so it was great in that respect. And what Jason ultimately brings to it is he knows how he wants to play his character. He knows how he wants his character to grow as well. He came in with a bunch of different ideas that we felt were really cool ideas. And it became our job to collectively go, “Okay, we want to tell this story and how does Jason’s story fit into that?” And luckily we were able to make it work pretty seamlessly.
To give you an example of what Jason brought to the table, Jason thought it would be fun to kind of see him… you know, he’s a single guy in the first movie. But in this one, it would be fun to kind of see him as a father. He’s a first-time dad. He’s dealing with the politics and the pressure of running an entire kingdom, right? He’s the king of Atlantis. Meanwhile, we intercut with him changing diapers at home. Doing the more domestic stuff. And that’s the kind of stuff that was really fun that he brought to the table. And we’re like, “That’s great. We totally get it. And we definitely want to go in that direction.”
io9: Oh, that’s awesome. Another thing I think he brings to the table is he’s got this incredible enthusiasm. One of my favorite things that he does is he gives a big old “Yeeeaahh” from time to time. We get one in the new trailer. Is that something you script or is that something he just belts out on set and makes the movie?
Wan: [Laughs] He pretty much does. You put Jason in whatever situation and he’ll give you a lot of great stuff. He loves to improvise. People don’t know that, but he loves to just come up with stuff and we just let him do it. And from out of that, you know, like, if you find one or two nuggets, then it’s gold. [Still laughing]
io9: That’s awesome. So you’ve got this mega underwater sequel coming out only a year after James Cameron had his mega underwater sequel come out. I’m wondering, did Cameron making and releasing an underwater film as you were making Aquaman 2 in any way change, influence, or impact your movie?
Wan: No, I mean, ultimately, we’re pretty much dictated by the story of the characters that we’re telling, right? The characters obviously from my world… they play to different kinds of rules. It’s more fantasy if you will. It’s very much staying on the same course and path as what we had established in the first movie, which is it’s kind of not afraid to be a little more Saturday morning cartoon, you know? We’re not afraid to go there. And definitely, that sets us apart from Avatar, right? We’re not trying to make the same type, aesthetically the same type, of films.
io9: Now, I don’t even know if you’re aware of this, but the first image we ever saw of Jason as Aquaman was something Zack Snyder released on Twitter that said “Unite the Seven.” And everybody was like, “What are the seven?” This before is Justice League, even before Batman v Superman. But now it seems like this movie is answering that with the reveal of the Seventh Kingdom. My question is, basically, were you even aware of that or did it ever come into your head?
Wan: Yeah, I mean, the seven kingdoms, sail the seven seas, it’s a part of that lingo, right? And we sort of touch upon that in the first movie. We talked a little bit about the Lost Nation in the first film and we just felt, from a story perspective, it might be fun to discover and involve what that Seventh Kingdom is that’s talked about, and how did they get lost? And then we find out in this movie that they were lost for a specific reason. They were kind of scrubbed from Atlantean history for a specific reason. Part of the fun is discovering what that is.
io9: What I love about the first movie and I’m excited to see more of in this one is just the design of these movies. It’s beyond infinite. You can imagine anything and it fits in this world. So I’m wondering, do you go in with any preconceived ideas of things you want to pay homage to or use as inspiration, or does that kind of happen organically?
Wan: It’s a little bit of everything. For me, the older fantasy kind of movies that I grew up with, the Sinbad films, classic Ray Harryhausen type movies, stuff that has a real sort of swashbuckling, high-sea, adventurous spirit to them, those films were definitely the big inspirations for me making these two Aquaman films. And I just wanted to keep with that spirit. A lot of movies that I pull inspiration from are not from today. We really lean into the Silver Age of the comic book. So we pulled a lot of stuff from the ‘50s and ‘60s from the comic book and from other pop cultural things from that period.
io9: As we speak, we’ve only seen two trailers for this movie and fans love to dig in and dissect things like that. Before release, is there any image or line of dialogue that we’ve seen in the marketing that means more, and the fans should think more about before the movie comes out?
Wan: I’m not sure. [Chuckles] You know, trailers for us filmmakers, for us directors, it’s a bit of a love-hate relationship. We always feel like the trailers give away a lot of our movies, give away a lot of our plot points. But we also understand that you kind of need to give them away to get people excited about that. Coming from the horror world, it’s always kind of tough when I find that the trailer gives away a lot of the scary set pieces that I would love for the audience to discover without knowing anything about. So I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything in these trailers that people need to read deeper into. But I do think that it sets up what the movie is about.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom opens December 22.
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