The decades-long story behind the writing of Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon.”

What does it take to build a whole new narrative world? For young women Rebellious moon It took a journey of decades and a merging of minds.

Nearly 30 years ago, director Kurt Johnstad sat on a plane with director Zack Snyder discussing their favorite films. Johnstad said his favorite is Seven samuraiand Snyder shared that it was star Wars. Then in the middle of that conversation, Snyder at the time brought up a fantasy idea between the two.

“He jokingly said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could make one of those someday?’” recalls Johnstad, who was excited about the idea at the time, but knowing the opportunity to do something like that was still out of reach for both of them.

But as the two directors continued their careers, crafting several successful cultural films in the early 2000s and beyond, they continued to brainstorm what this story could look like, based on a basic idea that Snyder had dreamed up in his college days. . They discussed potential characters, scenes, and moments, and Johnstad followed Snyder’s lead in imagining this world in the background while working on other projects.

But it wasn’t until the COVID era began in 2020 that Snyder finally called Johnstad and told him that he felt it was time to bring this long-planned idea to fruition, and that it was time to tell this story for real.

This project eventually led to Zack Snyder directing the new film Rebel Moon – Part One: Child of Fire, with a screenplay written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and frequent collaborator Shay Hatten. The film has been released on Netflix
NFLX
On December 21st.

But as this idea has developed over the decades, many things have of course changed over time. In fact, as Johnstad explains, the project was at one point intended to be a story set within the Star Wars universe, the same story that has been Snyder’s inspiration all along. However, this ultimately did not work, most likely due to Snyder’s unique vision of delivering an original story aimed at a more mature audience.

“I was like, ‘I don’t want any of your characters.’ I don’t want to do anything with any established characters. I just want to do my own thing on the side. And originally I was like, ‘It has to be rated R!'” he told Snyder. Empire departed from his original plans.

Ultimately, Lucasfilm and Disney chose to go in a different direction for their expanding sci-fi universe, leaving Snyder and his collaborators to go it alone. But, while Snyder was initially disappointed by this, he and many of his team members eventually felt that this course of events was perhaps the best thing that had ever happened to them. Johnstad goes so far as to say so immediately after the first was created star Wars The movie itself, this was the greatest gift Lucasfilm could have given them.

“he [Snyder] He was now able to create a world that had no law. He was creating his own canon. He had no guard bars. “He could go hard and push to the same edges, the rough edges,” Johnstad said.

And filling this new code without restrictions is exactly what the team did. Johnstad describes a close collaboration with Snyder at the helm of the company, with extensive planning that resulted in several offices filled with massive whiteboards for world-building. Impressively, one of these whiteboards is about 20-30 feet tall and carries Snyder’s detailed history of this world covering 10,000 years of planets, backstories, characters, major events, and more.

On such a large scale, Johnstad estimates that the two Rebel Moon films (with Part 2 arriving soon) only cover an inch and a half of that timeline. But how much lore would go into that first film wasn’t always a given. As Johnstad describes, when he sat down to write the script with his collaborators, the full story was about 200 pages long. From there, the team not only split the story into two parts, but also worked to pare down some of the information from each section for a more reasonable runtime and remove elements that might get in the way of the targeted PG-13 rating.

However, the team continued shooting most of the film, knowing that Netflix had confidence in their plan for multiple releases. In an exciting and complex production process, Johnstad says they were essentially working on four films at the same time. They shot what they needed for the PG-13 cuts of parts one and two, but then they also shot what they needed for the R-rated extended cuts of both, with the plan that each version would give fans more and more of the world they’d so meticulously crafted.

Because of the ambition behind this story, writing the film scripts required close collaboration, with everyone on the team keeping Snyder’s grand plan in mind while deliberating which parts each writer would build directly. But for Johnstad, his favorite contribution comes near the beginning of the film. In this introduction to the larger story, Korra, who had been planning to flee the threatening city for her own safety, decides instead to answer the call to action and begin building a team that can take on the harsh forces of the Motherworld. After this commitment to being a hero, she is reunited with her powerful ancient weapon.

“She gave her her gun that was found in the shipwreck, kind of unsheathed. All of a sudden you see this spell where it came from,” Johnstad said.

He describes how as soon as she sees the mysterious and dangerous object, and then sees her put it in its holster, you know that the adventure has begun and that we have crossed the dramatic point of no return. Because of the weight of that moment, he promises that the adventure will only get more exciting from here. For Johnstad, this moment recalls his favorite classic Westerns, and sets the tone for the epic story to come, just as those old films did.

Rebel Moon – Part One: Child of Fire It’s now streaming on Netflix. An extended version of the film is scheduled to be released in early 2024, with the sequel due to hit the platform on April 19.

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