Godzilla x Kong x Memphis: How a local filmmaker contributed to monster success

The title of the new movie "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" renders a clash of titans as a monstrous mathematical equation.

The previous entry in the so-called "Monsterverse" series was "Godzilla vs Kong." In replacing the traditional "vs." with the mysterious "x," the mathematical symbol for multiplication, the current film promises an exponential expansion of monster mayhem. In fact, before "The New Empire" ends, many symbols of the old empire — the pyramids of Egypt, the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro — have been scattered like confetti, as creature-crushed rubble.

A Memphis filmmaker contributed to the carnage. Chris McKinley, who grew up in Raleigh and Germantown, was an editor on "Godzilla x Kong," making him a significant participant in the construction of a science-fiction spectacle that has proved to be a king-sized, Kong-sized hit.

“It’s fun to be part of a movie that people enjoy so much,” said McKinley, 45, who now lives with his wife and two young children just north of Los Angeles, in the town of La Cañada Flintridge. “Certainly I am proud of what I contributed.”

Across the Monsterverse

Directed, like its predecessor, by Adam Wingard, who began in low-budget horror ("You're Next") before ascending to high-priced havoc, "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" is the fifth entry in the so-called "Monsterverse" franchise of feature films produced by Legendary Pictures, with distribution by Warner Bros.

The series — which showcase such superstars of the genre as Godzilla, the prehistoric beast with the atomic breath; Kong, the colossal yet lovable ape; and Mothra, the silk-spewing giant insect — began with a 2014 American-made reboot of the Japanese classic "Godzilla," which captured about $201 million at the North American box office.

Each subsequent film — "Kong: Skull Island" (2017), "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" (2019) and "Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021) — earned less than the previous entry until "Godzilla x Kong," which surprised Hollywood prognosticators by reversing the trend, raking in almost $95 million in its opening weekend at the end of March, after being projected to collect about $55 million. As a headline in Variety roared: "'Godzilla x Kong' Crushes Expectations." Three weeks later, the movie remains on close to 20 Memphis-area movie screens.

McKinley began working on "Godzilla x Kong" close to two years ago, in what would prove to be an enjoyable if intense trial by (radioactive) fire — his first experience on a major Hollywood project, with a budget that the website Deadline reported as $135 million.

A product of now-retired teacher Frank Bluestein's legendary arts program at Germantown High School, McKinley gravitated toward film editing while at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Citing the adage that "editing is the final draft of the script," McKinley said he enjoys the challenge of sculpting "a ton of footage shot on set" into a work of art that will "honor the original intent of the director or writer."

His first film-and-TV jobs were as an editor, cutting projects for VH1, Comedy Central and The WB network. He was an editor and associate producer on 2013's "Finding Vivian Maier," which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and on 2016's "American Anarchist," a documentary about the infamous 1971 book, "The Anarchist Cookbook." He also was a writer, producer and editor on "The Jim Jefferies Show," a news satire series that ran for three seasons on Comedy Central.

While working as an editor during the pandemic on "Under the Banner of Heaven," an FX network miniseries adapted from the best-seller by Jon Krakauer, McKinley "hit it off, as much as you can over Zoom," with another editor Josh Schaeffer, a veteran of the Monsterverse. When Schaeffer was tapped to edit "Godzilla x Kong," he recruited McKinley to be an "additional editor" (to cite McKinley's official credit).

"I'd never worked on a visual effects movie of this scale," McKinley said. "'Under the Banner of Heaven' was a very heavy drama. I said to Josh going in, 'I'm flattered you want me to do this.'"

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Legendary assignment

With the social distancing precautions of the pandemic no longer a factor, McKinley and his colleague editors worked in a suite of offices at Legendary headquarters in Burbank. For the first five months of the project, he said, the job was "keeping pace with the dailies." Footage shot on sets constructed in Queensland, Australia, was delivered to Burbank, where Schaeffer would "divvy it up," with different editors taking passes at different scenes, so by the end of shooting, "we're pretty close to having an editors' cut of the entire film."

At this point, much of the footage delivered to McKinley and his colleagues presented Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and the other actors against green screens that special effects artists would fill with computer-rendered flying reptiles, carnivorous plants and topsy-turvy "hollow earth" landscapes in later stages of the filmmaking process.

McKinley acknowledged crafting sequences based on storyboards and "what you anticipate will be there" can be a challenge, but an editor's basic responsibility is the same, whether a film's "star" is Vivian Maier, a real-life Chicago street photographer, or King Kong, a very much non-real life street destroyer. "It's always about the story," McKinley said. "As long as you're communicating the story, you're doing the job."

A helpful factor was that Wingard, the director, built a lot of sets and coordinated a great deal of physical effects, even when digital effects might have carried the load.

“For instance,” McKinley said, “there’s a scene where they’re up on a rocky hillside and Kong is hurt and putting on his ‘power arm’ for the first time, and Jia” — a telepathic teenager, played by deaf actress Kaylee Hottle — “reaches out and touches his finger for the first time. So on set there’s a guy holding on a stick a giant green Kong thumb, and she touches it, and eventually that gets replaced” with the CGI Kong hand now in the film. But “the hillside they’re on, the rocks, that’s practical — that’s a set they built.”

While the editors cut footage, "the effects team is working simultaneously," McKinley said. "They start with very rudimentary animation like in an Atari video game, and as they upgrade it looks better and better and better."

As the filmmaking process continued, the collaboration acquired "a back-and-forth ping pong effect," as visual effects artists, sound designers and others added layers to the movie, and the editors took further cracks at the material.

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Monstrous fun

A self-described monster buff, McKinley said working on "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" was particularly rewarding because "everyone involved, from Adam, the director, to all the producers and all the people at Legendary, they, in the funnest way possible, take this stuff very seriously.

"We had long conversations about how a particular creature should be introduced," he said. "About how the audience will react to a certain scene, and about how much the fans enjoy digging into the movies.”

But at least a couple of likely fans will have to wait a while before watching this particular monster mash. McKinley said he and his wife, Hannah, think their children, 8-year-old Patrick and 4-year-old Eve, are a little too young to witness the noisy big-screen monster decapitations, dinosaur disembowelments and ape fisticuffs of "Godzilla x Kong" (rated PG-13 for "creature violence and action").

"Maybe in a couple of years," McKinley mused. "I feel like Patrick is right on the cusp. I'm sure he'd love it."

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis filmmaker part of new movie 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire'