‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ roundtable: Wait to show fans has been ‘excruciating, exciting, weird and surreal’
Monday night at the DGA Theatre in Hollywood, Apple TV+ unveiled its long-gestating MonsterVerse project, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” to a packed crowd of excited guild voters. Following a screening of the first episode, which will debut on the streaming service on November 17, Gold Derby’s Chris Beachum moderated a panel with showrunner/executive producer Chris Black, casting director Ronna Kress, visual effects supervisor Sean Konrad, sound designer Ben Cook and composer Leopold Ross.
The “Monarch” production team discusses what it was like waiting for the fans to finally see the series, their biggest challenges with the project, and what it was like working with A-list stars like Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell (who play the same character, Lee Shaw) and John Goodman (who reprises his role from 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island”). Read excepts below from the “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” roundtable panel.
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Black recalls, “The first meeting that I had on it, I remember because it was March of 2020, I had a coffee with the executive who was then in charge of it at Legendary Television, and we were joking about, well, I hope this Covid thing’s over soon.” The showrunner has now been on the project for “three and a half years” and confirms the wait has been “excruciating, exciting, weird and surreal.”
For Kress, she is grateful that the production teams let her “come on quite early in the process, almost five or six months prior to starting to shoot.” That enabled her casting team “to do a really thorough worldwide search, which is what we did.” The main cast is led by Anna Sawai as Cate Randa, Kiersey Clemons as May, Ren Watabe as Kentaro and Mari Yamamoto as Keiko.
Konrad “officially got on board” in November 2021. “I was involved pretty early when we only had a couple of scripts at that point,” he explains. “It was pretty rare to be that involved in an early stage for visual effects and that was fantastic.” He shocks the crowd when he reveals that his visual effects team just wrapped up their work “about a month ago.”
Cook chimes in that he’s “excited” for fans to finally see the show, adding, “I’m glad that we’re done” because all of those visual effects required “a lot” of work from the sound department’s perspective.
Ross describes himself as “different from other composers” because he likes to “get the scripts and kind of base [his] ideas off of that.” He notes, “So when Chris pulled me up to assemble whatever we have, I immediately started before I’d even seen any of the visuals. So I’ve been on it probably since September of 2022.”
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” is constantly switching around in the timeline, which Black states is integral to telling the story. “The word ‘legacy’ is in the title, and part of what the story was supposed to tell was the history of Monarch and to meet those foundational characters,” he readily admits. “It gave us this multi-generational story that it is a show about a family, about legacy — do you choose your own destiny or the one you inherit? So you needed to see those generational stories. And then the casting just wound up being so perfect and we have the opportunity to cast Kurt and Wyatt as playing the same character.”
Kress expands more on the Russell father-son duo inhabiting the same role: “I had heard that Kurt and Wyatt it wanted to work together, and so I pitched it to our group and we sort of immediately fixated on that. And then it took a long time, but they did. And it’s amazing to see them in it. And I love them both in it so much.”
“Yeah, they were very excited,” Black chimes in. “I wish they could be here to talk about it. They had been offered a lot of roles to play father and son. And one of the things that they said was exciting for them was they’d never been offered this kind of unique, you’re playing the same character but in different time periods.”
As for the scene where 71-year-old Goodman is running through the woods, Konrad claims, “There’s a couple of fixed replacements there, but he did actually do a lot of running for that scene.” And Black calls it “great” that they were able to hire Goodman to return for the same role as Randa from the 2017 film.
One of Cook’s biggest challenges from the sound perspective was to emulate “some of the same techniques that they used in the original films, some of the recording processes that they did with super high frequency microphones and high sample rates.” All of the sounds he created for the monsters were “different,” but his favorite is a “snow creature” that is seen in some of the trailers. “I just happened to find a strange recording of a toad and it’s an interesting, just real quirky sound,” he remembers. “So that was a happy accident and it became kind of the signature sound of that feature.”
Ross expounds a bit more on his score, which switches between loud action music and more intimate character tones. “We faced the whole storyline in a very human family scenario,” he says, “but against the backdrop of this world where the monsters reside because it did allow for such a rich spectrum of emotions to be explored. It was just a lot of fun because it allowed me so much room to be able to cover a lot of ground of different textures.”
Finally, Black closes out the discussion by noting he’s “very aware” of the intense fan reaction he’s sure to receive. “But we all come from a place of fandom. We grew up on these movies, we love these movies, we love the characters and we see them as characters … It was challenging and I’m very proud of the result. I think we did succeed, but I guess it’s for hopefully everyone to see.”
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” premieres on Apple TV+ on November 17 with two episodes. New episodes follow weekly until January 12, 2024.
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