There are a few things you just have to get right when it comes to Masters of the Universe. One is the look. Not only so that it works in the movie, but so that Mattel, which owns the property, can make toys of it. Another is the music. You can’t just have people jumping around in loincloths and skull faces without exactly the right vibe. Thankfully, those are two of the things director Travis Knight got right on point.
Last month, io9 sat down with the Masters of the Universe director over video chat about the toys and music. We also discussed the long process to bring the feature to the big screen, if there was more to the time Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) spends on Earth, and more. Check it out.
Germain Lussier, io9: So obviously you came into this with your take, they loved it, and you got to make it. But the producers had been at it for a while—different stars, different distributors—what did they tell you or what was your understanding of the biggest hurdles in getting this movie made?
Travis Knight: I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. I wasn’t part of it. But it is something that Todd [Black] and Jason [Blumenthal] have been trying to get going for a good, long, wild, nearly 18 years, I believe. And they had a lot of false starts. I think they got fairly close at one point. But that predates all of my involvement. So I can really only speak to how the project has progressed in the last two-and-a-half years, which is since I became involved.
Look, movies are very, very hard to get made. It’s very challenging to mount something, particularly at this scale. It’s a very complex production. And a lot of things have to align in a perfect way. I felt very fortunate that we had great producers in Jason, Todd, and Robbie [Brenner]. And we also had an incredible studio head with Courtenay Valenti at Amazon MGM. I mean, they don’t make them better than Courtenay. And she fully embraced what the movie was, what it needed to be, and gave us the complete support to do it. And that’s incredibly rare these days.
io9: I think what’s also unique about this is you’re obviously working on a franchise that was based in toys. I’m a bit of a collector myself, and I geeked out seeing all the toys that came out from this. I’m wondering how early do you and your team have to think about that? Is there any change in the timeline when it comes to the designs of costumes, sets, or anything with the toy aspect of it?
Knight: No. I mean, we designed the movie based on what the needs of the movie were. And so we came up with variations on some classic ideas, some classic costumes, some characters, and some vehicles as well. That was one of the things for me that was always really fun about Masters. They had really interesting, weird vehicles. And so we came up with our versions of that. And then the challenge was when we started talking to the cats at Mattel about what we were doing and what we were emphasizing, then the trick was, “Okay, how can we help the team translate that into functional toys?” And some of those were incredibly complicated.
I think one of the most complicated toys they’ve ever made was based on our Roton, which was essentially like this flying Harley Davidson with saws attached to it. And they came up with this really cool, elaborate system to actually make the Roton blade spin. And it’s got a gyroscope in it. It was incredible engineering. But that was really fun. It was really fun to be inspired by toys that they created 40 years ago, to do our version of it, to then have a toy that comes out that’s now a version of our movie. So it was a really weird kind of trippy thing. But it was a ton of fun.
io9: Yeah, it’s so cool. Obviously, in the movie, once you’re on Earth, you want to get back to Eternia. You want to see He-Man, Skeletor, everybody. But that life on Earth is so ripe, right? There are so many questions you have. I’m wondering, was there ever more about his life? Like, did we ever get to meet who his guardians were, either in the script or did you film anything?
Knight: Well, I mean, we made more movie than what is in the movie, as typically happens. Film is a time-based art. So you only have so much time to tell the story. And so ultimately, you have to make choices. And so there were a lot of things, a lot of little side alleys that we went down that enhanced the depth of the characters or offered some nuance and some story aspects. But ultimately, you have to be focused. I mean, I do believe in the adage “The trimmer the vessel, the more it can carry.” And this is fundamentally a story about Adam in this time of his life. And so those things that didn’t directly support or in some way enhance that story, we had to lose.
And there’s some great stuff. There are some great things, great scenes between some of the characters that are emotional, that are funny, that are exciting, that ultimately we had to leave on the cutting room floor because they didn’t support the main story that we were telling. But that’s how it goes. Hopefully, some of those scenes can see the light of day at some point. But Adam’s life on Earth was always meant to be a relatively short part of the running time. This is a film that is set in Eternia. That’s what the movie is about. His life on Earth is a function of his development. But it was never meant to be the main focus of the movie. And so there might have been a couple additional scenes on Earth, but it was mostly the Eternia stuff that we had to strip down. Because that’s where the lion’s share of the movie is set.
io9: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, Daniel [Pemberton]’s score just elevates it to another level. It’s so great. So perfect. So of the time. I’m curious, what were your main directions to him, and what were your thoughts when you first heard it?
Knight: Well, so I’m a huge fan of Dan. I think he’s a fantastic composer. He’s a chameleon. He can tackle essentially any type of genre. He’s so inventive. And so I’ve been a big fan of Dan for a long time. And we’ve had dalliances of working together on different projects. This one felt like it was tailor-made for him. I knew he would bring something special to it.
So we started speaking about a year and a half ago. And for me, the touchstone for the score is I want to evoke the feeling that I got when I watched Flash Gordon for the first time, the ’80s Laurentiis Flash Gordon. And that was famously scored by Queen. And so I wanted to have that feeling. I couldn’t have imagined that, in working with Daniel, we would ultimately be working with Brian May [of Queen], which is a bit of a trip. Like it was a surreal moment being in Brian May’s home studio and just sitting right next to him as he’s playing his red special with his sixpence. It was so cool.
But Daniel understood that this was a maximalist movie and we needed a maximalist score. The film wears its heart on its sleeve. And so does the score. And so my original touchstones to Daniel were largely about Queen, kind of big and theatrical and operatic, but also sincere. Daniel brought a disco kind of inflected thing. It was kind of Abba meets Queen that he brought to it. And a little bit of some kind of medieval-type thing happening. So there are a lot of different layers to the score. It’s very dense. But ultimately, it’s incredibly unique. And I do not think there are enough guitar solos in modern movie scores. And boy, did we get them. And we got the greatest guitar player to do them in Brian May.
io9: That’s so cool. Absolutely. Now, Castle Grayskull is awesome in the movie, but I’m curious, having been a fan of the toy, it was always green in the toys. We kind of remember that in our heads. Was there ever a discussion about what green looked like? Did you ever look at a green Castle Grayskull?
Knight: You know, I think when you look at the original designs—which was always my mandate to the team. Anytime we were at a crossroads, go back to the source and kind of see what was cool about it to begin with. Grayskull went through a number of different iterations. Ultimately, we landed on this thing that was kind of a combination of different kinds of architectural schools. We didn’t want to go full-on kind of Norman classic or British Castle. So there’s a kind of a Spanish thing. There’s a Moor thing happening. And we did kind of play around with different colors. Ultimately, we landed on what we landed on because it felt like it was the most believable, I suppose. The most naturalistic. And I mean, look, Grayskull is variously gray or green or purple or blue. So choose your iteration of it. But ultimately, I’m incredibly happy with where we land on the locations. My production designer, Guy Dyas, he’s an absolute genius. And we had a hell of a time playing in this sandbox and bringing this world to life.
Masters of the Universe comes to life only in theaters on June 4.
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