Following up the arrival of Wicked Part One and Gladiator II at the box office right before Thanksgiving is a feat in and of itself, but following a beloved first feature installment gave Moana 2 even more of a wave to surmount.
Directors Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David G. Derrick Jr. navigated these high expectations as well as the transformation of the sequel film into a movie from what was originally supposed to be a television series.
In the below interview, the three directors unpack the process of changing medium, how they wanted to expand on Moana’s story and new faces and layers to the both Moana (voiced by Auli’I Cravalho) and Maui (Dwayne Johnson).
DEADLINE: My first question for all three of you is, could you talk about, I guess, instead of maybe expanding, you had to narrow down the plot from the TV show what that process was like?
DANA LEDOUX MILLER: We did have to streamline in a way. When it was the series, there was a little more emphasis on the ensemble, but we realized, in making it a feature, that this really has to be Moana’s story, and, not that we were diminishing the crew, but that we were really making sure that they were pushing up against Moana and that everything was pushing Moana forward. She is the hero. Her name’s in the title. You want her to have an epic adventure worthy of someone like her. That was probably the biggest shift. We were already telling a continuous story with one larger arc, the beginning, middle and end.
What was so amazing about this process, and probably unexpected was that in making it a feature, we actually got to open things up in a lot of ways. We got to go bigger. We got to pull out all the stops across the board, across all departments. One exciting element of this is we also had to make a feature worthy of the big screen. And so that meant, looking at the storm that we were building in the third act, and making sure that it was bigger than Te Kā and that it really filled — this is in IMAX — like you don’t want to send someone to an IMAX and have something that doesn’t need to be on a screen that big. It’s in 3D and it’s 4Dx. Somebody was just telling me today, they got soaked with water and windblown. It allowed us to elevate and up the ante in a way that I don’t think we would have had the resources to do when it was a TV series.
JASON HAND: When you hear, “Oh, they turned a TV series into a feature,” it seems like we had this animated, fully done thing, and then we just sort of stitched it together, which is not at all what we did. In production of an animated series or animated film, you actually do a lot of the production the very final year. So it was more working on the story as we are going. We had a couple of minutes of it animated that proved out that this could be a feature from a quality standpoint, but it was still in what we consider our story real form, where it’s storyboards that are cut together with music and dialog, and we test the film like that internally, and we show it to our studio, and we get notes and so in the at the end, it really is where all of these departments come on and come together, and we make the final product that way. We changed a lot of the storytelling, and then we were able to really push it forward and make it as big as possible.
DEADLINE: Moana starts out in her space, and Maui’s off in his own thing. I’m curious about some of that backstory with Matangi – What was your inspiration for her character?
DERRICK: Matangi was a character, early on, we wanted, someone, another demigod who could really push and challenge Moana, really force her to think differently. We were inspired by many of the stories of the people of the Pacific. And nature is always a part of everything. There’s no separation of it, and there’s different stories with people with connections to certain animals. We were really excited to have her also connected to these flying foxes, these giant fruit bats, and then allow her to move and defy gravity the way that those animals do. She was a hard character for us to figure out because it really is one of those turning points within the story. We absolutely loved where we got with her that, she’s mercurial, she’s fun, but ultimately she really wants to help Moana.
