On the sets of "Godzilla x Kong", courtesy of Tom Hammock

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome back Tom Hammock. In this interview, he talks about the scope of blockbuster franchises, building physical sets and things that are still missing in digital worlds, traveling the world to make movies, and the rising of generative AI tools. Between all these and more, Tom dives deep into what went into making “Godzilla vs. Kong” and “Godzilla x Kong”.

Kirill: What happened to you since we spoke earlier last year?

Tom: Well, we made a movie called “Godzilla x Kong”, which was great. And there’s another one that I just finished with Zach Cregger who directed “Barbarian” in 2022. But really the big thing was Godzilla, and as you can imagine, it took a long time to make that movie.

Kirill: One thing I couldn’t figure out is how to say the name of the movie. Is it “together with Kong”, “against Kong”, something else…

Tom: It’s tricky to figure out. I know they tried a lot of titles, and “Godzilla x Kong” worked in the wrestling sense, in terms of them teaming up. That was always the goal. We knew we wanted to do the “versus” film and then the “team” film.

Kirill: How many previous Godzilla and Kong movies have you watched?

Tom: Adam and I watched pretty close to all of them, genuinely. When we started “Godzilla vs. Kong”, Adam had a little TV in his office, and he scoured the internet for VHS, laser discs, anything he could find. He would play them constantly, and we’d come in and reference scenes. It was an interesting process. I’d say that I’ve seen big chunks of the majority.

Kirill: Are we talking also about the 30-odd Japanese ones?

Tom: He was able to get his hands on pretty much all the Japanese films, and another seven or so King Kong variants from around the world. We put in our time. You see little Easter eggs sprinkled through. Every once in a while, there will be something.

Kirill: Did you know that there was “Godzilla Minus One” happening roughly around the same time?

Tom: We did. It’s similar to when “Godzilla vs. Kong” came out, we had a sister movie, which was “Shin Godzilla”. Toho and Warner Brothers Legendary talk a bit and plan things out, because it’s not just the films. You have the trailers, you have the toy releases, you’re trying to build the excitement. Also, Takashi Yamazaki and Adam Wingard are friends.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: How was your experience going from the smaller art department on “X” and “Pearl” to this huge machine?

Tom: It’s a crazy change in scale, but in some ways it’s the same experience. You have your base camp, and you make your way through all the trailers and all the equipment. And at the end of the day, it’s still two people talking in front of a camera, which is the same as “X” and “Pearl”. But in other ways, Godzilla is so different.

On “Godzilla x Kong” we could go to literally an island to build the Monarch base on the beach. We had had the resources to do that, to get that level of in-camera work – which was fantastic and a ton of fun. Budget goes up, but expectations go up too.

Kirill: You mentioned this in our first interview that you might have a sense of security on a bigger budget production, but the budget is never enough.

Tom: Sadly, it’s never enough, but there is a greater protection in case something goes wrong or spins out of control. We tried to push the envelope on Godzilla, and that comes with financial risk. It’s one thing to make a movie like that in a studio, but we really worked to do it more like a Bond film or a Mission Impossible film. We went to Morocco, we went to Iceland, we went to Brazil, and with that comes difficulty and challenges and risk that something could go wrong.

On “Godzilla vs. Kong” we had entire sets disappear in flash floods. You come to location and the set is just gone. It’s that level when you’re trying to get the authenticity of working on location where things can get complicated. So it’s nice to have the big production that’s protecting you in case or weather or acts of god.

Kirill: You said that you wanted to do as much as in camera as possible, but you do have quite a few things that are not real. Between concept art, pre-vis and other parts of it, how do you hold this thing that is not there in your head?

Tom: It was a combination. We had a rigorous process that started with visual research for every single set and location. Then we worked in storyboards with Richard Bennett and Micah Constanza, who are both great storyboard artists. From those, we moved to illustrations. And then from the combination of illustrations and storyboards, we moved to pre-vis. This workflow works for completely digital stage based movie, but we tried to always work real locations into this.

For example, a lot of Hollow Earth is not made up. When you see a huge vista, the bottom-left part of the screen is something we shot in camera in Iceland, the right part is a jungle covered cliff we shot in Brazil, and the top-left is something we shot in Northern Australia. And they’re all blended together over geometry. So while it is fantastical, and you have digital creatures and all this stuff happening, there’s actually a surprising amount of in-camera work – so that the detail is always there. You get it on the big screen, and you start to see the little tiny things like the birds in the jungle canopy that we shot in Northern Australia, or that little bit of texture that just wouldn’t be possible to achieve any other way. Of course digital work is mixed in as well, but it all adds to the illusion.

Kirill: Is it question of, let’s say in 5-10 years, that this will be achievable digitally to the degree of the current physical world?

Tom: I don’t know. It’s possible, but there’s so much detail in the physical world. You have the small details like birds or animals, but also aging – dirt and grime – that comes with real places. So far, that’s one of the areas I can always tell when you’re dealing with a CG environment. Another thing that is hard to achieve digitally is the translucency of water.

If you look at the Monarch military base, you can completely see that that exists in real life on sand, because you can see into the water. You can see all the little tiny details in the sand below the surface, which I’ve never actually seen effectively rendered in CG generated water.

Kirill: It’s that uncanny valley effect – the smaller the gap between animation and reality is, the more noticeable it becomes.

Tom: I agree. I definitely get that sense too.

From the very beginning on Godzilla, Adam [the director] said that for us to believe that these giant monsters are doing these things, it’s essential that you completely believe that they’re in a real space, in a real environment. Going to these far flung places was the best way to achieve that, and allow that realism to happen. If you buy into the environment, then you buy into that Kong and Godzilla real. So we really went to Brazil, Iceland, Greenland, Italy, Gibraltar, Spain, Morocco, Australia and Hawaii.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Going back to building the military base on the island, how much work are we talking about?

Tom: It was a couple of months of work. We built the real part of the base in pieces at a large scale, and then we took them across to this offshore island on barges with a crane, and assembled it there, along with picture vehicles and other equipment. It was an offshore island, and we set up our base on the inshore side, so it didn’t have large, open ocean waves. Obviously the water is moving, but you don’t have the big open ocean waves pounding the beach all the time. This way we were able to use the interior side of the island to have a more stable build environment for the set. It was a long process.

Kirill: Are there any parts of the Hollow Earth landscapes that were created digitally?

Tom: It depends on the sequence. For example, the monkey kingdom is largely done in VisFX with real references mixed in. The opening hunting sequence is mostly specific pieces of Iceland, some from the southern coast, some from the deep interior, combined together. It’s a lot of VFX work blended with on location textures to feel like they belong together, but are unique. Lots of collage work.

Kirill: So when that movie is showing in Iceland, do you think the locals say “Hey, that’s my backyard”?

Tom: I’m sure they do [laughs]. You get to the point with some of these places where you recognize things. There’s only so many truly great roads for shooting car commercials on it. I’ll see a car commercial and be “Oh, they they shot that on the road between Queenstown and Wanaka in New Zealand”. So I’m sure locals recognize places. But that’s how they know you went there.

Kirill: We were talking early last year and you mentioned that there were still lingering effects of Covid on the global supply chains, affecting productions big and small. Did you have that carrying over into “Godzilla x Kong”?

Tom: It had gotten better than it was on “X” and “Pearl”, but it was still a big factor – literally to the point where we used up all the yellow paint in Australia of a certain pigment. They ran out of our specific shade of hazard yellow paint or construction yellow. We used it for construction equipment, the Mule spaceship, and other pieces. They ran out of those pigments. Our painters were scraping the inside of the yellow paint cans to try to get us over the hump. There are definitely some supply chain issues, but it was way better than it had been.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: How much of those spacecrafts was built physically?

Tom: For the Mule ship that Trapper’s using to fix Kong’s tooth – we built the entire cab that he’s in with the gang plank behind it, and the crane that sticks out of the side. And then we built a fairly significant portion of the interior. It’s about a shipping container’s worth of build where Dan Stevens is on the ladder. He drops down and goes back up – a big piece of what’s behind him is real.

A piece that everyone was particularly proud of was the HEAV spaceship. That spaceship is entirely in camera, except for the ends of the three little spines that stick up at the top. We built that spaceship, assembling it from 14 different pieces, and it has a steel frame inside. We could put it in the middle of the jungle and reassemble it. That way, when they step out of the spaceship, there’s a real ship there that they’re stepping out of into the real world, and the scene plays in front of it. Or when it’s in the middle of the riverbed with the destroyed base, the base is there and the spaceship is there, except for the three vertical spikes on top of the HEAV.

There are certain points where you can literally see a character in the cockpit get up, go through the door, walk through the cargo area, come down the ramp and go out into the environment.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: What conversations are happening between the money people and the art people on what gets to be done physically and what gets to be pushed into digital?

Tom: We have a wonderful line producer, named Eric McLeod, who’s always been great at taking on challenging projects and making them happen out in the real world. For example, he did that before on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Adam and I put together presentations during the pre-vis process we talked about, and then we would meet with Eric, and we’d look at the different aspects of it. We would talk about what was achievable, what might be a step too far, what we would try for. And Eric would budget accordingly and figure out a plan to make it happen. He did an amazing job. When Godzilla is coming out of the ice in the Arctic – we went to Greenland. That’s the real deal up there.

It’s definitely a careful discussion of the trade-offs and everything. But more often than not, Eric was able to find out a way to get us to the real place.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: That sounds like a pretty decent adventure around the globe that it took you. I’m not sure though how much you get to enjoy the places you go to.

Tom: Not too much, honestly. They’re all wonderful places, but it’s very much you land, and it’s go, go, go, to try to get as much as you can until your time is up.

Kirill: Do you get to taste local food?

Tom: Generally, it’s all local food. There is not really any other way to do it, at least for us, as we were trying to make things happen. If it’s a big city like Rome, you do have international chains. But when you’re away in Morocco, you commit to the local cuisine. That’s the easiest, fastest, most achievable. It’d be one thing if we were in the middle of Casablanca, but because we’re farther out, you commit to it and it’s great. I love that part of the process.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Going back to marrying the physical and the digital, how did it go in the Hollow Earth when they meet the Iwi tribe?

Tom: When they go to the stone temple complex that’s in the jungle, the first half of that complex was built as lightweight sets where little pieces could be hand carried. And we went up to the Cape York Peninsula to a place called Daintree, which is the jungle where Papua New Guinea and Australia come together. We put those pieces in the middle of a real jungle.

The rest where they go up to the high platform and come back down, that was all on stage. That was a significant build that took a long time. In order to have the scale of primitive plants and tree ferns that’s in the movie, we started at nursery around six to nine months before we shot. We started growing all of the plants for the sequence so that it would have that really primitive, ancient feel to the forest.

Then the progression takes the characters through two real environments. The first is the stone canyon where where we physically built the water channel running through. And then when they leave the stone canyon and go to the Iwi plaza, that plaza with the surrounding jungle and the pyramids, that was built on a stage. The crystal was obviously a set extension.

Kirill: What about the pyramids?

Tom: The small pyramids were gold metallic paint, and then for the main pyramid we built around a 10 foot portion of translucent layered fiberglass that had interior lighting, so you had that glow for the crystal pyramid. That’s where that ended. With all that being said, you’re still talking about a set that’s 100 feet by two hundred feet. It was a great, big physical build for the Iwi main area. The same goes for their temple, it was three stories high and 100 feet by 200 hundred feet.

Kirill: Do Iwis get their own written language? It’s not the first time we see those stone carvings, but it feels that we are seeing more in this movie.

Tom: They do have their own written language and it was really developed in “Kong: Skull Island” by the director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and the production designer Stefan Dechant. It’s based on primitive versions of gaming languages. The idea is that you have your blocks of code, and then you build out those blocks as letters or symbols. We tried to take that and stay within that language. So we went back and looked at their work really carefully, and then that’s what we used in the stone chamber and at other points throughout the Iwi’s world.

Kirill: Were there any parts of Kong that were built for the close-up interaction with the humans?

Tom: The only part that we built physically was the piece of Kong’s jaw with the tooth. When Dan Stevens comes down and he puts the clamp around the tooth and he’s standing on the gum, that’s a very soft foam so that his feet would sink in. It’s just a VFX reference piece. It’s not picture ready. But the clamp was a physical clamp built by our prop master Stephen Melton. There’s a wonderful prop. It physically ratchets onto this fake tooth which is also picture ready.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: I occasionally rewatch big action blockbusters from the ’70s and the ’80s, and you look at it with modern eye that is used to a totally different level of effects, you see these gaps. It’s difficult, because I want to be in that story. Of course now this gap is much smaller, and I try to not look for it when I watch a big movie like “Godzilla x Kong” for the first time. When you sit down in a movie theater, is it difficult for you to separate the professional-you from the viewer-you?

Tom: I always try to lose myself in the movie and the experience. But often when I rewatch a film, I’ll rewatch it sometimes without sound and try to piece everything together to try to see what’s going on technically. It can be a curse if it happens the first time I’m watching a movie. It’s distracting and you don’t want that. But the instant you’re really in the moment and you’re trying to ignore all that, it’s great. You always want to be swept away if you can be.

Kirill: What is your approach to imagining the scale when you are designing the sets where you are making these environments in your mind, something like Godzilla napping inside the Colosseum?

Tom: Ultimately, it’s a puzzle to figure out. Originally Godzilla was sleeping in the Miami stadium. Then we started talking about it practically, and you see that the Miami stadium is squarish. It doesn’t look that comfortable for Godzilla. So if it needs to be round, what’s the most iconic round stadium on Earth? Boom, we go to the Colosseum.

We drew the Colosseum. We had technical drawings, we had a digital model of Godzilla, and we went in to make sure that he fit and that all the action was convincing with him in terms of scale. We did quite a bit of pre-vis to try to make absolutely sure it made sense. It’s one of the most fun aspects of the movie, that he’s taking a nap in this giant cat bed [laughs].

Concept art for “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: And then people start taking it apart. How does he get in? Is it the real size? How is it that he so snugly fits in there?

Tom: We worked it out. The Colosseum has a low side where it had collapsed in an earthquake, I think during the Renaissance. Most of the beauty shots you see of the Colosseum are of the highest side, the one that has all the marble. So we always had him going in over the low side [laughs]. We put a lot of work into making sure that he fit in. His tail obviously doesn’t fit and sort of hangs out awkwardly. It was fun.

Originally we had been planning on building a piece of the Colosseum. There was a sequence where kids wake Godzilla up because they sneak in to try to take a selfie with Godzilla. They have their flash on, on their phone, and when they take the camera, Godzilla gets startled and wakes up. It all had to be accurate because we had planned on building a picture-real portion of the Colosseum, but then the script changed and we moved away from that.

Kirill: Do you keep in mind the smaller screens when the big movie like this goes to streaming, to digital, to video on demand, and how it scales down?

Tom: We do. There’s nothing we could really do about a phone, because that is so small. I know that when Adam is working at editorial, he and the editor Josh Schaeffer would sometimes put little figures down in the bottom of the screens – so that they can always see what an audience member was like. And they would treat the TV screen as an iMac screen. Does the scale make sense? Does the viewer have the sense of that experience? You watch the dailies on the laptop or an iPad to be conscious of the smaller experience, but like I said, you can only go so far with that. But everyone is careful to make sure that, for example, a texture that works on an enormous scale movie screen still works on a smaller scale television without causing moiré digital problems.

Kirill: Speaking of dailies, how different is it these days when everything is digital and immediately available for playback? It was probably a gradual transition over the last 10-15 years, but if you look at how it is now vs how it was “back then”, is it similar or sufficiently different?

Tom: It’s fairly different. In some ways I miss the old way of doing things. When I was starting out all the dailies were on film. After the shoot day, everybody would get in a theater and watch the dailies together. Whereas now, with all the security involved, everyone has a special link. You can view them digitally through an encrypted system on your computer, and it’s convenient.

But there was something about being out on location and everybody coming together in a dark theater and watching the dailies together that I miss. It’s that communal experience of making the movie. And it would be on the real movie screen as opposed to just on your laptop. Nowadays the dailies are generally only digital, largely for security purposes, among other things.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Let’s talk about the color pink. How unusual is it for a monster movie to use pink? What’s the story?

Tom: It’s fairly unusual. I do want to say that there’s no truth to the rumors online [laughs] that it was a change made after Barbie. The post-production process and the whole filmmaking process is so long. It was years in advance.

It was tied to Godzilla and the environments he’d find himself in. We knew the background colors he would be against and that there might be less separation for him if we remain in the blue world given hollow earth and the arctic ocean. We knew that it was going to be better to go in the direction of pink so that he always popped.

Imagine if he was blue and we’re doing the Arctic scenes and the scenes in Rio. There was a lot of water, so it felt like a stronger choice. It also allowed for a visual representation of the fun aspect of Godzilla – that he will change in slight ways to get ready for destroying whoever he’s going to fight next. He’s getting ready for Shimo, and Shimo is purple. So we gave Godzilla pink. When they’re clashing, they look great together.

Kirill: Was there any connection to the pink elements inside those crystal pyramids?

Tom: No connection at all. It was trying to tie everything together visually. You can think that maybe in the dim, distant past, there was a connection, but we didn’t specifically delve into that.

Kirill: There’s a lot of strong colors in this movie, green and orange and purple and blue and pink. It feels like there is no color that you wanted to stay away from.

Tom: This is a part of what Adam and I were trying to do. You look at these summer blockbusters, and you’ll repeatedly see that you have these expensive, large sets, and they’re always black and gray and silver, concrete and steel and glass – regardless of the look. They are amazing sets, but to a certain extent, they all blend together in that Bond villain way.

Kirill: That’s what we expect from a military installation.

Tom: Exactly, and we decided that we wanted to go in a different direction and try to do something much more colorful. There is a logic to it.

You’ll see in this movie, unlike most previous Godzilla movies, the humans aren’t really firing at Godzilla. We made the decision that within Monarch’s world, Monarch had realized they can’t do anything to combat Godzilla. And there are the universal color combinations in nature that warn predators to stay away? When you think of poison arrow frogs, you think of white and red together. You think of yellow and black together like a bee. That’s why those color combinations were integrated heavily into all the Monarch bases and spaceship and everything. They were warning symbols. Color-wise they’re trying to warn the Titans to stay away, as opposed to actually firing at them.

That was the logic. Once you go there, it allows us to do all these wonderful colors. That’s where that came from.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: What about that little podcast studio in the beginning? Was that built on stage, or a real location?

Tom: That’s a location in Australia, an office floor in this semi-abandoned building that we took over. We painted it and rebuilt it. It was a ton of fun. When you look out the window, you see real traffic and palm trees and everything.

My favorite thing about that set is when you have Rebecca Hall’s character coming up the stairs and she’s in the landing, that is all built on location. We put in the Chinese restaurant in the back with the wok, and the fire going in the air, and all the crates of beer and everything. That was a normal office building. Adam always likes to bring those dynamic aspects to every set, even on location, whenever we can.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Do you find that in terms of the storytelling experience, that these big monster movies or sci-fi productions need grounding in human elements for us to feel that this can be happening?

Tom: Absolutely. That is essential, because otherwise they start to feel just like a video game. Without that you have two creatures going at it. Look at a film like “Pacific Rim” with Guillermo del Toro. Everything feels so grounded. There’s careful logic throughout. It allows you to buy into what’s going on with scale and stay oriented.

Kirill: Which part of “Godzilla x Kong” are you particularly fond of?

Tom: I really loved everything to do with the jungle. We touched on it briefly that we went to this place up by Papua New Guinea. It’s the oldest rainforest on earth. It’s this little pocket of leftover rainforest that contains a lot of plants that used to cover Antarctica. There used to be this huge rainforest covering Antarctica, and now that’s only left in a couple of these little pockets around the world.

I love that we were able to go to that place, and actually build real sets in the real jungle, and spend a week shooting up there. Those palm trees that they’re walking through are around 1,500-2,000 years old. You get this fascinating quality with the light, where it looks like you’re in a pond looking up through lily pads. That place was really special, and took a lot of people working really hard to make a shoot like that happen.

Kirill: How many mosquito bites are we talking about?

Tom: So many mosquito bites [laughs]. There are these huge birds called cassowary, and they are quite dangerous. They cornered some of the crew members. We had to have people watching out for saltwater crocodiles for us. You couldn’t go in the ocean at all because of jellyfish. It’s quite a place up there. We weren’t quite as worried about the mosquitoes. We were more worried about the gigantic spiders [laughs].

There’s a lot of life up there in Australia, as my father would say. Why make the easy movies? Go where there’s some adventure, and there definitely was some adventure on this.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Did you get to enjoy the movie when you watch the final cut after watching who knows how many dailies?

Tom: It’s wonderful to see, especially in the aspect where you’re adding two of your principal characters in Godzilla and Kong. And of course you have Shimo and Scar King and Suko. It was great to see a lot of that happen, because it all comes together. On this one, even more than on most movies, there’s that piece that doesn’t happen until so late in the process. I think even up until just a couple of weeks before the release date, there were still shots coming in.

Kirill: Do you have a favorite monster that you would take with you to a remote island?

Tom: I love Shimo. She came out great and so beautiful. It’s the point where I don’t think the opalescent shimmer on her skin was possible when we made “Godzilla vs. Kong”. On this one we felt that the technology had gotten there so we could take advantage of it in this case. She’s a lovely Titan.

The goal for when we were designing her was, as always, to introduce creatures that people would feel like they were part of the canon. Somebody would say “Is it a new creature?” And someone else would say “No, she’s in Godzilla 15”. That was always the goal, particularly with her.

Concept art for “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: On the subject of these advances in visual effects, do you feel that anything that you can imagine can be done today, or are there still gaps in terms of technology?

Tom: There are still gaps in terms of technology. There are gaps when it comes to water and when it comes to particles. “Dune” pushed particles a great deal, but it still feels like there is work. Particle interaction isn’t quite there yet. Obviously, characters always need help. Even now characters are very hard to do.

Kirill: It also feels like humans still cannot be done well digitally.

Tom: Right. It’s just not there either. Cars? Fantastic. But humans are just not there yet.

Kirill: Maybe it’s some sort of a biological coding in us, for survival maybe, to be hyper attuned to recognize these gaps in digitally created humans.

Tom: It’s going to take so much to get there. You have the same trickiness with the apes, because the apes are so close. There is less concern about Godzilla, but a great deal of concern particularly with Suko the little ape. We’re not making a Disney movie, so he couldn’t be too cute. You want to be kind of cute, but also a bit of a little brat. Suko was tricky, but same with all the apes, because humans are, as you were saying, so attuned to that. It took a great deal of time and a lot of observation to try to get that all right.

Kirill: We already talked about Covid last time, and touched on it earlier in this one. Where do you see it these days in terms of the film productions? Do you see lasting effects, or is it back to how it used to be five years ago?

Tom: It’s largely back to how it was five years ago. The only exception is that productions are much more understanding if people are sick, that they don’t come into work. It is a great change. You still run the risk of a disease, whether it’s Covid or the flu running through a set and causing a lot of problems. That’s the main difference. I see productions being willing for people to take time off when they’re sick.

It depends on the person and can they really do their best work if they’re feeling that bad? Productions aren’t necessarily worried about the flu, but by being worried about Covid, it forces them to worry about everything else.

On the sets of “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

Kirill: Generative AI has been at the forefront in the recent strike negotiations, and a lot of artists are worried about how it is going to affect their field. On the spectrum where some see it as an extinction level event for human creativity and some see it as another tool that we need to understand and incorporate into our professional lives, where do you find yourself these days?

Tom: Today, I still haven’t touched it. It’s something that worries me. I work so closely with storyboard artists and illustrators, and I feel that within the entertainment industry, they are the people that will be affected first. As concerned as the writers are, it’s going to be a long time before you can get a great original script from AI. And if it can do that, I feel like there will be many other things it can do. But as of today, I haven’t touched it or used it.

Most of the studios I know don’t want you to use it, because the chain of title for intellectual property is not clear. These models haven’t necessarily been trained on the intellectual property that’s licensed. It’s not worth the risk.

I haven’t used it, because I want to be supportive to all these people who work for me and make these amazing contributions to these movies. I want to have a chance to talk to my core group about it. Some of us have talked, but I haven’t talked to all of them about where they’re feeling, what they’re thinking right now. I felt like it’s not a safe thing for me to use.

Kirill: This next question might be uncomfortable, as from the creative perspective it is painful that most or even all of the human talent might be removed from the process. You were saying that you were shooting landscapes around the world, and then combining it for the Hollow Earth vistas, and it gave you all the great amount of detail that is not yet achievable digitally. In a hypothetical world where you are presented with an image that is indistinguishable and you can’t tell if it’s real or if it was generated by AI, should it matter from the perspective of myself as a viewer?

Tom: I’m not sure that it should. But I think that it will be a long time until we get there. Even though when you look at AI generated art was three years ago, two years ago, one year ago – you see the great leaps and bounds that are being made, it’ll be quite a while to bridge all the gaps. There will be that oddity still to our human eye.

As I look at AI art today, it has a sameness to it. It’s the same color palette. It’s like taking a Gaussian blur effect in Photoshop and smoothing all the edges out.

Kirill: Everything feels like it’s made from colored plastic.

Tom: Exactly. If there was a model of you or me, there wouldn’t be any pores in the nose. It’ll be a while until humans are able to visually connect with something.

Kirill: The entire history of Hollywood and the global movie industry in the last 125 years or so has been to adopt the ever more sophisticated techniques to fool the viewers into thinking that something exists. So maybe Generative AI is not there today, but it has a wide and deep potential down the road.

Tom: Maybe it’ll start in more boring, less front and center areas, like helping with rotoscoping and visual effects. That’s where you’ll start to see it first. It’s already virtually eliminated subtitling as a profession. You go on YouTube and it’ll auto generate subtitles. That’s where you’ll end up at first, and then it’ll slowly come into the other, more creative areas. Eventually it will get there.

Kirill: It’s hard to see the magnitude of an impact of a specific technology when you live through it. The Internet might not be a flashy sci-fi technology, but it has profoundly changed our lives in the last 20-25 years. It’ll be interesting to see how the world might be changing for my kids that are about to enter it as young adults.

Tom: I have a friend who works at a big consulting company, laying 10-20 year plans for companies. I was recently talking with him, and he said that their projection is that the current ravaging of the globe for resources last for about 20 more years. They’re thinking that in 20 years, battery technology will be all based on salt, which is available everywhere. At that point, you will not need to go after lithium and rare earth minerals, and you’ll get this great reduction in harm.

My dad was at some point working with a major indy food company in their search for protein. They think that we’re 10 years from the point where if you feed a pet, you are directly taking food out of the mouth of a child. They see that they can’t get any more efficiency out of major crops, soybeans, peanuts, breadfruit, whatever it might be, that the efficiency increases 1-2% with major innovations. It’s an interesting time to be alive.

Kirill: In our first interview you said that you wanted to continue doing a mix of small and big productions. Now that you’ve done this very big one, is it still the same thing that you want to do in the near future?

Tom: It is. I just finished a smaller production for New Line, which is the “Barbarian” director’s new film called “Weapons”. And Adam Wingard [“Godzilla x Kong” director] and I are hopefully about to do a small movie for A24. We could leave in as soon as a week. Hopefully that all comes together. So I’m keeping with the goal of big, small, big, small, bouncing around.

Concept art for “Godzilla x Kong”, courtesy of Tom Hammock.

And here I’d like to thank Tom Hammock for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design, and for sharing the supporting materials. You can find Tom online on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. “Godzilla x Kong” is available on a variety of digital platforms. “The Art of Godzilla x Kong” deluxe art book is out as well. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.