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.
MOANA 2 – Matanagi (voice of Awhimai Fraser)
HAND: The Maui part of this was, from a narrative standpoint, it’s exciting to have the audiences want these characters to be back together, and so by naturally having them be on the same quest from the get go, but they don’t really both realize that they’re both doing that, and then they’re on these two train tracks that are eventually going to collide into each other, it helps build the anticipation and knowing that they’re going to be together. Plus we get to have these really fun interactions where Maui actually meets Moana’s crew first. And it’s so fun to watch, first of all, Moni, who’s such a huge fan of Maui run into him, and then on the flip side of that have Maui realize that this crew is with Moana just by having Heihei pop up. We had a lot of fun with that. It helped keep the attention alive of “When are Maui and Moana gonna be back together again?”
MILLER: I’d say from a character standpoint that we were also playing with this idea of how Maui’s changed from the first film, and wanting to develop the friendship with Maui and Moana even further. Part of that is set up right from the beginning, in that he’s doing something he’s never done before, he’s on an altruistic mission. He is off to break this curse because he wants to do this for his friend because he’s actually ahead of her in the story, and he knows that eventually this is gonna fall on her. We talk a lot about Moana wanting to give her sister the whole ocean, but Maui wants to give Moana the whole ocean, and that’s what he’s doing before they come back together. In that sense, it was a small way to set up the bigger story that doesn’t really pay off till later.
DEADLINE: What did you learn from the first film that helped you with the sequel? I’m assuming the Kaka Mora were a fan favorite with their unique communication.
HAND: The Kakamora were something that I loved from the first film. One of the exciting parts about it is the idea of we’re going to learn more about the Kakamora, and we tried to do this on anything that we were doing a call back to from the first film. It was evolving your understanding of them, or Moana’s understanding of them, which is really important to find out that they’re looking for their home too. So even in the first film, they’re adrift, and you understand them in a different way. Therefore, they share this common bond of wanting to find Motufetū for this curse to be broken. It really helps illuminate any character that we have a chance to repeat again, that alongside Moana’s personal growth journey, that’s actually happening across all elements of the story. It’s so much fun to have characters that don’t speak the language that we normally understand, but they are so expressive in their own way. And [with] Kotu, the Kakamora that joins their crew — it’s so much fun to have [the question] “Is this character going to be good or bad?”
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DERRICK: Jason and I both worked on the first movie. It is an incredible movie. I love the story. I love the thematic of identity and how she figures out who she is, and she declares it triumphantly, and it felt natural to us as storytellers to continue that conversation of identity, that, at every stage in our life, we think we know who we are, and then life throws something at you, and you’re forced to evolve and change. And a lot of times, we surprise ourselves with how far we can go, and so that was, it seemed to really speak to you know who Moana is and what she stands for, and to show everyone, no matter how old you are, that there is always more to life. There’s always more to you than you know
DEADLINE: Going off that theme of identity I am curious if Moana is considered a princess? I know you have that line in the film poking fun at that. It seems like Simea also
MILLER: What is a princess? I think what we all love about Moana is that she’s a badass hero who has really deep empathy. That’s what draws all of us to her is like everything she does, no matter how dangerous it is, even when it’s hard, even when she’s struggling because she has this sister that she knows she’s risking ever seeing again, she does it because she deeply loves her people and is willing to risk everything. It’s so aspirational in a lot of ways. Most of us can relate to loving our families and our communities in a way that I think we all hope that when faced with an impossible choice, that we would do the thing that was right for our people, and I love seeing that in her. And if that makes her a princess, fine, but I it’s like “who needs labels?”
Simea (Khaleesie Lambert-Tsuda) and Moana (Auli’i Cravalho)
DERRICK: We love Simea. She offers, like, a glimpse into, like, how Moana has even changed and grown since the first film. Before, it was easier for her to look out to the horizon than it was back to her own community and Simea represents both of those things for Moana. She wants to give, like Dana said earlier, Simea the whole ocean, and Simea wants to be just like her sister. She represents the future of her people. Everything that Moana does is with that in mind. I my own family, my eldest daughter, her name is Simea, and she’s 21 years old, and we have a little Caboose in our family, Quentin, who is seven, and seeing the bond that can exist with that age gap, for me, is so specific and heartwarming.
HAND: I think that idea of the future is such an important one that differentiates for us as we were making the first film, very much, is Moana reconnecting to her past. For this one to be about, for her to be charged, even by her ancestors, with the future of her people on her shoulders. And there’s no rule book for this one. Grandma Tala could help Moana a lot in the first film, and really told her, “Hey, go follow the hook, find Maui, grab him by the ear and take him and make him return the heart.” And there’s no rule book in this one. There’s no instruction manual, and so Moana has to figure it out on her own. And I think that alongside being a leader in her community, we brought a crew along with her this time, because that was the other thing is, we never saw her as a leader because she left her island. So to have her island, in a sense, come with her on that canoe, was really important, and it helped us for all the choices that we made. It’s about the future, it’s about the people, it’s about her as a leader. So each one of those things sort of added up to why we chose to have a crew, and why, Simea is in the story, and why her ancestors give her that new charge to find a better future for their people. We are always we’re trying to tie back to things within the first film, so that it felt like it was a continuation, but it was very distinctly different for us to make those choices.
DEADLINE: At the end, when the ancestors come revive Moana, and she has her cool tattoo, does that make her immortal now? Is there a consensus on that? And then on the flip side with Maui losing his tattoos for a bit, was that also part of the raised stakes conversation?
MILLER: For Moana, yes, she’s a demigod. What that entails to the full extent? We’ve yet to discover, but she’s been changed by this experience forever. With Maui, this is some of the funnest stuff to write and animate all of these things. We name all of our sequences, and that one was called, “What makes a demigod.” It’s exploring this idea that he would make a big sacrifice to do this for Moana that, and there’s like a small moment, I think the animators did such a beautiful job where he just looks back at her and smiles a small smile, in a way, right before he gets this, Death Blow, essentially. I just love that we’re pushing him to these new depths that undo him to the point that he doesn’t have any of his powers, like him swimming down to the depths to rescue Moana and then to find her gone in a way that just breaks him, because he’s never really had a true friendship before. And when you have a friend, you’re vulnerable in a way that you weren’t when you don’t care about anything. So him being stripped of his power, and then being down there with her and having to ask for help, probably for the first time in his thousands of years of life, was was exciting to us as storytellers, because it just put him in such a different place.
That song that he sings, Mana Vavau, is him calling to the gods and the ancestors to make it right. It was also fun to talk to Dwayne about that, like what does it mean to be an incredibly strong, larger-than-life personality and have to ask for help? It was really exciting to see him go to those places we don’t often get to see him as an actor go to, but we had to give him his powers back, because she’s a demigod now. They can’t not be demigods together, right?
HAND: There’s some moments in there, which I think is helpful for you know, if there’s ever any continuing stories of Moana, that immortal, I don’t think, actually, is on the table, because we saw that there’s incredibly powerful gods within this world that can do a lot of damage. We obviously made the choice to bring Moana back, and I think it was the right choice, and to have Maui get his powers back, but at the same time, I think there’s powerful forces within this world that are really strong and so I don’t think it makes anything completely off the table is from an immortality standpoint, but obviously we wanted to level her up for sure.
DEADLINE: I read that the mid credits scene was tweaked up until the last minute. And I wanted to ask why you held off showing Nalo in his human form until then?
MILLER: We knew that we wanted to see Nalo in some form, especially because we spend so much time talking about him. There’s so much imagery about him, but we never really thought about bringing him in earlier to the story. Like Dave was talking about, nature is such a powerful force within the Pacific, and the stories of the cultures across the Pacific, the gods are always tied to nature in some way. We liked the idea of building out an obstacle that was really grounded in that, but we wanted to see him at some point, and we liked the idea that there’s more to the story with him and Matangi. When we talk about the dials that were being changed within that sequence, it’s more just like, what is that relationship looking like? Also, we’ve just been on this wild, emotional ride. I think at a certain point it was a little darker, that mid credits scene, than it ended up being. We realized, we don’t want everyone leaving the theaters on a bummer. We have such fun characters, let’s go out still having fun and wanting more. Plus, we were lucky enough to get Jemaine back for a little cameo, yeah. We could have done any of the things that he did.
DEADLINE: Dana, I just wanted to ask how working on this film, has informed your work on the live-action Moana movie?
MILLER: We actually wrapped shooting the live action the day after the Hawaii premiere. It was really special to have a lot of the live action crew actually at our premiere in Hawaii. It is a very different project, but I think if this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that there is an appetite for our girl. It’s exciting that there will be, there will be more of her to come.