Robert Kojder chats with Greenland 2: Migration director Ric Roman Waugh…
If you have seen a movie starring Gerard Butler, there is a good chance you have also seen a movie directed by Ric Roman Waugh. He is the filmmaker’s muse of sorts, having worked together on all types of action-packed projects that differ from one another but maintain an interest in the human side alongside spectacle. One of those films was Greenland, a pandemic-released character-driven disaster film about a comet heading for Earth that triggers an extinction-level event.
That film was a bleak but hopeful blast, similar to this sequel, Greenland 2: Migration, which follows the Garrity family and other survivors living underground before they are pushed onto another perilous adventure of epic scale and tension. What is here is once again excellently realized from a visual effects standpoint, while also packed with action and emotional stakes. The best part is that it is being released in a much healthier theatrical landscape.
It was also a treat to speak to director Ric Roman Waugh (now for the second time, having previously spoken to him for Kandahar, which starred, you guessed it, Gerard Butler), once again bringing up our shared love of the communal moviegoing experience. We also discuss what goes into conceptualizing the aftermath of such a comet, some real-world parallels, and father-son dynamics (Jojo Rabbit breakout Roman Griffin Davis now plays Gerard Butler’s on-screen son). It is genuinely fun talking to Ric (who clearly loves what he does, typically putting out a movie a year), so please enjoy the interview below:
This movie rocks, it has spectacle and emotion.
Thank you, Robert.
We spoke a couple of years ago for Kandahar.
I remember!
Yes! I remember bonding over our love of the theatrical experience. So Greenland was released in that bizarro 2020 landscape, when theaters were technically reopened, but not many people were going back out into the world yet. How does it feel that Migration is getting a wide release with a healthier theatrical landscape?
It’s awesome. The interesting thing is how the two movies actually bookend what happened to our theatrical experience. Greenland was always in IMAX, Dolby Vision… we were ready to go, and then suddenly the pandemic hit and shut down everything. I was really fortunate about Adam Fogelson being audacious enough not to do what everybody else was doing, which was kicking the can down the road, and trying to release on a different date, but actually went hard at it. We landed a huge streaming deal with HBO and drew a lot of eyeballs, watching the next five years unfold as we worked to rebuild the theatrical business. And now you’re seeing it be really robust. It feels good to have a movie that is built for the theatrical experience. And I appreciate you, Robert, bringing it up because it’s going to be fun to see this with an audience and experience, hopefully, what the first movie brought, which is that inside-out feel of humanity in the middle of a big-scale movie.
Speaking of that, the visual effects are highly impressive throughout. There might have been a great deal of pressure about what the impact zone of Clarke should look like when the characters eventually arrive. What kind of conversations did you have with your visual effects team about what that should look like?
I’m always trying to do things authentically. So you’re dealing with a lot of theories from millions of years ago, during the first extinction event. Then you’re also looking at the modern world of the things that we use to advance our civilization, which, without the safeguards, can destroy us. So we looked at Chernobyl and what happens when radiation leaks. We looked at the devastating fires in Australia at that time and how long it really took Mother Nature to rebound. Also, a lot of things during the Younger Dryas event, 12,500 years ago… theories about how another comet impacted the polar ice cap and caused a 400-foot rise in sea level, leading to the formation of different types of topography, born out of that through erosion.
It was fun to shake up the snow globe and create a new world, but do it based on as many scientific facts and theories as we could, and take cinematic license from there, if you have to do what every species has had to do since the beginning of time to survive, which is migrate… leaving a safe harbor of a bunker and going across water, land, man versus man, war zones, and then even changing the landscape of the English Channel. It made the journey fun to create these different types of environments that felt real, original, and new, like all our great explorers back in the day, wondering what the land ahead looks like.
Thanks for bringing up the science you researched. I was wondering how much research went into this. This is also a hopeful movie, which is interesting given the apocalyptic setting that, in some ways, mirrors the real world we live in. You seem aware of that in the things you mentioned, such as war zones.
Every movie that I do is always told from the inside out. It’s always about following the POV of the characters, the journey within. Other movies are done from the outside in, right? They’re done Roland Emmerich style, where you’re in the actual scope and the epic nature of bouncing around the world into different characters and vignettes. When you’re doing it from the inside out, it’s always about the emotional integrity. What is the emotional journey of my characters? What are they dealing with? The human experience: the first movie dealt much more with man versus man than the comet did, coming down to the end. In the second movie, our monster is still coming from the sky, and now it’s beneath our feet, causing seismic activity. More importantly, how are people going to deal with one another? What’s the human condition? Will people be selfish or selfless along the journey? So that internal conflict was always important to have in the second movie as well.
You have Roman Griffin Davis taking over the role of Nathan here. I’ve loved him since Jojo Rabbit and thought he was great in The Long Walk. The ending scene is beautifully delivered and is a moving callback to an earlier moment in the movie. Can you just talk about how that came into the script?
We wrote the speech late in the game because it was about what the journey represents. In the first movie, the father’s speech to his son at that point is: “No matter what the world throws at us, our love will overcome anything, including death.” The second movie was really about the peril we all went through during the pandemic, when we were so worried about our own sheer survival that we kind of forgot how to live. Then, when we finally got to the point of wanting to explore the world again and live, and then really what is our legacy forward and how do we rebuild, we wanted a lot of those parallels to be about father and son in how a man understands his mortality. It’s always shorter than we’d like. And what legacy are we leaving our kids? But also a kid who has grown up in five years. He has lived underground for five years, and now he’s a young adult questioning everything. Where is his future? Is there a future? Is this it? And all those questions we have as young adults. It was really fun to explore that through Roman.
Thank you. Both of these movies are awesome. Action-packed. Lots of drama. You did a great job with this one, too. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Robert. You’re the best bud.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of Greenland 2: Migration here
Robert Kojder
