During an appearance at the Television Critics Association summer press tour to promote the upcoming TV remake of MacGyver, IGN caught up with James Wan, and naturally talk quickly turned to Wan’s next feature film project Aquaman. Wan discussed working with Zack Snyder to define the character in Justice League, as well as his thoughts on handling underwater speech, and the casting of Jason Momoa as the King of Atlantis.
“The train on Justice League has kind of set off already,” said Wan. “That’s basically Zack’s vision for that world, but you know, early on, Zack tried to involve me as much as he could and I really appreciated that. It’s just that it was very hard for me to solely focus on it, because I was still in the midst of finishing up and shooting The Conjuring 2 for Warner Bros. – the same studio! So it’s this very interesting world, you know? As much as they wanted me to be involved with Aquaman early on, I was busy making a movie for them. [Laughs] But now that everything is finishing up, I’m definitely getting in there much, much more. And I’m definitely really excited about running with my standalone movie.”
“I always say, if you have water in your lungs, like these characters do, there’s no air bubble,” Wan replied when asked how he intends on handling speech underwater. “So I don’t know… I just think in my movie, I want to kind of create… I love the idea of underwater speaking but with a real sort of sonic, aquatic quality to it. So there’s this sort of aquatic, almost sonar/whale thing. Even though it’s in a human language, there’s this slight sort of underlay to it, this ping to it, which I think would be interesting for us to design from a sound design perspective. Yeah, it will be fun. Also, Zack has some ideas that he’ll be doing in Justice League. Listen, I’ll be honest, in some ways, JL will be an experiment for me to see what works and what may not work as well. And then kind of go, okay… Here’s the great thing, with all these superhero movies, you watch from one movie to another, and they always sort of slightly change things along the way. You kind of have to do that to make what’s best for your film.”
Asked about the casting of Jason Momoa and how that helps to overcome peoples preconceived notions of Aquaman, Wan responded that, “I actually think it’s a brilliant move on Zack and co. to cast someone like Jason. Immediately, the whole joke aspect of Aquaman goes out the window. You have such a muscular, superhero-y character and one that is almost, to me, in some ways… I look at him, he’s kind of the Wolverine in some respect. He’s the outsider who gets pulled into this world and he kind of doesn’t want to belong and he was doing his own thing. And he prided freedom above everything else. That kind of plays nicely into who his character is. He’s like a reluctant superhero, right? He’s the reluctant king, basically, or would-be king.”
Aquaman is set for release on July 27th 2018, but Momoa will be back as part of Justice League on November 17th 2017.
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Originally published August 15, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
