How they combined silly and ‘stupid’ scenes with meaningful moments in the blockbuster Sony Pictures Animation/Netflix film.
befores & afters recently got the chance to sit down with KPop Demon Hunters directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans at VIEW Conference to discuss their hit movie.
One of the fun aspects we discussed was arriving at the film’s tone and how an approach called ‘sneaky deep’ let them tell a serious story while also incorporating plenty of silly, and even self-described ‘stupid’ moments.
We also discuss the intense worldwide reaction to KPop Demon Hunters, and one of the toughest technical aspects of the film. And, yes, we talk about corn eyes and ab eyes.
b&a: I’d love to know from each of you whether you anticipated this kind of reaction to the film at all? I’ve never really seen a reaction to a film like this before.
Maggie Kang: I mean, we haven’t either. We’ve worked on many movies collectively and have over 20 years of experience in the business, each of us. When we finished the movie, we were really happy with it. We’ve worked on a lot of things, but we were like, this is different. This feels really good. Anytime a new collaborator will come on or new crew members, they would say that, too. They would say, ‘This is unlike anything I’ve seen. I’m so excited for this.’
That kept us feeling like this was really different. We were pretty confident that it would find this fanbase, but I didn’t even know that a movie could get this big. We’re still trying to process that. It’s wild and it’s amazing, but you can’t really plan for this. Nobody can expect this.
Chris Appelhans: Same. Plus, it’s a very personal film for both of us. It feels like there are parts of this movie that only Maggie could have done. Having been born in Korea, raised in Canada, watching every K-drama ever made, but also every Simpsons episode, I mean, it had to be her!
I was a musician my whole life and I then became a filmmaker and a writer and felt like I never really got to use the musical things that I knew. And this was the first time where I was doing sequences where I felt like I’m using every part of my toolset as an artist.
b&a: I have to say, I mostly cover visual effects, and sometimes, I’ll put on a clip from, say, the podrace in The Phantom Menace just to watch just that. But now I put on ‘Golden’ from this movie and just watch that over and over again! I think one of the reasons I love that sequence is the energy to it, and it’s the same throughout the film. What were some of the earliest conversations you had about how the film should feel?
Chris Appelhans: We talked about what we wanted it to say, what it was really about. And then we talked about who these characters were, who we wanted them to be, and then the movie starts to tell you what it needs at that point. I think Maggie always had this great vision for the girls of amazing and super real and strange—stupid, in the best way. We both really wanted to make a film that was about music and how powerful it is. And so you start creating mythology and moments and sequences that are trying to service those things and mix them together.
Maggie Kang: We both came up from DreamWorks, and there you get this teaching that every moment counts. Especially in animation, because, number one, you don’t get a lot of time. And two, they’re very expensive to make. So for me, I always treated it as, okay, if my scene is a minute long or two minutes long, is this worth X amount of dollars? Is this worth the amount of screen time that I’m given? I just want to make it as entertaining as possible with the time I have.
For example, for the scene of the girls on the plane with ‘How it’s done’ where the demons attack, we’d board that conceptually, then we go into the music video of ‘How it’s done’, and then they jump out of a plane and land on the concert. Even before Chris joined, that was a concept that was in there. That just sets the tone for the ground rules for the movie. That’s one of the first scenes in the movie. Don’t take it too seriously. They fall out of a plane putting make-up on and land on a concert. That is the tone of the movie. Just go with it. I think because that was already in there, that just allowed us to be like, whoa, let’s go crazy. How much further can we go? So, it allowed us to explore much sillier comedy.
We love having animation reviews where we’re doing corn and ab eyes one minute, and then 20 minutes later we’re animating the scene where Rumi asks to be killed. Chris always called it being ‘sneaky deep’.
Chris Appelhans: Sneaky deep just means, you’re having fun. You’re being funny. You’re entertaining. You’re planting seeds. Nobody notices it. And then, Act Three—you’re crying, and you’re like, what the hell?! How did this movie make you cry?!
Maggie Kang: The deep sneaks up on you. And that’s what we wanted.
Chris Appelhans: I think audiences don’t want to be 10 minutes in and for it to be like, ‘Let’s sit down, children, and let us tell you a lesson…’.
Maggie Kang: We did all that with Rumi. Right before we told her backstory and revealed her deep, dark secret, we had that moment where she comes in with the clothes and it’s really silly. We wanted to balance off the seriousness with a very silly Rumi, so that you can feel for her more. This is the life that she wants, but that she can’t have.
b&a: Did that also mean you could give the film a lot of fun and silly stylized moments? Did you ever have any trepidation going stylized? I love those moments, and they work, but I wonder on the page, did you feel that any of them would be, ‘This is too far’?
Maggie Kang: Well, I think we went too far with the ab eyes. That was weird. It was so weird that my husband, who’s also a director and writer, he was like, ‘That’s not going to work.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes it is.’ And it worked. I mean, we just wanted to go as far as we could go, and if it broke the movie in a bad way, then we would just not go that far. But it never got to a point where it was like, this is too dumb, or this is too much.
Chris Appelhans: We definitely tried stuff that didn’t make the cut.
Maggie Kang: But they were just not good.
Chris Appelhans: Yes, they were just not genuinely, genuinely funny. But it wasn’t that it was too silly. It just wasn’t successfully funny. Our benchmark, our gold standard for comedy, is that we’re laughing while we’re saying, ‘That’s stupid.’
Maggie Kang: ‘This is so stupid’ was the best comment to hear.
b&a: When you were getting into animation and production, was there anything particularly technically complicated that you didn’t think you’d be able to pull off?
Maggie Kang: I think Imageworks [which was responsible for the animation] tried to hide it from us. They protected us. The Honmoon was very hard to do. We spent almost a year just trying different versions of it. What does it look like when the demons are pushing through? What’s damage? What’s healing?
Chris Appelhans: There’s also a very lovely and effective symbolism with Rumi’s visuals, essentially her costume. She starts all covered up singing about how she’s going to be perfect one day. Then her Golden costume, which she wears the second half of the movie, eventually ends up in tatters and her patterns are on display. They integrate in the end and they become a part of her in a kind of chromatic, beautiful way. That’s not something you can board. You can’t really put it in layout. We just tracked it and then we implemented it. The climax was the last sequence we completed. Honestly it was too late to even change anything and that was either going to work as a symbolic visual or not, and that was a little scary.
