00:00 - Hello.
00:00 - Hello.
00:01 - Caitlin, how are you?
00:02 - I'm good, how are you?
00:03 - I'm real good.
00:04 You been?
00:05 - I'm amazing, I'm so excited.
00:07 - Are you from Los Angeles, California?
00:09 - Not originally, but I live here now.
00:10 - Oh, good.
00:11 - Yes.
00:12 - All right, Caitlin,
00:13 would you please say your name and your career?
00:14 - Okay.
00:15 I'm Caitlin McDaniel, I'm with Rainbow Media Co.
00:18 I'm so excited to be talking to you, Zach.
00:20 I really enjoyed the film.
00:21 - Okay.
00:22 - And I'm eager for everyone to see it tonight
00:24 at the Los Angeles premiere.
00:26 So, just starting off, I know you created
00:29 an entire universe, and that is no easy feat.
00:33 So, just going into that,
00:34 what did that process look like for you?
00:35 - Yeah, it was funny because, well, funny.
00:38 It was interesting because once we had
00:40 the sort of premise, the basic concept
00:42 for the way the world, the villagers,
00:45 and that there would be, the mother world would invade,
00:48 we really went back mostly on the mother world, right?
00:52 And we went back to, and we wrote an entire history
00:55 for the mother world.
00:57 It's, or stuff that's not in the movie,
00:58 you'd never see in a million years,
01:00 but maybe in some years, but anyway,
01:02 like the origin story, its origin myths,
01:05 its early religions, how those religions
01:09 were transformed into different ideologies
01:12 and different warring factions,
01:13 and then finally that the royal family, you know,
01:18 gained power and then how they have been in power
01:22 for thousands of years and that through their,
01:25 the reign of this monarchy on the mother world,
01:29 that they've been able to expand out into the galaxy
01:32 and do everything that they're doing.
01:34 So, that was important because we really had
01:37 to have the psychology of the mother world
01:40 really cleanly represented because we knew
01:43 that Korra and Balsarius and Noble,
01:46 they all were products of that philosophical origin.
01:52 And because our villages were pretty easy,
01:55 you know, they're like culturally like of the land
01:58 and they're really like earth people
02:01 and they love their harvest
02:02 and they have their like traditions.
02:04 And so that was the different, that one was,
02:07 we did the same work with it, but it was a lot easier
02:09 because like, they're not as,
02:11 I don't wanna say complicated.
02:13 They do have their own origin myths, of course,
02:14 and their own same exact, but they're a lot more
02:18 just linked to the natural cycles of their planet
02:21 and of like summer, spring, and winter
02:23 and the harvest and all that.
02:24 So that was really, and we did a ton of research,
02:28 sort of mixed the Scandinavian, you know,
02:31 cultures with other agricultural cultures around the world
02:37 to just kind of find like commonality
02:39 and that was really, that was fun to do too.
02:41 - And I did hear that--
02:42 - Sorry about the ranting.
02:43 - No, it was so much information, I loved it all.
02:46 I did hear that you brought in also,
02:48 like the actors' backgrounds into these characters
02:51 and kind of--
02:52 - Yes, for the main characters,
02:54 we brought some of their cultural sort of like touchstones
02:56 into their characters because I felt like
03:00 it'd be a really, well, first of all,
03:02 if we were basing the mother world
03:04 sort of on like Victorian England
03:06 or like sort of using that loosely
03:08 as the sort of cultural and iconographic,
03:11 you know, touchstone, that it was an easy thing to say then
03:17 as you go out into the universe, you know,
03:20 if Cora's character was she,
03:25 Sofia is Algerian, French-Algerian,
03:29 can we use some of her sort of,
03:33 what would be her sort of,
03:37 almost her personal backstory and cultural interactions
03:41 with civil war, with empire or whatever
03:46 to sort of tell the story of like iconographically
03:49 of what she might feel.
03:51 And that way, we were able to kind of use
03:56 the actors' real experiences and/or cultural experiences
04:01 to tell sort of the larger iconographic story.
04:05 And the good thing about that was that it,
04:08 I think it really sort of locked them into,
04:12 their point of view was really clean and clear
04:14 about like who their character was
04:16 and their relationship to the mother world,
04:17 I thought was really.
04:18 - Absolutely, I really felt that it helped to create
04:20 just like well-rounded, perfectly relatable characters.
04:23 And I also heard that you kind of brought,
04:26 you had like more room to kind of play with this.
04:29 And you even said the word that you kind of got
04:30 to be able to bring in a more freaky element
04:33 into this kind of movie.
04:35 So I wanted to--
04:35 - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the movie is like,
04:38 if you could think about it in the context of,
04:40 if you want to think about it in the context
04:41 of like "Star Wars" or whatever, that cultural experience,
04:44 like I kind of, I grew up, right?
04:49 Aesthetically and sort of emotionally
04:52 and all those things happened to me.
04:55 And so the sort of the "Star Wars" universe
04:59 and or sci-fi universe that I have now cultivated
05:03 tends to reflect the sort of now larger experience
05:07 that I've had as a grownup.
05:09 So it tends not to be as, it's a little darker
05:13 and a little weirder than you might get away with otherwise.
05:17 And you can imagine that the director's cuts
05:21 that will come later in the summer are again, that again.
05:26 And so, but yeah, but I think that this movie you're in for,
05:31 probably a little bit edgier of a thing
05:35 than you would necessarily expect.
05:37 - Yes, absolutely.
05:38 Well, thank you so much.
05:39 That's all the time I have.
05:40 - Thank you.
05:41 That was fun.
05:42 - Go ahead and cut please.
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