From the beginning, editor, filmmaker Chris McKay has shown a lot of versatility. He’s vacillated a lot between live-action and animation, directing his feature-length effort “2wks, 1yr” in 2002, working a lot on the “Robot Chicken” TV shorts in the interim, and then, in a big move, became the editor and co-director on the very successful “The Lego Movie” (2014) for WB. That led to solo directing “The Lego Batman Movie” and the upcoming live-action sci-fi film, “The Tomorrow War,” starring Chris Pratt. Premiering globally on Prime Video July 2nd, we recently spoke to McKay about the film (that conversation soon).
But many of the projects that McKay has signed on to following the ‘LEGO’ movies also speak to his versatile adaptability. McKay already spoke to us about his D.C. superhero movie “Nightwing,” which he still hopes to make. Still, he also gave us some updates on the live-action “Johnny Quest,” film, the Renfield movie he’s developing for Universal, and being called into to help fix the ailing “Doolittle” movie, which was an expensive flop in 2020, with a runaway production that made headlines the year before.
READ MORE: ‘LEGO Batman’ Director Chris McKay To Direct Live-Action ‘Jonny Quest’
First up, “Johnny Quest.” Well, it’s on track, and McKay says he just turned in a script to the studio. “Projects like this. especially when you go and work on other things, sometimes they take a little bit of time to get to the right spot,” McKay explained. “And you’re all experimenting with writers and tone and that sort of thing. I’m really excited about it. Johnny Quest is a different kind of movie; it’s more like ‘Raiders [of the Lost Ark]’ but with a family aspect. And I’m really excited about what the guys did with the latest draft; I think it’s going to be really special. It’s another story about a family and about the family that you create a little bit with the people in your life, which to me is a really great message. And it sees Johnny and the Quests in a very modern context, and in some ways, it’s about how the people around you can help you overcome grief.”
As for “Renfield,” note, it’s not a project from the Dark Universe. This is a project that was announced this spring and is very much alive. It centers on Dracula’s infamous unhinged minion. “It’s a Dracula story but told from a different point of view,” he said, then revealing the movie will juggle a lot of tones and genres. “And to me, at the end of the day, it’s a movie about codependency. It’s going to be an action movie, it’s going to be a horror movie, it’s going to be a comedy, a lot is going on in Renfield, but yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
As for “Dolittle,” McKay didn’t direct it, but he was one of the directors brought on board to help fix the movie and directing some of the reshoots. His take on it was sanguine about it all and empathetic about the challenges and difficulties of pulling off such a film.
“Big movies sometimes run into problems that are,.you know, there’s a lot of reasons people get into a spot. Could be schedule, financial reasons, the weather, there are a million reasons why things could go wrong when you’re making a movie,” he explained. “And I was certainly not the first person that they reached out to. There were a lot of people that they reached out to sort of help out with the movie. When I’ve helped out on movies before, I have some very practical solutions to problems. I come from a post-[production] side of things, so I kind of know. To me, there’s lots of flexibility that you have. So, I was there to present options; I was there to develop. They needed joke punch-ups for sure; that was a big part of what we came in for. Basically, I was on the movie for about three months.”
“It was a fun process; I got to meet a lot of fun people. It started my relationship with Universal, which is how I got the opportunity to do ‘Renfield,'” he continued. “I think Seth Rogen had already done a deep dive on his [experience] because he was there before I was [to help with the writing and joke], but making movies like that is hard. Making big-budget movies like that is hard, and so when filmmakers find themselves in a position like that, sometimes they need people to come in and help out, and I try to approach it from a positive.”