Disney’s “Moana,” the company’s splashy, live-action remake of the 10-year-old animated Oscar nominee (it lost the same year to Disney’s other animated treasure “Zootopia”), is here.
The movie follows the same contours of most of their recent animation-to-live-action pipeline – big stars in crucial roles (in this case, Dwayne Johnson reprising his role as Maui), lavish visual effects courtesy of effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic and Wētā FX, with a general atmosphere that veers more towards faithful reproduction than inspired reinvention. (Judging by opening night numbers and harsh reviews, it may not be the staggering box office behemoth that, say, last summer’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch” redo was.)
What might be the most surprising thing about this new “Moana” is who is behind it – Thomas Kail, a genuine force-of-nature in the theater world, having directed “Hamilton” and “In the Heights” (working with frequent collaborator and “Moana” songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda) and recent revivals of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and “Proof.” On the television side of things he’s directed everything from “2 Broke Girls” to “Fosse/Verdon.” (The man has range.) He also had a filmed version of “Hamilton” debut on Disney+ during the pandemic.
With “Moana,” though, he’s making his big screen debut.
Kail said that he was first approached about the project in late 2022 and had his first meeting with Johnson, who also serves as a producer, in March 2023. Now, two strikes and some production delays later, “Moana” is complete.
Things take a long time in theater; Kail said that he started working on “In the Heights” in 2005 and went off Broadway five years later. “I’m used to things taking three-to-five years,” he said. “Obviously, the difference of a movie for me is a musical on stage is much more elliptical. It’s like a real series of intensity, and then, Okay, let’s go off and write, or do something else. From the moment I got this job in April 2023, with the exception of the strike, I was working on this movie every day.”
They started shooting in July 2024 in the tropical isle of Atlanta, Georgia, and wrapped in Hawaii in November of that same year.
As to why he signed onto “Moana,” since certainly there are other projects out there and ones that don’t come with the same level of scrutiny as something like a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated classic, Kail said “there are quite a few reasons.”
One, he said, was that a question that pops up in his work time and time again is one of “Who am I?”
“This question of who am I, who am I supposed to be, what if the thing that I tell myself is different from what others tell me that I am, how does my role within my family or my community shift depending on their needs or my own needs, there’s echoes of this in all the stuff I do,” Kail explained.
“I’m fascinated by leadership, this this idea of who’s called to duty, who’s called to action, whether it’s a president like George Washington or in ‘Fosse/Verdon,’ who is the dancer who can’t dance, like what if the thing that you are is taken away from you, so those things are always quite interesting to me.”
He was struck by the idea of legacy, another theme that recurs in his work, and, of course, loved that “Moana” was a musical.
“I love the form of musical storytelling, I think that it has the ability to last with us in the most profound way, because I see music as a transportation device. If you hear a song, you are transported back to where you were, back to what you felt. I think it’s why our favorite music is from high school. It just takes us right back there,” Kail said.
“This movie came out in 2016, obviously was incredibly watched once it got onto Disney+ and those songs have been viewed a billion times – that’s a real number. You’ve heard that song, and that song connects you to who you were when you saw it, who you were with, what you felt then, and I just think that’s why it’s had such endurance over this time.”
But when new musicals pop up, they are typically a reinvention of some kind, either formally or in terms of casting or visual aesthetic. This new “Moana” feels very much like the original “Moana,” to the point that the Academy shared a video on social media of the same scenes from the original and the remake and they are remarkably similar.
Kail noted that Jared Bush, who wrote the original film, also wrote the remake, with Dana Ledoux Miller, who would co-write and co-direct “Moana 2” (“These are people deep in the ‘Moana’ world,” said Kail). “I’m only interested in making things that make people feel, and I felt by telling this story and centering Polynesian culture, and having flesh and blood, and human beings having these conversations fully embodied, we had a chance to celebrate this culture, and also reach for a level of emotionality that I thought could be quite meaningful,” Kail explained. “If you make a movie like this and it doesn’t follow the story, then it’s not ‘Moana’ and it shouldn’t be called ‘Moana.’”
For his part, Kail said that he never felt any pressure from the studio or his internal team to make the movie a certain way or adhere to what came before. “There’s lots of scenes in our movie that don’t exist in the original and things are in different order. There’s so much that’s different,” Kail said.
He knew that he always needed to stay true to “Moana,” even when it came time to edit the movie.
“When you get into the edit and you start to see all the pieces, I felt like the spirit of that original was what we wanted to maintain, and then as we started to progress through it, things felt like they deviated in terms of setting or where we put something in a different place,” said Kail
Did he ever deviate to the point where a higher-up had to tell him to bring it in closer to the original? “No,” Kail said. He was quick to acknowledge that he has a deal with 20th Century Television, part of the same corporate super-structure as Walt Disney Studios, which produced his “Moana.”
“This is a company that has been really good to me, but Disney has always believed in the musical, even when it was not popular,” Kail said. “There were a lot of years in the recent past when people moved away from musicals because they didn’t do what people wanted them to do in the marketplace, and Disney has never wavered since their inception. That’s very meaningful to someone who has dedicated a big part of their life and career to musical storytelling.”
He said he was moved when, on the “Hamilton” filmed version, he saw the Disney castle with music from the show underneath it. “I said, ‘What a minute, something from my childhood and my present can collide,’” Kail said. When they were working on the castle opening for “Moana” he made sure that you hear “the music and the voices of Polynesia and Opetaia Foaʻi over that castle.” “We worked a lot on that sequence, just to make sure we’re saying, ‘Here we are,’” Kail said. “I was really thrilled to have a chance to try to be part of that musical tradition that Disney has.”
The physical production of “Moana” was tough, but Kail made sure he lessened the amount of decisions that he made on any given day, first by wearing the same thing every day and eating the same meal every day. “Because my job is answering 500 questions a day,” Kail said. He also started to change his shoes at lunch as a way of resetting for the second half of the day, something that he heard Steven Spielberg did on all of his films. When he finally met Spielberg and told the master director that he had adopted this ritual, Spielberg said, “Why would I change my shoes?”
“This is just something passed down in the lore from like one assistant director to another and by the time it got to me, it was lost,” said Kail. But when he was explaining his methodology, Spielberg was intrigued. “He looked at me and goes, ‘That’s a good idea, maybe I’ll try that.’ I thought, That’s not what I thought the ending of the story was.”
Kail denied earlier reports that Disney had been working on a way of using an AI Johnson as a fill-in for Maui during production. “I don’t really know what that was about,” he said.
When it came to the design of Maui, the prickly demigod who Johnson now got to perform in live-action after playing the character in two animated features, there were some interesting choices made. Specifically, he doesn’t have nipples. Once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it. And his decided lack-of-nipples has been brought up in reviews, begging the question.
“I can’t speak to much to the discourse and controversy around his nipples, other than he has them and sometimes you don’t see them,” Kail said, very much wanting to move on from the subject.
Kail said they never considered going the full-CGI route like the similarly shape-shifting Genie in the live-action “Aladdin.” Instead, Johnson wears a bulky suit over his chest, which houses all of his tattoos, including Mini-Maui, a character that Kail confirmed was animated by the legendary Eric Goldberg (who also worked on the original).
“Maui is also both in and out of water, so sometimes we might be shooting in the water, and then an hour later, two hours later you’re doing something that’s dry, so it couldn’t be on his body, like we needed something that could be swapped. We had a few suits, because you just can’t be in and out of water in that way,” Kail said.
“The suit was built to look like Dwayne, you’ve seen what Dwayne looks like in our premiere photos, he’s still Dwayne Johnson, but what could fit on top of that, that could give that musculature, because also, the relationship between Moana and Maui in the animated film, it’s quite different physically,” he explained.
But what was Kail feeling now, that he was on the other side of it?
The day we spoke, he was going to go uptown with Lin-Manuel and screen the movie for 1,500 people. Then the next night he was going to go screen it for the crew and their families in Atlanta. Earlier in the week, they had done the world premiere at the Hollywood Bowl, with 5,000 people, accompanied by the LA Phil, with 148 Polynesian dancers on stage and both Johnson and Laga’aia singing their parts. (“I looked at Lin like, How did this happen?” said Kail.)
“It’s not lost on me. I’ve had a chance to do some really, really cool stuff in my 100 years of show business, but now I’m in the place where I get to do what I always love doing, which is share it with people, and so to sit in a theater and watch an audience absorb it. I feel very proud of that accomplishment that we all made,” Kail said.
He recently asked his post-production supervisor for a final count of how many “human beings worked on this movie” (again: no AI!) and he returned with a staggering number – 2,944 people.
“That’s food on people’s table, that’s someone coming in from a day of work and saying, ‘Here’s what I have contributed,’ both in terms of my artistry and on a practical level, there’s employment there. That’s very meaningful to me. I started out making theater for free in a basement and now we’re in a place where almost 3,000 people put their hands and their hearts into this thing,” Kail said.
It was important to him, “as the person who’s sometimes more visible than them,” to acknowledge all that they have contributed.
“I’ve made some of the smallest stuff anyone could ever imagine – like two people and a prop in a black box theater for $12. And so the fact that I now have an opportunity to let that many folks come to work and be a part of that and be a reason that that can happen is enormously meaningful to me,” Kail said.
As for his next adventure? He’s not so sure, beyond working on some television projects as part of his 20th Century deal and producing a new stage version of Walter Hill’s immortal 1979 cult classic “The Warriors” with his old pal Miranda. The stage show begins previews next spring. But hey. At least the pressure of directing is off.
“It’s a different kind of pressure,” Kail said.
“Moana” is in theaters now.
