KPop Demon Hunters: An Empire Podcast Interview Special

0:14Hello Pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to an Empire Podcast interview special. K-pop Demon Hunters was, quite simply, one of the biggest movie phenomenons of last year. An animated movie about Huntrix, a K-pop girl group who, well, hunt demons. It debuted on Netflix last June without much fanfare, just another movie seemingly destined to be lost in the shuffle. But then, something funny happened. It found an audience, beguiled by its blend of cracking action, humour, heart and tunes. and then that audience began to grow and grow and grow a couple of months after it launched a sing-along version was released in cinemas for one weekend only and did boffo box office as they say the soundtrack album has dominated the charts for months while Golden, one of the songs from the movie hit number one in the UK and the Netflix records began to fall first it became the company's most watched original movie it began life as a Sony Pictures animation film although it became a Netflix property around 2021 while it was still in production.

1:20And then, Netflix's most watched property ever. Time magazine held it as a breakthrough of the year. And as if that weren't enough, now it's been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars and is hotly tipped to add that little gold guy to the Golden Globe it won last month and a Grammy it picked up just last night for Best Song Written for Visual Media for, yes, you guessed it, Golden. And at the centre of this golden era of success are the film's co-writer-director duo Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. When they came to London recently, our Alex Godfrey, who has watched the film about a thousand times thanks to his young daughter, jumped at the chance to talk to them both about how the little film that could became the big film that has.

2:03But there was only one question that he could possibly ask to kick things off. Here it is. Enjoy. Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhands, welcome to the Empire Podcast. Where are you today? We're in the Netflix London office. My first question is basically, what the hell is going on? That's what we're at. Well, I imagine my daughter is five and she discovered the film when it came out. What was it? August, I think. June. June. June. Oh, my God. she found it in the summer july or august and i hadn't heard of it so she took it and her mom they brought it to me and then it started to it was already starting to to filter through um but very very quickly became the biggest thing on the planet and but genuinely like it's genuinely the biggest thing on it has been for a while i mean netflix's most watched movie ever number one album number one single for for ages and it's amazing that so before the summer the world at large just didn't even know about it right and you've been working on it for for you know for years maggie what maybe a decade-ish like seven years right and you know so you worked on it for seven years and then suddenly it is everywhere everywhere where every day it's just permeated every facet of pop culture.

3:41This must just feel like a parallel universe to you, what's going on with this. I mean, I know people say, did you ever expect something to get this big? Obviously, you would have had no idea that it would have exploded like this. But what does it feel like? Because it must be really surreal. It is. It's very surreal. It's weird. You have this idea for so long, and you work on something for so long, and it's finally out there and you're just happy that people are seeing what you've been working on and but you never expect this scale of this is just massive we never I mean I honestly didn't know that a movie could do this yeah it was just we had a moment where we're like this is like uh the first two or three weeks we felt like we had to be everywhere and see everything and every comment and every response and then like after a few weeks it was overwhelming and we're like oh this is like it's like it's like a kid like you just have to let it go out in the world and you don't have to be there for all of it like just let it be itself so that's kind of what we're trying to do well it's interesting you just said maggie you didn't even know a movie could do this well they don't movies don't do this i don't think i've seen this before so i didn't even know this was possible you know it's not it's it's it's it's not usually possible i I mean, it's unholy what's going on.

5:01It's so, so big. And also, you know, so through my daughter, I lost count of how many times I've watched it. You know, it's different when you have a kid and watching it all the time. And she is, I'm not joking. She's getting up in the morning at 7 a.m. Invariably, this is what she wants. And, you know, sometimes when she comes home as well. i do the school run every morning and sometimes in the afternoon cannot get in the car without her asking for how it's done yeah and then and then golden and and what it just my son is five and he's in the bathtub singing about how he sees beauty in the broken glass and i'm like okay whatever that means to you my daughter is five and she's she's quoting rambo because Rambo is referenced in, you know, that's quite disturbing.

5:57But for me, through my daughter, I am just seeing, and I have very quickly grown to love it as much as she does, if not more. You know, it's gone past the point now where I sometimes get in the car on my own and putting on golden. No, it is. So she's five. I've got friends with teenage daughters, 14, 15, 16, 17, and sons, you know, and it's rare to find a film that succeeds on this level, but also that cuts through demographically, you know, age, culture, everything. And I guess that's just testament to the work, not just the work you put into it, but the quality control on every level of this film, you know, narratively, visually, lyrically, the production, the song production, everything.

6:54I just can't imagine how much work you and everyone who worked into it to get everything so right. And I guess that as artists, that's what you try to do every time. But what you've achieved here seems to... Sorry, this is just going to be half an hour of me telling you how long this stuff. I know, I love this. Yeah, more and more. It's an emotional film. It's a dramatic film. It's funny. It's quite illuminating in terms of the culture as well. You're opening up Korean culture to people who don't know... Some people who don't know anything about it, especially kids. And the songs are just permeating all the time.

7:36when did you well has it been a constant realization of just as it's been growing that is just hitting more and more and more people on every level it is yeah yeah you kind of watch it travel out i mean great credit to like that core audience like the first two weeks of people who found it and made their own tiktoks about it they were like the best marketing you could ever ask for because they'd make mashups and then that however it works traveled from them to parents to kids to you know my parents who are very old and live in the middle of nowhere in idaho so when they heard about it from their neighbors i'm like whoa we made it all the way well that's what's really interesting isn't it because you know i wouldn't get into the weeds too much but when a film is so quickly beloved like this one is and you know there there obviously has been some talk of people saying oh well you know this this should have been released you know should have been a cinema release but you know the world has changed and i cannot see that this film would have caught fire in the way that it has if it had just been a theatrical release because people found it they discovered it themselves they told their friends about it the family started watching it and they were immediately all watching it again and again and again and again it's been a word of mouth um success of the likes that i i can't compare it to anything else and that is in large part due to to the fact that it was freely available to people with netflix subscriptions on their tv sets and then obviously it has subsequently been put out in the cinemas and watched by i think including me and my family by people who have already seen it countless times on there is nothing like this you know before this my daughter had frozen and frozen is still a big thing but there's just something else about it and when i did take her to see to the that's what i'm getting confused about august was when i took to see it in the cinema to the sing-along line right that's when we went to cinema obviously it'd been around a couple months before that um but i'd got her a hunt tricks t-shirt official netflix merch and she was psyched to go and see it in the cinema she wore her t-shirt and i was standing there with her in the lobby and she was so excited to see it in the cinema because i said there's going to be other boys and girls there you're all allowed to get up and sing along the words going to be on the screen and she was there in her t-shirt and um and i thought i saw star wars when i was four and in the cinema and it had a massive effect on my life and is responsible for better or worse for many of my life choices since then and seeing her there in the cinema being really excited and wearing that t-shirt i thought well this is this is that possibly this is that generation's star wars you know this is that film that is having that impact on them and it's got all that stuff in there it's a fantasy film it's exciting it's got good guys and bad guys it's got that really beefy mythology it's got that influence of all different sort of cultures which is what george lucas put into star wars as well in a way um and i wondered if if that sort of thing was on your mind when you were working on it if you were hoping for that sort of cut through in that way and for that sort of impact or were you just sort of locked inside the bubble of just trying to get it right yeah i think it was the latter we we just we just wanted to make something great we wanted to make something we'd always wanted to see yeah as younger versions of ourself but also now and as filmmakers and people who have watched a lot of these things and wanted to see something we haven't seen and we just wanted to like you said like perfect it we we didn't let go of anything until we were like 100 satisfied with it and there's i don't i don't know about you but i you know i have i have small tiny like oh i wish we did that but really no regrets at all with what the movie is and i'm just very very proud of it and happy with it and and so we just hoped that people would like it too because we loved it yeah yeah well what was it like maggie you said you worked on it for seven years um you know you've worked on you've worked on one of the lego movies you worked on kung fu kung fu panda three i think you were all sorts all sorts of things what was it like working on other people's projects while you had your own very personal passion project sort of bubbling under um beyond that at the same time you know i don't think it was really bubbling under there for a long time it wasn't like i wanted to make something for that long i i knew that i wanted to tell eventually get to a place where i wanted to tell my version of a personal story.

12:59And I knew that I wanted to see Korean culture represented on screen, but it wasn't like I had this in me for a really long time before it was bought by Sony and developed. I'm just kind of trained to come up with ideas. And so when I was approached by a producer at Sony asking, hey uh a producer the producer produced um wish dragon wanted a very similar experience because he loved working on that film so much and he asked if um i had an idea that was more international perspective and i said of course i do and even though i had i didn't have anything and um and so it was you know as a creator you just you're always constantly thinking about elements of stuff and not really a full it doesn't it doesn't always it's not always like a full concept yeah and i had a few things and just put them together korean demons korean culture these types of women female characters and got this demon hunter idea and then the k-pop was kind of added in last as like oh it needs more flourish doesn't feel like enough of a concept and it was another korean element and at the time bts was i don't think they were kind of at their peak yet but they were like peaking and um so it felt like uh just a good element to add in and it felt weird and but different and and exciting when that mashed up against demon ending yeah and And then literally the next day it was, it was pitched like very, yeah.

14:41With like six words to a producer over brunch. And he was like, I love this. Let's do it. And that's kind of how it went. And so it was after it was pitched and bought that I really dug in and try to figure it out. It wasn't like I had thought about this for, for years before that. Okay. although i think you've explained it well in that like we're both worked in the industry for 20 years 15 years and you're accumulating skills but you're also like you're like you're like also collecting feelings and ideas that might not even be you don't even understand that they're related to this idea but like maggie's talked about like wanting a certain type of comedic female character and kind of having a lot of the movies you were working on sort of rejecting that which you don't realize in that moment is shaping you as a storyteller eventually until finally you get your chance and you're like well here it goes yeah here's something i've been holding yeah i could do the thing that i wanted to do there's one thing that i've never done but i've looked that's there's ideas that you kind of accumulate that you're like oh i want to do this kind of thing and when you get that opportunity you just you do it well maybe that's yeah i mean that That speaks to the success of this film, that it does feel new, but in a sense also it's doing things that people have maybe wanted to see for so long without really maybe even knowing that they wanted to see it because of the way that we've been fed traditionally before that.

16:15I mean, it's really interesting what you just said about you've been wanting to do, you know, funny female characters and not being given the chance. What were your experiences there? Were you creating things and people were just saying, we don't do that? um there there was a one instance where we had we have so many meetings in animation with female characters and because you know if we have a group of characters we usually just get one female character and all male and we run into an issue of like we have all these meetings about how do we make this female character pop that's always the word pop and and um in one film i i suggested well why don't we make the why don't we take the take the funniest male character and just swap it with the female character so she's the funniest and there was just silence in the room but they were like not going for it i just thought well well that was my that was my And I thought that was a great idea, but that nobody went for that.

17:19And so, you know, just having gone through that, it's, it just, it kind of accumulates and you think like, well, if I'm going to do a movie about women, I'm just going to make them really weird and super funny. and just to just to prove a point that female characters can be that and i think we i feel like we've seen that in live action movies like with bridesmaids and like just everything that crystal wick does and 13 yes uh a show that we referenced a lot yeah but we should we were just not seeing that in animation and it was just really frustrating yeah it's weird because my wife is a she's an author and she's like a early korean american writing voice in young adult and she writes like these funny weird characters and she's always hounding me like why are you not making more interesting female characters in animation yeah the time i sat down with maggie and she's like i want to do these girls that are like really awesome and really weird it was like yeah there is a pent-up demand for this like so many people i don't even think weird is really the right road it word is just they're just real real yeah they're not they're just they're all the things themselves yeah and we're not i don't know it's just it's a different they're just bare it's just and that was that was very important for us and to the point where we did we wanted to show all aspects of women and yeah and and um we also did a bare makeup bare face look with no makeup they were just not made they had like not even filled in eyebrows and some bags under their eyes redness and that was very important for me to show because and on you know and then the other side of it really really good makeup because i feel like both of those have not been shown in animation and so we worked really hard to to really hone in on that and then also the fashion There's so many aspects of this movie that I feel like we just haven't seen on female characters.

19:28Really great fashion, nail art, like all these details that women really appreciate. And then the flip side of that, which is the bare makeup and pajama pants, lame tacky pajamas, which is also an aspect of women that a lot of people get to see, but we don't see represented. yeah it's it's amazing and and and and they're pop stars it's it's really interesting you said the k-pop element came in late because what is brilliant about the music and the songs in this film that they are not only a fundamental but an inseparable part of the narrative these songs drive the story forward and drive character with every beat with every line and then they stop and they start and you know sometimes the songs just start while something happened yeah and i'm fascinated to know how you made that work in terms of working with the singers and the songwriters and i know you know and some were both um were they part of the script process at all because it seemed like i say it's completely inseparable and it's such a smooth fluid job yeah yeah it was a really intense collaboration.

20:50We were writing kind of launch documents. We were writing scripts really for every song to kick the songwriters off in which we were without the poetry of a pop lyric. We were telling as if we were writing a scene, what's the meaning and the purpose of this verse and this pre-chorus and this chorus and all the same high standards you would hold to writing a good scene. You put it into the song and then to also provide the songwriter with a kind of pop parallel. So maybe a song like, I don't know, Takedown is story-wise, it's this double act of like sort of a catharsis of like saying how crappy the Saja boys are, which is all triggering to Rumi because deception and demon, all that is part of what she's hiding.

21:40And then at the same time, we'd be like, but really this should feel like a song where like your ex, your boyfriend that you broke up with, you know he's a total jerk and you can't wait for the rest of the world to find out what it what an a-hole he is so i was always trying to balance that like almost like sort of pedantic specific thing for the subtext of the songs but never say that never actually say the way musical theater will just declare a thing we're like let's do the metaphoric version and then it stays pop we we were the writers so we wrote we had full control of the story yeah it's um And so we were writing the script, but the music was all just part of the writing as well.

22:24It was just, we were now going into song. And the music had just more, I guess, more dense storytelling that it needed to carry. And so we worked with our executive music producer, who's also very great at story. He comes from a musical Broadway background. And so he would grill us on like, what does this song, what does it have to say? like what is what is the what does it need to say about the characters what does it need to say about this moment what why what story story role is it playing so it was very tough it was it was really because we would abandon story things problems because they were too hard to figure we're like oh okay let's go to music and then we go to music and then we'd have to we'd have to confront that story problem because we have to address it in order to get the music written yeah like oh the music meeting became a story meeting again no so it was just double story meetings and just more intense because just the songs just were just i don't know just condensed story things yeah and we tried the other thing i think became a guiding principle was people don't just break into song that there's always a a context for them whether it's releasing a single or even in the duet scene, which is sort of your most conventional West Side Story duet.

23:40But even there, Rumi is trying to regain her voice and she's actually testing out her voice while she's sort of progressing the relationship. So always having reason for the song felt like it made it different. Well, also tonally, you know, the Huntrick songs are so heartfelt and empowering and dramatic and vulnerable and the Sarge Boys songs. are like empty bubblegum boy band pop and not just like let's have a song for this guy and let's have a song for this guy and let's you know let's give this person a chance to sing a song they are such keen observations on you know different types of pop music and you use them in a way that serves your characters it's just uh it's really nuanced that was that something that you wanted to do from the start yes yeah yes we wanted those to be essentially manipulations and emotionally at at its core kind of emotionally either deceptive or kind of abusive like your idol is it's a total banger and it's also when you stop to think about the lyrics it's like a really toxic relationship that you're being beckoned into and we wanted to make sure that that That was a reflection of Kima, whose whole philosophy as a villain is that the secrets and the shame that you have are things that make you unworthy of love and only come to me where you can be consumed.

25:12But that was really his song in a way. But really, with all the songs, except for the last song that the girls sing, which is the most vulnerable song, it's just everything is put out there. All of the songs have dual meaning. they they even the even how it's done it's it's a triumphant declaration of of who they are as pop stars but then there is that kind of underlying we are the the new the latest iteration of these hunters this legacy that's been passed down through centuries and that's just kind of snuck in the soulful underpinning and everything all the songs have dual meaning except for the last one which is the most meaningful thing and that's that's their journey is that they have to shed all of that i guess facade and just be real it's incredibly emotional um i read an interesting interview with uh audrey nuna uh who is uh is does she do mirror is she mirrors

26:16so she was being asked uh about the music and um i remember when i first started really when these songs really started to get under my skin oh even when i first started hearing i remember hearing um how it's done and the first couple of times and i was like oh this kind of sounds like a Katy Perry song. Oh no, now it sounds like a Bollywood song. Oh, now it's like K-pop. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting because it's all over the place, but it works as a whole. But you can sort of feel all the different influences and infiltration, which I think is just how music evolves over time and how pop music assimilates all sorts of styles and cultures.

27:02And so then sometime after that, I read this interview with her, And she was talking about the fact that that's sort of going on. And she said, I think genre is dead in a sense. And I thought that was really interesting. And it definitely applies to some of these songs. And I also think it speaks to this film as a whole, because it is a bit of a melting pot, isn't it? Would you agree with that? And where does that come from? Is that sort of just emblematic, the point that we've sort of got to in culture? Well, I mean, the origins of K-pop is that it is like a mix of genres. So the guy who is kind of coined as the godfather of K-pop, he actually comes from a heavy metal background.

27:42So if you listen to his music, there's a lot of heavy metal influences. Not even influences, just both of them. And he's the one that also brought rap into Korea. And so there's a lot of hip-hop influences. So he just mixed everything. You would just switch it up right in the middle of the movie and then switch it again. and it really fits our movie because tonally we wanted to do that. We wanted to achieve that as well. We were really big fans of Pong Juno and The Host especially is something that we both connected with because he's just constantly switching up tone over and over again and putting total opposites next to each other and just makes it work and we wanted to try that in this and so I think it really suited like just our movie and also just how our characters are we we wanted to show very silly girls but also really vulnerable but also pop stars very cool and so i think the entire movie is just this hodgepodge of things and and we we weren't very exciting we just wanted this to be just a huge experience even launching the songs like pulling we obviously had a lot of k-pop references when we were giving them direction on the vibe of the song but there's there's k pooch and bill withers and yeah kanye and fk twigs and yeah like biggie like just which is the beauty of how k-pop is so yeah so uh acrobatic and so open to like influences because it could be kind of taken as like just pop music it's not artistic but there's actually tons of artistry that needs to go into that and yeah production value of it is very specific the skill level is is really crazy so you know the huntrix girls like the real the real singers were on jimmy fallon's show singing golden it must be amazing for you to sort of have that fourth wall be obliterated because like huntrix is almost like a real band now yeah it's it's really wild yeah it was just a dream seven years ago and we just i remember just being in spring asper's office the president of sony music with christine belson the president of sony animation and just talking about just how do we build this group like yeah and we talked about you know do we do we assemble like a superstar group with existing artists and it didn't feel right like we wanted i i my dream was just to create an original band like a new group of unknown or relatively unknowns and and create this create this group um and it feels like we really did that um and even when and that's something that we worried about a lot even when um the film came out we we wondered how long it would take or or if it was possible for the audience to just accept these women as the stars as stars as stars and not fictional characters and immediately it just happened.

30:53It was like, I love Rumi, I'm Rumi, I'm a Zoe, I'm a Mira and because it happened so quickly we were like, whoa, okay, where do we go from here? And it just made leaps and strides. I think it also speaks to the timeliness like when Maggie told me about this idea that one of the things that struck me was just like, how overdo it? Because this, I think good original ideas that are sort of having their time they have this kind of a they like extract from the universe the things they need and so as we're casting voices and and singing singers and songwriters people like ej and audrey and and ray they they are they are here in their talent that they need a platform the movie is a platform to showcase this talent that's like waiting for their moment yeah i feel really that's a sign that you are making a film that's like you know it's it's time it's the right time for that yeah 100 okay well i've got time for one more question i just want to go back to the star i was talking i was comparing this to star wars in terms of the mythology and i think it's also got the potential and the scope that star wars has always had i mean star wars is maybe 50 years old and still growing and getting bigger and bigger and bigger um and obviously there has been talk of sequels for this and spin-offs and you know further stories concentrating uh giving this what like to different members of the band um i heard rumors of maybe a potential stage show but how how do you see it do you think that there is scope here for this demon hunter's world to branch and spin off and spiral and sort of grow beyond the story you've told?

32:42Where do you see it going? There's definitely room, yeah. You're probably going to be really cagey here about what you can and can't say, I'm sure. I can see you going. I mean, I think it'd be a missed opportunity to not do that. so because there's there's just so much potential where and it's great to hear everyone's the way everyone has understood and embraced everything that we thought the story was saying spoken or a subtext everything we wanted to imply that the sort of perfect way that that hit the audience i feel like it makes us excited because we were just making the story that we believed in and writing the characters that we wanted to write yeah then it feels like okay we just We just keep writing the stories that we want to tell.

33:34And wherever that takes it, the audience will follow. Yeah. Well, there's a moral to that story. Congrats on the film and its success. And I can't wait to see what comes next. And thanks for talking to me today. Thank you. It's really fun. All right. Thanks. Bye-bye. Okay. That was Alex Godfrey talking to Maggie Kang and Chris Applehands, directors of K-pop Demon Hunters. Glorious stuff. and that's it for this interview special there will be more interviews coming your way this week in the new regular episode called simply The Interviews and on the Mothership Podcast which is out every Friday and also features Team Empire talking about movies when we're not fighting demons that is right that's enough from me I'm going up up up it's my moment you know together we're glowing gonna be gonna be golden thanks for listening see you next time bye

34:33You