‘Rebel Moon’ Co-Writer Kurt Johnstad Talks Part One’s R-Rated Cut and Nonstop Action of ‘Part Two’ 

[This story contains spoilers for Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire.]

Rebel Moon co-writers Kurt Johnstad and Zack Snyder go way back. Years and years before they struck gold with 300 (2006), Johnstad first met Snyder at a time when they were both cutting their teeth in the world of music videos, and in 1997, Snyder raised the idea of Rebel Moon in its embryonic form of Seven Samurai in space. And once they both broke into the film industry in the early 2000s, Johnstad and Snyder began to brainstorm potential characters and scenes.

Johnstad and Snyder’s partnership then led to the 300 franchise and various other unproduced scripts. In 2012, Snyder pitched the idea as a more grown-up version of Star Wars to Lucasfilm, but when Disney acquired the company, Snyder knew that his vision wouldn’t see the light of day. He then entertained the idea of a TV series with producer Eric Newman, but it wasn’t until Snyder’s dramatic exit from Warner Bros. and its DC Extended Universe that Johnstad would eventually get a call about their long-gestating idea that they referred to as The Five. 

“During Covid, in March of 2020, [Snyder] called me. We had just finished working together on another project called Blood and Ashes, and he said, ‘Hey, I think we can revisit The Five,’” Johnstad tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He was just starting to do Army of the Dead with Netflix, and he was like, ‘I think I’m going to need another movie to do with them after this, so let’s talk about it.’”

Johnstad and Snyder then wrote nearly 100 pages of the story, and when a deadline came near, Snyder’s Army of the Dead co-writer Shay Hatten jumped on board, bringing the page total to 216, give or take. Knowing full well that a 216-page was unlikely to be produced as one movie, the Rebel Moon creative team whittled their script down to around 138 pages, but Snyder ultimately made the call to return to the longer script. This decision then got the ball rolling on the now two-part film series, as well as a shorter PG-13 cut and an extended R-rated cut for each part. The latter decision is proving to be controversial among fans and critics, as Snyder’s best work tends to happen when he’s unrestrained. 

However, Johnstad understands why Netflix would want to include younger teenagers in the proceeding, without parental controls and age restrictions getting in the way of their latest crack at a big-budget streaming franchise. “At some point, there was a business decision of, ‘How can we have more eyes? How can we have more people experience this?’” Johnstad says. “And that’s just part of Hollywood. People make these decisions all the time.”

With Part One now released and topping Netflix’s film chart, Johnstad is also shedding light on what viewers can expect from Part One’s extended R-rated cut that will be released at an unknown later date. Snyder, during a recent appearance on The Film Junkee’s YouTube stream, confirmed that Part One’s extended director’s cut won’t drop before Part Two in April.

“There’s definitely a lot more story at the front of the movie. You’re definitely going to get a lot more [of Anthony Hopkins’] Jimmy and see his arc, and you’re going to get a lot more of Kora and the Motherworld,” Johnstad shares. “You’re going to get a different introduction to Noble. You’re also going to get a different introduction to some smaller characters like Aris [Sky Yang], who’s the Motherworld soldier that defends the character of Sam in the granary. But just in broad brushstrokes, there’s more character, and certainly knowing Zack, there’s more action and spectacle and the visual vibrance of what he does. So there just wasn’t enough time. It would’ve been a four-hour PG-13 movie.”

Johnstad also says that Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver feels like its own distinct movie compared to Part One.

“I would say that it’s definitely its own movie, and it’s a very different movie. It’s not an assembly of the team. The team is built, and now it’s why they fight,” Johnstad says. “I think [the PG-13 cut] is two hours, or maybe it’s more, but it’s a nonstop action rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. And the ending is spectacular.”

Below, during a recent spoiler conversation with THR, Johnstad also discusses his writing process with Snyder, before offering some clarity on Admiral Noble’s resurrection and his first-class trip to the Motherworld’s astral plane. 

So I’m all-in on what you guys are doing, but having to wait for the full six-hour experience is proving to be a problem for me.

(Laughs.) Six!? You’re shortchanging us. We’re ambitious. 

Oh, so there’s even more than expected. Anyway, for those who don’t know, what’s the CliffsNotes version of your origin story with Zack?

We have a three-decade friendship. We started working together 30 years ago, and he first mentioned this [Rebel Moon] idea to me in 1997. We’ve always had a love for all things movies, and then, around 2003, when we actually started making movies and working in the business, he said, “Hey, maybe one day we’ll get to make Seven Samurai in outer space.” And I was like, “Oh, that’d be awesome.” So, in ‘03, we started doing character sketches and some scene work: “Wouldn’t this be cool? Could there be a heist? Could there be a double cross? What would it look like?” 

And then both of our careers took their own trajectories, and we worked together many times on projects and then other times separately. There were times where he took shots with Lucasfilm and Disney, but that didn’t pan out. He then tried to turn it into a TV show with Eric Newman until he said, “I think this is a movie.” 

And then, during Covid, in March of 2020, he called me. We had just finished working together on another project called Blood and Ashes, and he said, “Hey, I think we can revisit The Five.” That’s what we were calling it at the time, and he was like, “I think we should look at that. Maybe there’s an opportunity to do it.” He was just starting to do Army of the Dead with Netflix, and he was like, “I think I’m going to need another movie to do with them after this, so let’s talk about it.” So we did, and then we just started figuring out the story.

After co-writing two 300 movies and various unproduced scripts together, what made Rebel Moon the right situation for another reunion, as opposed to all the superhero movies he made?

We’ve always been very close as friends, and we had just been talking about this for years. It’s a funny business that we’re in where creative alchemy turns these leaden ideas into gold. So I have always trusted Zack’s instincts, and I think he has the same feeling when it comes to me. So we just knew that a lot of work and a lot of effort was going to be put into this, and the reward is up there on the screen.

For some reason, I have this mental picture of Zack pacing back and forth with his ax in hand, spitballing these huge ideas in his spirited, energetic way, while you and Shay Hatten somehow turn them into pages. Is there any truth to that image of your writing process?

(Laughs.) Yes, sometimes, it’s an ax, but many times, he’ll be holding a Leica camera. And sometimes, it’s a football. We’ll throw a football back and forth. Zack is a kinetic human being. He is always in movement, in his mind, his heart and his body. That’s just kind of who he is and how I’ve always known him to be. 

How [the writing process] has worked in the past is Zack will always write the first five or ten pages of every script that I’ve worked with him on, and then he’ll usually write the last five pages. And so that creates this creative container or bookends for the story. They’re guardrails for the 200-plus pages in this case. And when I read his first pages, I am always like, “Damnit, he’s literally just poured gasoline on this thing, and I’m playing catch up already.” That’s happened in every script that I’ve worked with him on, from 300 to scripts that haven’t even been filmed yet. We have things on the shelf that maybe will be made one day, but it’s always a really fun process. 

And then it’s looking at the workflow and beating out which things need to be done and saying, “Okay, I’ll take these two scenes and you take those two scenes.” And then there’s this really lovely creative competition that happens where he’ll read me a scene late at night and say, “Hey, this is how I’m punching out of this scene.” And I’ll be like, “Okay, great. Got it. Here’s how I’m going to enter that scene.” So I’m not going to question [our process]. I don’t want to intellectualize it or even try to figure it out, but it’s worked for 20 years. So I’m going to keep going with it.

So you, Zack and Shay combined to write a 216-page script, and then the decision was made to split those 216 pages in half for two movies. From there, how much refinement did you have to do each half so that both functioned as their own movies? 

Before Rebel Moon became two movies, we brought Shay in around 95 or 100 pages. The script was somewhere in there, and we weren’t going to hit the deadline that we’d set for ourselves. Zack had other commitments. He was doing his cut of Justice League, and there are only so many hours in a day. So he was like, “Do you mind if I bring Shay on?” And I was like, “Absolutely not, if you trust him.” So we brought him on, and Shay, who’s been an amazing partner, hit the ground running. By the end of all three of us working on it, it went from those 95 or 100 pages that Zack and I had to 200-plus pages. We knew we couldn’t deliver a 200-plus page script, so there are many drafts where we cut it down. The leanest it got was 136 or 138. 

And Zack, in his wisdom, was just like, “We’re losing all the mythology. We’re losing the characters. We can’t do this.” So then we went back to the big draft and just asked ourselves, “What is the best story?” And then we started looking for a place where we could break it up, and we found that place just by consensus. We were like, “It’s right in here, if we create another ending and do a few things on either side of it to shore up why we would create a cliffhanger there.” So that is basically how we broke both movies, and their shooting drafts both ran just under a hundred pages each.

Now, I understand why Netflix would want shorter PG-13 cuts in order to maximize views among younger teenagers and not run into parental controls and age restrictions. PG-13 also creates more merchandising opportunities, but we’ve learned by now that Zack is at his best when his work is unadulterated. So how much deliberation was there about doing both PG-13 and R-rated cuts? Was Zack conflicted at all from what you could tell?

I wasn’t in those meetings, so I can’t really speak with confidence of how those decisions were made. The long draft that became two movies was always the Zack Snyder draft, and I would call that the extended version draft. So we ended up filming all of that. It’s not like he went back and did reshoots to do an extended version. That didn’t happen. Everything that was in the [153] days of shooting was in the extended version [of the script], and at some point, there was a business decision of, “How can we have more eyes? How can we have more people experience this?” And that’s just part of Hollywood. People make these decisions all the time. 

So we really had our eyes on four drafts, because, in a lot of ways, we were shooting four movies at once. It’s not just two movies. There are line reads and dialogue and little inferences [to track], and the nuances of how hard an action scene can go [for PG-13 versus R]. So everybody kept a multitude of plates in the air, but nobody had as many as Zack. I still don’t know how he does it, but it’s impressive to watch.

The movie devotes most of its runtime to assembling a team, but as soon as that team is assembled, it’s immediately disassembled, resulting in a new version of the team that’s six people at the moment. What was the thought process behind that swerve? 

We knew we needed a cliffhanger to create an energy and an appetite for more. We also knew that we were filming both films back to back, and so people weren’t going to have to wait three years like they did between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. They’re not going to lose their minds or lose interest because the window is only four months. In April, they’re going to get the answers to movie one. So we knew we needed something to change the attitude of the characters and also change the attitude and the experience of the audience in a big way. There are a couple things that happen at the end of movie one that definitely get you to sit up in your seat and go, “Wait a second, what just happened?” And that launches this next band of outsiders or rebels, and it sends them onto movie two. 

Kora (Sofia Boutella) kills Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) in the end, but he’s resurrected through this technology on The King’s Gaze. Can anyone be brought back in this fashion if they have access to that tech? Or do Noble’s specific modifications allow him to have this ability?

If we fall in love with somebody and then we kill them, the rules of the world don’t allow us to just bring them back, but some people have accessibility to technology and are constructed in a way to where they can be brought back. And not everybody can jump into the astral plane where Noble goes and talks to Balisarius. That’s very much a Motherworld-centric thing, and it’s also where Noble is in the caste system. He is a privileged admiral of a military dreadnought. It’s not like he’s a person who’s selling at the farmer’s market in the Motherworld. The people on the street don’t have neural links, and so they don’t have that capability.

Is Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) linked up to the astral plane somewhere else on The King’s Gaze?

I can’t really go into the mechanics, but you will see more of the astral plane being used. It’s how people can communicate information through space and in a subconscious way. It’s almost like a scientific dream state, I would say. I don’t know if that’s approved by Zack, but that’s how I always looked at it. If they’re plugged in, then they can talk to somebody a light-year away if it’s that far.

What can you tease about Part One’s extended cut? Is there more backstory for characters like the Bloodaxes (Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman), Jimmy (Anthony Hopkins) and Tarak (Staz Nair)? 

There’s definitely a lot more story at the front of the movie. You’re definitely going to get a lot more Jimmy and see his arc, and you’re going to get a lot more of Kora and the Motherworld. You’re going to get a different introduction to Noble. You’re also going to get a different introduction to some smaller characters like Aris [Sky Yang], who’s the Motherworld soldier that defends the character of Sam in the granary. So you get an interesting look into why he is now constricted as a slave soldier of the Motherworld and how he got there. So his arc is much more defined. But just in broad brushstrokes, there’s more character, and certainly knowing Zack, there’s more action and spectacle and the visual vibrance of what he does. There’s definitely a lot more mythology, and a deeper understanding of the Motherworld and their intention, and what the rebellion is coming up against. So there just wasn’t enough time. It would’ve been a four-hour PG-13 movie.

Jimmy’s scene with Sam (Charlotte Maggi) is probably my favorite scene, so I’m glad to hear there’s going to be more of him.

Yeah, it is such a beautiful scene. Zack wrote that scene. It’s a stunning piece of work, especially how he shot it. Charlotte [Maggi], the actress who plays Sam, is just so perfect and innocent in that scene, and her work is fantastic.

And how does Part Two compare to Part One? Does it feel like its own movie with a different engine and tone? 

I would say that it’s definitely its own movie, and it’s a very different movie. It’s not an assembly of the team. The team is built, and now it’s why they fight. I think [the PG-13 cut] is two hours, or maybe it’s more, but it’s a nonstop action rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. And the ending is spectacular. We hope things are going to turn out the way they do, but it’s a fantastic, fun ride that’s very different than [Part One].

Charlize Theron told me a few years ago that Atomic Blonde 2, or Atomic Blonder as I prefer to call it, was in some stage of development at Netflix. Do you still have ties to that property?

I don’t! I think they’re supposed to come and talk to me at some point. But [Atomic Blonde] was a fun one to write. I’m very proud of that movie and what Dave [Leitch] and Charlize and Sofia [Boutella] did with it. So it was great to reconnect with [Sofia] on Rebel Moon, because she was so fantastic in [Atomic Blonde]. But no, I don’t know what’s going on with it. More often than not, people come up to me and ask me that question: “Where’s Atomic Blonde 2? What are we waiting for?” And I am like, “These decisions aren’t made by me.” But I know that [Charlize] had fun doing it. It was a hard shoot, but every shoot is hard. So I’d love to see [a sequel].

Can you say what you’re writing right now? 

I can tell you that I’m working with Zack Snyder on a bunch of really big ideas. A lot of them. 

Rebel Moon Part Three?

Zack and I are always going to bet on ourselves because it’s not gambling if you bet on yourself. So, in success, we hope to continue giving the fans what they deserve, which is some cool new original stories. Zack is excited to bring those stories to them.

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Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire is now streaming on Netflix.