One of my favorite trailers released at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, and produced by Jeremy Latcham, the Paramount film looks like a ton of fun with the way it mixes action, adventure, comedy, and the incredible cast. I also love the use of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” over the footage. I’d be shocked if it’s not a big hit when it’s released in theaters next year.
Shortly after their big Hall H panel, Goldstein, Daley and Latcham stopped by the Collider studio at SDCC to talk about the film. During the informative interview, they talked about the tone, how they’ve made a film that has real stakes and real motion, but you’re also having a good time, what they’ve learned from test screening the movie, how they were able to use Led Zeppelin in the trailer, and how they decided on the title.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head and Hugh Grant.
The film was written by Goldstein, Daley and Michael Gilio and based on a story by Chris McKay & Gilio. The film was also produced by Brian Goldner, and Nick Meyer.
Watch what they had to say in the player above, or you can read the conversation below.
COLLIDER: Gentlemen, you guys know I’m a big fan of all of your work, and I think the trailer, looks really, really fun. Is that the movie? Is it a really fun ride?
JOHN FRANCIS DALEY: It is absolutely a ride, if rides also made you cry.
JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN: Sometimes they do.
DALEY: There’s some of that.
GOLDSTEIN: Some rides make me cry.
DALEY: There’s some of that too.
GOLDSTEIN: You know what? We tried to capture the spirit of what it is to play a D&D game, which is life and death stakes one minute, and then you’re laughing your heads off the next. That’s what this movie hopefully is.
JEREMY LATCHAM: To me, it all comes down to tone. Right? I think the tone that you want to hit is that thing where you’re just like, you’re having this fun, fun, fun time, and you’re getting hit in the heart all the time, over and over again, and you see stuff you’ve never seen before. That’s what these guys do so well. It goes back to me having worked with them on Spider-Man: Homecoming, and reading the first thing I ever read of theirs was just this thing that kind of matched up genres and was hilarious, and heartfelt, and adventurous, and everything else. Knowing that they had that in them and being so thankful to be on this journey with them here to bring this totally huge new world to life. It’s damn exciting.
I’ve heard you’ve test screened the movie. What did you learn from those screenings where you’re in the editing room?
DALEY: We’re basically locked in terms of the edit. We still have a lot of VFX work coming in, a lot of music that we need to conform and stuff. Beyond that, I think the thing that we learned the most from our test screenings was that it really appealed, not just to D&D fans, [but] people that had no idea what they were watching when they were going into the test screening actually were engaged, and they didn’t think that they would be because it’s a D&D movie, and it’s got us not necessarily a stigma, but it has a lot of baggage attached to it in terms of what people expect out of it. I think that was like a pleasant surprise for a lot of people.
GOLDSTEIN: Especially women are loving it too. Which D&D is not necessarily thought of as, but in fact it is, and I think if handled right, it should be. Because it’s all about characters, it’s all about the people feeling real and relatable. We tried to tell the story of some people who are not superheroes by any means, they kind of suck at a lot of things, but they’re great at other things. So how do you make those skills come to the fore? How do you tell the story where they all get to kind of level up over the movie?
I saw someone on Twitter say this, and I was thinking the same thing. Looking at the footage, it almost looks like a Guardians of the Galaxy meets D&D. In terms of like the fun characters, is that accurate?
LATCHAM: To me, the thing about these kind of movies is, I come from a background where I’ve worked at Marvel for a really long time, but I didn’t grow up inherently as like the biggest fan of all that Marvel stuff. One of the things that I think I was particularly good at in that era of my life was going, how do we make this thing that could be really nerdy and really just for this one particular audience, something that everyone can kind of relate to.
That was kind of the challenge with Guardians was space movies. Make a space movie that my grandmother can love. I think here it’s, make a fantasy movie that my grandmother can love, but also, make it so that the fantasy people love the fantasy movie. It’s that walking that line and threading that needle, and I think that’s what James Gunn, did really successfully with Guardians. I think that’s what we’re we’re trying to do here is walk that line, and make it, so it’s 100% serious and 100% has real stakes and real emotion, but also that you’re having a good time.
GOLDSTEIN: We’ll know more when we screen it for his grandmother, it’s coming up.
So obviously any Dungeons and Dragons movie has dragons. I’m very curious, are there multiple dragons? What can you say about how many dragons are in the movie?
DALEY: I can say that there are multiple dragons in the movie. I can’t say specifically who or what they are, but they are very unique in their own way. There are depictions of these dragons that have not been seen before on screen. I can say that I think.
Talk a little bit about designing the dragons because that’s a huge thing and obviously there are many versions. If you look at any D&D cover you can see all these different dragons. How much did you look at that material and say, “we have to give the fans of D&D something that looks like that”, and how much were you sort of like, we just have to do the dragons that’s best for the movie?
DALEY: What you just said, right, it was like subverting people’s expectations to a certain degree of things that they haven’t seen in dragons, but also giving them a more traditional look at the dragons that are from their fantasy books. So it’s finding that balance.
GOLDSTEIN: That’s typical of how we approached every aspect of this movie, because there’s a lot of lore. There’s a lot of things that you expect it to be. Ee work closely with the Wizards of the Coast to make sure that we were within the right zone of what it needed to be for the fans to appreciate it and not be thrown by it. But ultimately we also had to make it our own and make it work for this movie.
LATCHAM: That was one of the things I think we worked really closely with this art director, a super senior guy at WotC named Jeremy Jarvis, and his thing was always it’s not about accuracy, it’s about authenticity. It was about capturing the vibe of say, a specific kind of dragon and capturing what makes those dragons tick for fans and for the lore, but also understanding that it’s a campaign. Everything is different every time you stumble into a different dragon’s den. It’s going to be a little bit different than the last time, and it can be different, it can be unexpected. So finding that way to walk that line, and I think we had really incredible artists working, and we had really incredible support from WotC. I think that together with a great script that called for specific needs for the dragons made it unique and special.
You guys obviously settled on a title. Was it almost something else? Was it almost Dungeons and Dragons without honor? How did you decide on it?
DALEY: It was a long process deciding on that because it’s representative of this much bigger brand. I think that was what the kind of challenge was, was how are we going to depict this movie. At first, when we wrote it, we just called it Dungeons and Dragons, but there was rightfully the concern that it doesn’t necessarily emphasize the scope of Dungeons and Dragons. The fact that Dungeons and Dragons isn’t just this story. This is just one of many stories that kind of live in the world and that’s kind of where our title landed.
Was it almost something else?
LATCHAM: It was almost a couple of things, but it wasn’t really, because no one really felt that they captured it right. There’s a moment in that process when you’re talking to marketing, you’re talking to brand, you’re looking at the screenplay, you’re looking at the movie you’re making, and you go, “Oh, it could be this.” and then no one is really that excited about it.
GOLDSTEIN: There were titles thrown out that felt more like marketing things than the spirit of the movie.
LATCHAM: Then this came along, and we were all like, yeah, that captures who this team is. It says something about this movie in particular and not just like generic, generic. That’s the line to walk there to make sure you find the thing that captures the soul of the film. I think it does. I think it’s a nice title.
DALEY: It’s a very true subtitle to what the movie is about.
So I’ve been waiting for a kick-ass Dungeons and Dragons movie since I was a kid. Obviously the studio, everyone involved, this is potentially a really big franchise and a world that can be explored. When you guys were first talking to the studio about doing this and getting the green light, how much are they saying to you, “okay, this is great, but we want to make sure you have three ideas for other things”? How much are they thinking about the world, and how much is it, let’s just make this one movie?
GOLDSTEIN: There was no pressure put on us to think in terms of a cinematic universe. We obviously wanted to create characters and an environment that could grow, and that had the potential for more films, but that wasn’t at all in the forefront of our approach to this.
DALEY: By the way, that’s a testament to the studios, because I think sometimes the studios put the cart before the horse and try to create these cinematic universes before the first movie even comes out. So I think they were smart and savvy enough to know that the first one’s got to work before you even dive into the others. That said, I think it’s a really good jumping-off point for a lot of other potential movies to come after it.
LATCHAM: Having come like through the world that I grew up in, and we never thought about sequels on that first round of movies. It was just about make this movie good, make this movie good, make this movie good. Okay, now we got to make an Avengers movie that ties it all together. How do we do that? Oh, my God. The journey to that wasn’t like, we got to start planning. It has to be that you make something great in its own merit. So I was really adamant, let’s not be thinking ahead whenever that would come up. If someone would say something about the future, I’d be like, it’s this. This is the future. This movie being good is the future.
So I’m curious, what can you say about which character classes, types? What can you reveal about what’s in the movie?
DALEY: We made sure that we had as much of a diverse group of characters in terms of their race and class. I think we really covered as many as we possibly could without having even more characters in our ensemble. We have a big group of people. They all kind of represent a very specific thing that I think, a lot of players can sort of see themselves in, but also it’s not so bogged down with the proper nouns that people that aren’t familiar with the game are going to be alienated.
You got Led Zeppelin in the trailer. A, how much did that cost? And B, how much did that cost? And C, was it always going to be Led Zeppelin? Was this the dream? What happens if they said no?
LATCHAM: That is a funny question. We can’t tell you how much it costs because I’m not even quite sure. I know it was very complicated, and it happened at the very last minute. So we were definitely on a high wire without a net for a second. I was so thankful that they saw it and said yes, because I think it really is additive, and cool, and kicks a lot of ass. I think it kind of broadens things in a way that you’re like, heck yeah. So it was definitely a complicated process for the music department.
GOLDSTEIN: I will say, that when a studio’s willing to spend what it costs to get Led Zeppelin, it’s a good sign for their faith in the movie.
DALEY: Zeppelin, by the way, is so perfect for Dungeons and Dragons. Especially since Zeppelin, in its heyday, was when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came to be. So there is this real crossover that I think is juicy and still feels kind of contemporary and different from other fantasy films that you’d see. So it was a perfect combination, I think.
LATCHAM: I’m very thankful that they dove in with us on this. It’s really cool.
I watched the trailer twice, and you should be thanking your marketing team because it’s a fantastic trailer and the thing that people don’t realize is this early out, you don’t have a lot of VFX shots to work with. You know what I mean? I guess you were finishing shots for this trailer.
GOLDSTEIN: We were pushing very much to get these done.
I got to stop. I’m just going to say sincerely, I really can’t wait to see the movie.
