Werewolf By Night Director Michael Giacchino Is Bringing Real Horror To The MCU [Exclusive Interview]

It’s a tight 50 minute thing. It’s not quite a feature. So was it your choice to go with the short length? Or was that kind of the mandate with it?

Well, there was never a mandate. It was always just like, well, what do you think if we did this? Or what would this be? How about this? And Kevin said, one day to me, he goes, “Why don’t we make it a special? And let’s see what happens. We make it a special.” I was like, “Well, one of the things I love about ‘Twilight Zone’ was that it was always a self-contained story in under an hour.” And I said, “I think that would be great to do that.” I said, “That absolves us from having to do too much of an origin story and too much of what happens after, and we can just concentrate on what we’re doing.”

We always looked at it as a night in the life of Jack and Elsa [Bloodstone]. We never shied away from the fact that, okay, yes, this exists in the MCU. Somewhere else in the world at this very moment, Spider-Man is swinging on something and Captain America’s doing something, but we’re not going to bother with that. We’re just worried about this moment right here, wherever we are. We never say where we are. We never say exactly where we are, but it’s within the realm of the MCU for sure. Then we’ll see where we go from here. Who knows? But it was never a mandate. It was always just something that we drove towards.

I don’t want to get too away from the point here, but last night during the Q&A, you’d mentioned for the first time in your career, you don’t really know what’s next. But you did, I believe, mention you wanted to direct more. Marvel likes to keep things in the family. If they come to you and said, “Would you like to do a full movie?” Is that something you would do given the time that would take?

I have found such friends and such … Marvel is a family to me. They’re part of my family. I’ve done so much work with them, and we have gotten to know each other so well. Anytime one of your friends says, “Hey, you want to do this?” You’re apt to go, “Absolutely.” Because you trust them, you love working with them. So who knows what’s going to happen. But yes, that would be great. I would absolutely jump at anything like that. It would be a lot of fun. Like I said, there’s nothing specific at the moment, and even in the music world, I don’t have anything super specific and I’m just waiting. So it’s a needed break, especially after six movies, scoring six movies and directing this one. Over the past year and a half, it’s been a lot. A break is nice.

I cover this stuff for a living, so I kind of followed the trajectory of this. It feels like this was done on a pretty quick turnaround.

Yeah, well, we worked for about two years, I guess, that we worked on it. But a lot of that was in development and getting everything prepped. But we were in Atlanta, we shot it in Atlanta, and I was there for two months total and came home for editorial. And we did all that here.

So one last thing before we go, look, it’s the MCU. The implication is that this might just be the very beginning with these characters and it was kind of your choice to introduce them. Have we gotten any indication, or do you have any indication as to when or where we might see Jack or Man-Thing again?

No idea. But that would be nice to see them again, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, no, I got to tell you before we go, so, okay, Werewolf By Night is so cool. But you got Man-Thing in there. How cool was that, that you got to do that?

I know. I felt so lucky when Kevin came to me and said, “Hey, what do you think about Man-Thing?” And I was like, “Really?”

Oh, that was Kevin’s idea?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin, he was always in the mix, but it was always in the mix with a bunch of other things. We were kind of in the very beginning figuring out what we wanted to do. Kevin really loves that character and why wouldn’t you? It’s one of the best. And that comic run is one of my favorites in the world. I love it.

It’s so good.

Oh, it’s the best. It’s just so, so beautiful. And the artwork is incredible. Yeah. So that was one of those things. It was just like, I feel very lucky to not only have been able to bring in Elsa and Jack, but to bring in Man-Thing too. That’s a huge, huge, huge thing. And I feel forever grateful.

“Werewolf by Night” debuts on October 7, 2022, on Disney+.