Netflix’s new animated series Twilight of the Gods brings together humans and the Norse gods for an all out war of epic proportions. Series creator Zack Snyder came to Atlanta for the premiere as part of Netflix’s Geeked Week, and Shakefire had the chance to speak with him on the red carpet. He talked with us about what sets Twilight of the Gods apart from other Norse mythology adaptations and whether or not a series is better suited for his directing style.
There have been so many Norse mythology adaptations. What sets Twilight of the Gods apart from everything else? What should people be most excited to see about this adaptation in particular?
I think that the thing that’s cool about what we did is we really took a pretty deep dive into sort of the, what I would say are the more the hokier bits. It’s not really the sort of Norse Mythology that you have seen so much in pop culture. Or pop culture tends to like shave the edges off a bit and make it a little easier. We really went for all the weirdness. I thought that was cool. So like yeah, I think that it’s a much weirder, kind of more edgy, kind of bizarro vision of Norse mythology but actually lines up probably more with traditional Norse mythology. You know, with all, there’s like, they’re all gender bending and they’re all like, you know, it’s great!
So where did you draw your inspiration from for these particular versions?
When I was in school, in high school I had a mythology class and we did a big section on Norse mythology that really piqued my interest. And then I just started to read here and there and just kind of study and then one of our guys, one of our writers, Peter Aperlo, he wrote also a book on Norse mythology. So we really had a lot of scholars of Norse mythology on the on the writing side. So it just helped a lot. So whenever I had a crazy idea they’d be like, “oh that’s not real,” or, “oh that’s awesome because that’s real.” So yeah, that was helpful.
You’ve come to be known for your hours long director’s cuts of films. So moving now into television which gives you hour-long episodes and you have an entire season now. So how has that been getting to work with for this?
It’s really fun because like we could do all the weird shit that we wanted to and never run out of space. So it’s been really fun.
Twilight of the Gods and all of its eight episodes is now streaming on Netflix.
