In a Friday press conference attended by The HoloFiles, Masters of the Universe director Travis Knight described the late-night session with Queen guitarist Brian May that produced the film’s guitar solos, and the moment May disappeared from the room and came back ten minutes later with two boxes of his son’s He-Man toys from his attic.
Knight told the assembled press he had expected an hour or two with May. Instead the Queen guitarist stayed all day and into the night. “It was near midnight. And then he disappears, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s tired,’” Knight recalled. “But then he comes back about ten minutes later and he’s got two giant boxes of He-Man toys. It was his son’s He-Man toys. He still had them from his attic. He brought them down and he knew all the characters.”
Knight said composer Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Verse, Project Hail Mary, The Drama, Materialists) and he had built the musical approach around the 1980 Flash Gordon soundtrack Queen wrote with Brian May. “There was something that was just so fantastic and theatrical and operatic about it,” Knight said. “But, like all Queen stuff, it was emotionally complex and had a big heart and it also sounded awesome. So Daniel and I talked about that. I couldn’t have imagined that a year later we’d be sitting in Brian May’s home studio watching him record guitar solos for our score.”
Producer Jason Blumenthal told the same room that he and producing partner Todd Black have been trying to make a new He-Man film for 18 years. Various directors including Jon M. Chu (Wicked), Aaron and Adam Nee (The Lost City), and McG (Charlie’s Angels) had been attached at different points before Travis Knight came aboard. “Travis put this thing together and then together we all landed this plane,” Blumenthal said. Producer Todd Black added that Knight “knew how to make it work on so many levels. Adventure. Comedy. Emotion. Spectacle.”
Alison Brie, who plays Evil-Lyn, also revealed during the conference that Jared Leto was on set in costume as well as voicing Skeletor, calling it “an incredible suit” and saying Leto “still looked terrifying to all of us.” Leto skipped Monday’s TCL Chinese Theatre world premiere and has been notably absent from the Masters of the Universe press push, as covered separately in this archive.
Masters of the Universe opens in U.S. theaters on June 5, distributed domestically by Amazon MGM Studios and internationally by Sony Pictures Releasing International.
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