‘Aquaman’ Director Explains How He Pulled Off That Epic Ending Scene

Aquaman‘s third act was no easy feat or standalone effort for director James Wan.

Spoilers for the Aquaman movie follow. Major spoilers!

By the time Arthur Curry had rightfully claimed Atlan’s trident and become the one true king of Atlantis, it was time for a battle involving all of the sea’s creatures and Arthur and his half-brother Orm went head to head. Of course, every shot of this sequence required a tremendous amount of visual effects and careful planning during production, accordingly.

“It was a combination of a lot, a lot of efforts from a lot of people,” Wan tells ComicBook.com. “You know, whenever we have the actors, obviously, they’re there on wires and on rigs, and they have to do what they have to do, and big stunts obviously with the actors riding their creatures, and jumping, and hacking and slashing their way through the sequence. And then ultimately just a lot of many iterations of visual effects on all the shots. Just keep working on the shots, keep tweaking it, and trying to get the animation looking right. Trying to make sure to design the action in such a way where even though there’s a lot of visual effects happening, a lot of CG happening, I want the audience to kind of know where they are, and then on top of that, just wanted to just keep breaking grounds. You know, breaking visual grounds that we haven’t seen before, and just really push the envelope.”

While Wan is well aware of technology’s constant evolution, he hopes that as Aquaman ages, fans remember it fondly rather than looking back at it as a dated piece of cinema. “I really want this movie, decades from now, for people to still say, ‘Holy crap. This movie holds up,’” Wan said. “Or even if the visual effects don’t hold up 10 years from now, at least they can look at it and just go, ‘Wow, they went for it in a big, big way.’”

Speaking of 10 years from now, it’s not unlikely an Aquaman sequel arrives within that time. Whether or not Wan will be at the helm of it, however, is unknown. “I mean, liking the people I work with goes a long way,” Wan said. “That was the reason why I came back when I did Insidious 2. But it’s a weird one for me, because I actually don’t know what I want to do next for the first time in my career. I felt like Aquaman ticked a lot of boxes for me. I want to do another action movie after Furious 7, I wanted to do a world creation film, and I wanted to do a superhero movie, and Aquaman literally ticked all of those boxes for me. And so right now, I’m in that sort of place of like do I kind of go back and do a smaller movie maybe as my next one, something a bit more intimate. Or if I can do a personal movie, but maybe it’s on a bigger scale. I’m not sure at this point.”

Aquaman is now playing in theaters.