Rebel Moon Stars Break Down Filming Two Movies at Once

Djimon Hounsou and Staz Nair are no strangers to big, spectacle-driven productions, having appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy and Game of Thrones, respectively. Still, there’s not much that can quite prepare you for being on a massive, two-part space opera in which half the world is practical and the other half will be painted in later with visual effects. Rebel Moon is almost unprecedented in modern movies,  in the sense that Netflix committed a huge amount of time and resources to making the first two movies in the potential franchise back to back, with Zack Snyder and a star-studded cast working basically without a net.

Shooting the two movies apparently didn’t feel too overwhelming, though; the cast has spoken about their love for Snyder and the environment he fosters on set, and in an interview with ComicBook.com, Hounsou and Nair both said that it all felt so cohesive that they sometimes didn’t know what part they were shooting for.

“Part 1 and 2 are not considered a sequel,” Hounsou said.

“They’re not sequels,” Nair added.

“It’s the full story,” added both men, in unison.

“I don’t even know what we were filming for, half the time,” Hounsou elaborated. “I didn’t even know what world we were in, because part of that world was completely foreign, which is the environment in which this takes place.”

Rebel Moon is set in a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy that finds itself threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius. They dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighboring planets to help them take a stand the Tyrant.

Eric Newman, who produced Snyder’s take on Dawn of the Dead in 2004, will produce this film, too. Ironically, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead was written by James Gunn, whose Guardians of the Galaxy generated dozens of think-pieces linking him to, and eventually asking him about, new Star Wars that might be in his future. For Gunn, the idea didn’t hold any appeal, as he said he would rather create stories from the ground up…which is kind of what Snyder is now doing.

Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire is set for release on Netflix on December 22.