If you haven’t seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, this is your warning there are a lot of spoilers ahead.
As stated in the first part of this interview, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles director Jeff Rowe is in a pretty good mood this week. The reviews are great and he’s already been asked to come back for the sequel and the 1st day box office numbers were pretty good. He’s in such a good mood he wanted to dive right into the mid-credit scene and talk about some of the plans for the next installment. But, it was probably a good idea not to publish that until after the movie was at least in theaters, which is now.
At the end of Mutant Mayhem, the Ninja Turtles along with all their new mutant friends are now living with Splinter and the cardboard cutouts of the three Chrises. Maya Rudolph’s Cynthia Utrom, in an attempt to recapture the Turtles in an effort to “milk” them, calls in for help. And, from there, leering out over New York City, we see Shredder from behind, very much teasing his involvement in the next film.
As it turns out, Shredder was going to be a big part of this first film, but Rowe and his team just couldn’t figure out how to incorporate Shredder this soon and decided, instead, to fully focus on the Ninja Turtles being outcasts from society and their dream of, one day, attending high school.
Ahead, Rowe explains the big reason he even wanted to come back for a second film is because of Shredder and tells us what Shredder would have been in this first movie and why it didn’t work.
Yes, it’s safe to talk about spoilers…
I wasn’t sure if I could do another Ninja Turtles movie. I’m like, I don’t know. I feel like you never do a sequel. Get in, get out, never do it. And then our production designer, Yashar Kassai, did this painting for that Shredder moment in the mid-credits.
Oh yeah, that looked great.
The tag. And I’m like, Oh, that’s so cool-looking.
That’s what swayed you? That you have to come back for Shredder?
Well, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. What am I going to not do in that movie? Oh, man. So that tipped me over the edge.
To be fair, it’s not really that big of a surprise Shredder shows up. Who else would it be?
Yeah. I mean, people already know, I think on the internet. They pick up on that stuff quickly.
Well, how hard was it to keep him out of this first movie? Because everyone wants to go to Shredder immediately.
In fact, he was in the movie for a long time, for a year and a half. And then it just did not work. And we were just banging our head against the wall and we had two big story problems. One, the Turtles were in high school on page 30, so they got exactly what they wanted way too early.
Right, which now is the full movie.
And it also meant that the movie was a reset 30 minutes in, which was just broken. And then Shredder was the villain and it was too big of a character too soon. And you didn’t understand how a crime boss, which is how we were playing him, was connected to these teenagers. And it just got too far away from the most simple essential story, which is teens wanting to fit in – the metaphor being that they are actual mutants and actually shunned by society. It’s not just a feeling for them. And having a villain that was also a mutant and had similar experiences just made the themes and the story all kind of come together.
Are you going to use elements of that version of Shredder in the next one?
No.
Okay.
I mean, I don’t know yet. We could! We’ve storyboarded and edited so many different versions of the film that will never see the light of day. We have scenes that we could just take and recycle them for the new movie. But I think you always have to start from a place of story and character and what is the specific emotional journey that these characters are going on this time. And if anything old happens to be relevant still, I’m happy to dust it off.
I love how you call it old, this new stuff that we just haven’t seen. It’s not even old.
Yeah, the cutting room floor stuff. Yeah.
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