Epic

[This story contains major spoilers from the season one finale of Chief of War, “The Black Desert.”]

Come hell or high water, Jason Momoa was going to do everything in his power to execute his ambitious creative vision for the season finale of Chief of War, which he considers to be the apex of his three-decade action career.

“At first, no one really thought it was going to be possible. And when we were at the very end of it, people that I really, really respect were like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,’” Momoa, who co-wrote and directed the finale, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But I knew we only had a certain amount of time, and the only way to pull off something of this magnitude was to shoot it a certain way.”

The synopsis of the final episode — which co-creators Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett confirm to THR is meant to function as a season, rather than a series, finale — may sound relatively simple. After Kamehameha finally comes around to the idea of using Ka’iana’s “red-mouthed weapons” — the firearms that Ka’iana had acquired during his travels abroad — in battle, the two chiefs and their small but mighty army go head-to-head with the forces behind power-hungry kings Keōua (Cliff Curtis) and Kahekili (Temuera Morrison) on the volcanic terrain known as Hawaii’s “Black Desert.” The brutal battle is a decisive victory for Ka’iana and his allies, thanks in large part to their formidable fighting skills and their use of those devastating weapons.

But anyone who has watched the finale knows that summary just barely scratches the surface of the this cinematic ending. “When people are talking about episode nine, that conversation really needs to include Jason as a director,” Sibbett says. Shooting in Hawai’i — much less over the real-life lava fields of Kalapana in the middle of the night — was actively “discouraged,” but Apple TV+ executives eventually signed on to the idea at the insistence of Momoa, who pulls quintuple duty on the series as star, co-creator, co-writer, executive producer and now director.

“Keeping it in Hawaii allows the inhabitants of that area, other people from across the island, to participate,” Sibbett adds. “They get to be the wearers of the feather capes. They get to be the warriors that hold the spears. The impact that has on a people, the impact that has on a culture that has never been shown at this level — I think that sets [Momoa] apart in this conversation.”

Early on in the writing process, Momoa had a clear idea of how he wanted to helm the finale. “I’ve directed quite a few times before this, and I’ve always wanted to shoot in really good light,” says Momoa, whose prior directorial experience included the 2014 indie film Road to Paloma and his recent HBO Max docuseries On the Roam. “Not being able to have money or have the crew that could pull off maybe what some larger [productions] could, I’d always have to really scout it, dial it in, and shoot in the right light.”

Momoa knew he wanted the battle to end with Ka’iana holding Keōua at gunpoint, just before Keōua was killed in a rush of lava. “I wanted to have that moment where I’m staring [Keōua] down be right at the last bit of that blue light with the lava going off and the ash coming down,” he says. Since he wanted the battle to start in the early afternoon and spill into the late evening, the production had to work backwards and shoot the entire sequence in reverse.

With the help of the same stunt team that he has worked with for decades, Momoa meticulously planned out every scene of the battle long before cameras started rolling. “I would shoot four to five units at the same time,” the director reveals. “I had to pick the storylines that I wanted to shoot within each of the other three to four units, so that I was getting what was going on with me, what was going on with Kamehameha, what was going on with my brothers and my wife. I had to make sure I blocked out correctly all those moments.”

“Don’t be fooled by his abs and physique. He’s got a great frontal cortex going on,” jokes Curtis. “I’ve worked with brilliant people, so I know what it looks like and smells like. James Cameron’s got a similar facility — perhaps on a different scale — to understanding the complexity of how to manage multiple units, and Jason’s definitely got that facility. It’s very, very impressive to see him map it all out in his mind before it happened.”

A lot of people, however, were not convinced that Momoa would be able to pull off what would typically be a weeks-long shoot on another production in just eight days.

“The producers were very scared, but I was like, ‘We’re going to shoot early, and we’re going to end not too far after noon and get some of the daylight.’ We got up at 3 a.m., started at 4 a.m., and we’d probably end at 2 or 3 p.m., and then I’d stay and prep for the next [night],” Momoa says. “You could have shot this in a Walmart parking lot, and you could probably put green screens up, like we normally do on other things, and just put down black and use it as lava fields. But you’re going to feel that we were there when the volcano went on.”

Momoa enlisted the rest of his producing and filmmaking team to oversee each of the units, and he would always be running between scenes, if not acting in them. “I had just done this LeBron James Nike commercial, so I had these lavender trainers on with my Malo, and my ass was just running from one side to the other,” Momoa recalls with a laugh, evoking quite a striking visual. “And it’s a lava field, so you fall. I think I’m the one that got messed up the most, but thank God we had no accidents. But I was just running, because I had it all in my head. This is how I like to direct. Most people don’t know that, but I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

As Momoa puts it, the Hawaiian gods seemed to be on his side during the grueling shoot. A few hours before they were set to begin their first late-night shoot of the finale, Mauna Loa, the nearby volcano, erupted for the first time in 38 years. After pausing production for a day to review the air quality, the cast and crew resumed production. The next day, another mountain, Kīlauea, became active, but the smoke blew away from the set. “Obviously, many volcanoes did create the Hawaiian Islands, but in our written history, it has never been documented that they both went off at the same time. That happened as we started,” Momoa says.

After a little bit of rain on the first day, the weather was clear for eight days in a row. But the day they wrapped, it started pouring rain and Mauna Loa stopped erupting, recalls Momoa. “It was the biggest, most beautiful omen. We stirred up so much [energy], and it just felt like we were doing the right thing. It’s powerful, man. There’s footage of us there dancing in the rain with all the extras [after] fighting on lava. Nothing will ever come close to that, ever.”

Momoa was also not afraid to take some creative liberties with the historical facts. Before they officially started attacking each other, the two sides would first engage in a kind of spiritual battle. Their respective kahunas would do their chants, the volcanoes would go off, and then the two sides would engage in a kind of rap battle in Ōlelo Hawaii, where they would taunt each other. In this case, ‘Ōpūnui spoke for Keōua, while Ka’iana spoke for Kamehameha.

“When we came up with this [scene], I was like, ‘What’s the most disrespectful thing [Ka’iana] could do? He’s on his enemy’s side, he’s on their land — and he’s going to speak English,’” Momoa says. “I said, ‘Listen, if I look to Kamehameha and I ask for permission, and he gives me the nod, I’m going to say this shit [in Engish], and our audience will be able to understand me, my team will understand me, and Keōua won’t. That will infuriate him. Being able to have that moment in English, the audience understands that it raises the bar.’”

Momoa knows that he may catch a little flack for deviating from the historical record in that scene. But what he ultimately wanted to accomplish from a storytelling perspective was to piss Keōua off so much that his troops would try to attack the other side with spears — only for them to be wiped out one-by-one by the red-mouthed weapons that Ka’iana and his allies had hidden in their capes. “It wasn’t necessarily what happened, but that idea came out of a place of me just as an actor going, ‘What would I do? How do I get him to charge me?’”

That wasn’t the only choice that Momoa made from his character’s perspective. As an inside joke, Keōua’s kahuna, whose tongue Ka’iana rips out of his mouth in front of Keōua during the hectic battle, is played by Kahoʻokahi Kanuha, Momoa’s ʻŌlelo Hawai’i coach.

“That’s the guy who lived with me and taught me the Hawaiian language. So he obviously can do these amazing chants, and he can speak the language, but he knows my frustration with it,” says Momoa, who learned the critically endangered language specifically for the role. “I’m like, ‘I’m going to rip your tongue out, and I’m going to eat it, dude.’ So [that scene’s] just two buddies just being silly. But it was something that would’ve happened; it’s something I would’ve done.”

Momoa was also keen to give each of the other core group of characters their own moment in the spotlight. For most of the first season, Ka’iana and his wife, Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinepehinga), have largely been unable to see eye-to-eye. He has been permanently changed by all of the pain and suffering he has seen abroad, and she believes he is no longer the man she fell in love with. “Kupuohi’s put in positions where she should blow her top, snap, and just lose her mind so many times, and she doesn’t. Every time she goes, ‘No, I’ll stay strong. I’ll stand beside my man. I will not break. I will not cry,’” O’Hinepehinga explains.

But Momoa always wanted to give Kupuohi a moment of catharsis. One day while shooting the finale, he came running up to O’Hinepehinga with a giddy look on his face. “He’s like, ‘We’re going to stab you right here,’ and he grabs my waist,” she recalls of shooting the moment that Kupuohi gets stabbed during the battle. “And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry. What? You didn’t say I died?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, no. He’s just going to stab you really lightly.’ And he comes in, and I’m shish-kabobed! He’s like, ‘We talked about it, remember? There would be a moment. This is the moment — [this] scream is a release of every single moment you have wanted to scream ever.’

“I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but when I’m overwhelmed with situations or emotions or just work in general, I don’t have a chance to express it. So it all just bubbles to the surface until eventually it blows — and it’s in the aftermath of the blow where I find clarity in all the things that I’m confused [about],” O’Hinepehinga continues. “I wanted that for Kupuohi. Yes, she’s emotionally intelligent and strong, but a person can only take so much.”

Kupuohi ultimately survives being stabbed. But immediately following the conclusion of the battle, Kupuohi watches from afar as Ka’ahumanu (Luciane Buchanan) — the wife of Kamehameha who has clearly been harboring feelings for Ka’iana — rushes to Ka’iana’s side to make sure that he survived being knocked unconscious. O’Hinepehinga sees Kupuohi’s final look at Ka’iana and Ka’ahumanu as not one of “pain” or “jealousy,” but of “clarity.”

When Kupuohi sees her husband embracing another woman after the battle, “she’s able to see clarity not only in her future, but her relationships with the people around her. It’s terrifying, but I think there’s liberation in having a complete understanding of where you are in this world and who you are in this world,” O’Hinepehinga says. “I don’t know what that looks like in the future, but a woman liberated is a terrifying thing, I’ll say that much.”

That love triangle could very well play into future seasons of the show. Momoa notes that, historically, Ka’iana was accused of having an affair with Ka’ahumanu, with whom he shared a similar pessimistic worldview. To complicate matters further, by the end of the first season, Ka’ahumanu has officially joined her husband’s council. “But when she can’t have his kid, there’s a lot of stuff that happens coming up in the future, and I think things shift,” he says.

“You have to understand our system is completely different from what the modern system is right now. So if a woman wanted to upgrade and make her bloodline stronger, she could leave and go and be with the chief with more stature,” he adds. “Kamehameha had many aikāne [or same-sex relationships]. Kahekili had endless aikāne. They had men and women, so it’s something that we can’t wrap our heads around. We kept it smaller the first season. But it’s a very complex and beautiful system that happened in Hawaii, so I’m sure that did happen.”

The other character who has a real moment of catharsis during the battle is Kupuohi’s sister, Heke (Mainei Kinimaka), who lost the love of her life, Ka’iana’s brother, Nahi (Siua Ikale’o), in the penultimate episode. In the finale, Heke brutally slashes, gouges, poisons and then stomps ‘Ōpūnui — the man who presumably sexually assaulted her after Nahi’s killing — to death.

At the end of the finale, after learning that Ka’iana and Kamehameha obliterated Keōua’s troops, the more sinister Kahekili declares war on Hawai’i. “I’m building something that’s even more crazy. So not to give away a spoiler, but I’m going to have a super monster soon,” Momoa teases of what that ending means going forward. “I’m setting up things, which I like to do. Whether we get greenlit or not, my intentions are there. So there’s a lot of foreshadowing; there’s a lot of things that I want to happen in the future.”

For those who are familiar with English literature, Sibbett likens the story of Ka’iana and Kamehameha to that of King Arthur and Lancelot. “They needed to come together by the end of episode eight. It needed to be understood that they are not the same person,” he says. “They have a completely different way of thinking and how they view the world, but bringing them together creates the strongest force possible, and we were able to accomplish at least the friendship in episode eight, and by episode nine, it’s showing why it works, how it works, and that they are better off together.”

So much of the first season was about trying to unite the two men “so that we can now really dive into the building of Camelot,” Sibbett explains. Looking ahead, “if you’re thinking of it in terms of King Arthur and Lancelot, I want to expose the world to Camelot. I want to expose them to the world now as we’ve built it, as we’ve seen it, and to really get an idea that Camelot’s not the only kingdom.”

Whereas the first season largely centered around Ka’iana and consisted of “seeing the world through his eyes,” the second season would “be about really looking at Hawai’i a little bit more from that bird’s eye view, and really starting to see how these kingdoms interact with each other,” Sibbett teases. “I want us to expand the world, if we get a season two, so we can really get an idea of the functionality and how everything works.”

While the co-creators are feeling positive about a renewal — especially after the overwhelmingly positive responses they have received from critics and the people of Hawai’i and Aotearoa — Momoa and Sibbett insist that “it’s still too early” for them to pitch a second season. But that does not mean that they have not been tracking the response to the show on social media.

“People are really being drawn into not just our big storylines, but even some of these smaller ones. These are actually areas that we would like to build and go deeper into. It’s just a matter of [considering], what’s the public’s taste, and what are they eager for?” says Sibbett, who has noticed that some viewers have gravitated toward the prophetess Taula (Roimata Fox) and Prince Kupule (Brandon Finn), the son of Kahekili, in particular. “Of course, we can tell Ka’iana, Kamehameha and Ka’ahumanu all day. But to see that people are enjoying all these little sub-stories as well is really enjoyable, because we can definitely build more and more.”

Regardless of what happens, the cast and crew — most of whom identify as Polynesian — have been forever changed by the experience of retelling a key part of Hawai’i’s history. “Chief of War is such an emotionally liberating story for a lot of us here in Polynesia for so many different reasons, whether it be [speaking] Olelo Hawai’i, or just representation, or the fact that we get to be at the forefront of telling our own stories,” O’Hinepehinga says.

During her final day (or night) of shooting the chaotic finale, O’Hinepehinga turned a corner and saw and heard “this sea of brown people chanting” Kamehameha’s name. “We had 500 to 800 Polynesians standing there chanting that statement for the scene, and most of our crew, they were all Kanaka or they had been living on Hawai’i, so they were very committed to living the authentic Hawaiian experience,” she recalls. “I turned and I saw one of our cameramen with tears rolling down his face. He was like, ‘This is the moment.’ And in that moment, we went, ‘I don’t care if it succeeds or fails or wins every award out there — this is what it’s about, this is what it’s for.’ You could just feel it, this sense of pride and achievement.”

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The full first season of Chief of War is now streaming on Apple TV+.