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In an interview with ComicBook, Tropper revealed Momoa’s impact ahead of filming. “I will tell you, this is the first time ever that in writing a movie, I actually had to travel to the locations before I wrote the movie. So like I went out to Hawaii and Jason arranged all these places for me to see, because Jason really wanted me to find the underbelly of Hawaii and not just write about the beaches in Waikiki,” Tropper said.
“He has a writing partner who’s also really an expert. He’s a Hawaiian who’s an expert in the land and the history, and so I spent a lot of time like going to Hawaii, being taken around everywhere to see everything, and a lot of what I wrote in the movie came from that trip. So that was, it was the first time I’ve ever done that for a movie,” Tropper said.
“I left Hawaii knowing how to write the movie. I couldn’t have written this movie. It would have been so generic if I just wrote this movie without knowing everything from which highway I wanted the helicopter chase on and what are the Ahomoku and what do they do? And, you know, what are the whole, the Hawaiian homelands and like, just learning all that, the history of the government, the history of the Hawaiian people, and, you know, how they talk to each other, how they relate to each other, and then seeing sort of, All the kind of gritty underbelly spots in, in Oahu, it was all really, it just informed the whole movie,” Tropper said.
