Brace yourselves. On April 13th, monster movie Rampage hits theaters. The Dwayne Johnson-starring film from director Brad Peyton (San Andreas) is based on a classic video arcade game of the same name, and has gone unabashed big and refreshingly earnest with its monster movie premise.

Originally released in 1986, Rampage the game had players controlling one of three humans-turned-giant-epic-monsters following some unfortunate lab accidents. From there, as George the gorilla, Ralph the wolf, or Lizzie the lizard, the player destroys cities around the world while attacking or avoiding cops and soldiers. It’s a pretty vague premise around which to revolve a film, which is why the movie only uses it as a jumping off point for diving into the monster movie genre.

In Rampage the movie, Johnson stars as primatologist Davis Okoye, whose best friend is George, an albino gorilla. When a mysterious genetic experiment mutates George and two other animals, a wolf and a crocodile, North America is under imminent threat. Davis teams up with discredited genetic engineer Dr. Kate Caldwell (played by Moonlight’s Naomie Harris) to secure an antidote, keep North America safe, and help George. Collider was part of a group of reporters who visited the Atlanta set of Rampage back in June. We talked to Johnson, Harris, Peyton, and producers John Rickard and Hiram Garcia.

Here are 39 things we learned about Rampage...

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— Johnson called Rampage “easily the most physically demanding role I have ever done,” pointing in particular to a scene in a nose-diving C-17 plane as an example of the kind of constant, performative physical feats the actors had to do during production.

— At its heart, Rampage is about the relationship between Davis and George. “It still comes down to this core relationship, and that’s one of the reasons that really attracted me to begin with to the movie and to the script,” said Johnson, who has a special animal in his real life, too: a Frenchie called Hobbs after the Fast and the Furious character.

— Davis saves a baby George after his family is killed by poachers.

— Davis and George communicate via sign language. “He tells me, ‘I love you,’ I tell him, ‘I love you’ back. He shows off in front of pretty ladies, I tell him don’t do that [gesturing the middle finger]. We do some funny stuff,” said Johnson.

— To prepare for the movie, Johnson spent time at the Atlanta Zoo and at the Dian Fossey Foundation where he spoke with primatologists and spent some time with a silverback named Taz. “I had an opportunity to spend time with primatologists, understand them, understand what their passions are, what their goals are, especially when it comes to animal conversation,” said Johnson.

— Johnson played and loved Rampage as a kid.

— Dwayne Johnson, a self-described “animal lover” has dogs, horses, and fish.

— While Davis is good with animals, he’s not so good with people. “He’s seen a lot of the grim parts of the world, he’s tracked down a lot of bad people,” said Johnson. “So for him, the interpretation of what a good human being is is a bit skewed, but he is justified in his ways in how he feels.” Part of his arc is learning how to trust humans again, through his relationship with Kate.

— Rampage has more non-stop action than San Andreas, another team-up between Johnson and director Brad Peyton. “In this, with three gigantic monsters, especially at their height of the serum taking effect, there’s no time,” said Johnson. “There’s no time, and everything happens very quickly.”

— Fear not, Rampage video game fans. Johnson said there would be some Easter Eggs amidst the chaos.

— This is the third time Johnson and Peyton have worked together. They have previously worked on San Andreas and Journey to the Center of the Earth 2 together.

Rampage is looking to break the video game adaptation curse. Johnson said the key to doing so is “like any movie, it all starts with story, it all starts with characters.”

— Johnson said of co-star Naomie Harris, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Moonlight, that she is “so incredibly committed and disciplined and phenomenal with her work.” He wouldn’t be surprised if she got some more Oscar nominations soon.

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Image via Warner Bros.

— The alligator creature in the movie is the length of four football fields. Run.

— Johnson was “blown away” and “really captivated” by co-star Jason Liles' performance as George, saying it “reminded [him] of how remarkable motion-capture acting is … I can see … where the discussion of an Oscar nomination started happening, and that dialogue started happening filling up our rooms throughout Hollywood.”

— Peyton said he chose Rampage because it was the video game that he and Johnson talked about, but also because it doesn’t have the deep, complex mythology of some better-known games—he can make it his own. “I was like, ‘Okay, there’s not a lot of mythology that everyone’s aware of,’” Peyton told us. “There’s a couple things – like we all think of the three creatures and the woman with the red dress who gets eaten. I’m like, ‘Okay I can do that, and then get to do all the things that I wanna do.’”

Rampage is an adventure film with a monster in it, said Peyton, likening it to action films he grew up with, like Terminator 2.

— Peyton said that he wants to be remembered as a filmmaker who centered his action in emotion, something he strove to do with San Andreas and Rampage. “The relationship between George and Davis was, to me, the anchor of everything in the movie, and therefore gives you heart and purpose and drive and makes you relate you everyone so it’s not just big destruction for destruction’s sake, which is always what I’m trying not to do.”

— Peyton never considered having the monsters start as humans, as they are in the video game. “Let’s just say I said no to ‘Rock-zilla.’ It was presented in a room much like this and I was like, ‘That’s a hard pass from me.’”

— Peyton said he and Johnson work so well together because they are at opposite ends of the introvert-extrovert spectrum, but meet somewhere in the middle. “We talk very clearly: I talk very clearly to him, and he talks very clearly to me,” said Peyton. “For all of my introverted, nerdy shyness, he is willing to go the opposite direction … We balance each other out, and the reason why I think that works so well is because we just say what our goal is, and we have the same unified goal, which is: how can we make this the best thing possible?”

— Peyton called Johnson “so brave,” adding: “There’s nothing that ever holds him back. He never looks at the monitors. He always says, ‘What do you need? How do we do it? What do you want? Let’s do it.’ But that’s been earned, you know.”

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Image via Warner Bros.

— Peyton described Rampage as “a monster movie that’s taking place all in broad daylight,” and said that it is different from other recent monster films because the monster isn’t looming in the distance. “You are inside that event as opposed to: ‘Look at that giant monster over there!’”

— The two villains in the film are sibling billionaires— an “ice queen, super-intelligent, cutting,” played by Malin Akerman, and her brother, a “guy who can’t figure out how to work the keyboard,” played by Jake Lacy.

— The movie bases the mutation of the animals in real-life CRISPR technology, which is able to edit DNA at precise locations in the human genome. “Everything that’s happening in this movie is actually real,” said producer John Rickard. “There’s one piece of it that is science fiction [the delivery mechanism] that may become real in the next five to 10 years that they’re working on now.”

— Harris’ Dr. Kate Caldwell has not only been fired and discredited by the firm she once worked at, Energyne, she also ended up in prison. “She has a real reason to want to clear her name and also to bring to light the evil work they’re doing,” Harris told us. “So that’s her kind of motivation for getting involved with this whole journey and hooking up with Davis.”

— The animals are affected by Energyne’s research when something goes wrong on their space station laboratory and cannisters from the lab fall to Earth.

— Before working for Energyne, Kate worked in the Arctic, saving rare species.

— Harris’ favorite part of working with Johnson is that he’s the master of this genre. “[I’ve] just being taken by the hand and being shown how to do it, and watching someone as skilled as he is at work is really priceless.”

— Harris was drawn to Kate because “she was intelligent and capable and fun,” but it took a phone call with Peyton to convince her to work on the project. “He’s like the most enthusiastic person in the entire world, and just speaking to him I felt better and I felt positive,” said Harris. Also, after Moonlight, she said she didn’t want to be typecast as a “haggard mother.”

— Peyton said he wanted Harris in the film because “she’s really intelligent, she’s really sweet, she’s really passionate, and that’s exactly what the characters need to be.”

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Image via Dwayne Johnson

— Even though Harris has been in two James Bond films, she said she’s never done anything as insane as Rampage when it comes to action. “Even like the shooting here [in Atlanta] where this building is supposed to have come down, and you see the debris and the destruction – it’s a mad movie!”

— Harris called Jason Liles’ motion capture performance as George “vital,” even though she didn’t understand at first why they needed someone on set to play the animal character.

— Harris’ Kate gets to punch Akerman’s Claire in the film. “I love her, and it’s awful because she’s the nicest possible person, and I wish her the very best. But in this

— Producer Hiram Garcia teased that fans of the video game would get “that big, final end moment … in a very realistic way.”

Rampage decided to make George into an albino gorilla, versus the brown color he is in the game, to set him apart visually from other film gorilla characters.

—  Garcia credits Jake Lacy with bringing more levity to the on-screen story. “We started very grounded and real and Jake brought an aspect of fun that just made us start to adjust things a little bit where we were realizing at the end of the day, we’re still a big summer fun movie and a well-timed laugh goes a long way.”

—  “We wanted to make sure that we’re sensitive to the fact that all the animals are victims in this,” said Garcia. This is different from other monster movies because it’s not just about stopping the monster; it’s about saving the monster.

— The entire movie was pre-visualized before it began shooting. “There are no questions he doesn’t have answers to,” said Rickard of director Peyton, adding that: “There are camera moves, shots that you will never have seen in any other movie that he’s taken so much time to craft and it’s visually stunning.”

— Could Rampage continue with more movies? “I think you always have a hope for..  I don’t want to say creating a new universe, but being able to start a story and kind of world that you can go deeper into,” said Garcia.

Rampage opens April 13th. For more, read my on-set interview with Dwayne Johnson right here.