From IGN
SPOILER WARNING!
Gareth Edwards: It’s weird because we’re still in the process of finishing it, and then you get pushed on a plane, and sent somewhere, and then you have to promote the film whilst we’re still finishing. It’s like painting the nursery while you’ve got contractions. It seems back-to-front a little bit. But I think it’s the way these things work.
IGN: How scary do you think Godzilla should be?
Edwards: I think if there’s a pie-chart of emotion that you’d generate after watching a Godzilla film, for me, fear should be the biggest segment, but not the only feeling. The fear factor often comes from the unknown, and what you think is around the corner or in the darkness. So obviously at some point these films go from fear into the reveal and you get fully engaged with the monsters – it goes into more action-horror. Because there’s only so long you can sustain before it evolving into something else or frustrating everybody. I definitely wanted suspense to be a dominant storytelling device in the film. Because otherwise you’ve got nowhere to go. I think there’s CGI fatigue that’s quite common in films like this. They throw everything at the screen and after a while you stop caring and you sort of plateau. So you’re trying to build incrementally.
IGN: Where does your love from Godzilla come from?
Edwards: I love monsters full-stop. Giant monsters. And I’ve got some crappy theory… the idea that for thousands or millions of years we’ve lived as part of nature. In huts and caves, and every day there’s this threat that an animal’s going to come and attack potentially. I think it became hard-wired in our DNA to expect that. And be afraid of it and ready for it. Now in just this little period of time in the modern world we’ve pushed nature out and it’s no longer a threat any more. But I think that fear is still very much there in our DNA. That the animals are going to come and attack. So even when our caves grow and become 30-storey skyscrapers, then our fears and our nightmares grow, and the animals that we are worried about become 30-storeys high. It shouldn’t work – you should not be able to make a film like this and have it resonate with anybody. I think the reason that it does is that it’s tapping into this subconscious fear. You go ‘Yeah, I knew he was coming. I knew this was going to happen.’ You shouldn’t – it’s obviously not going to. But it sort of feels right.
IGN: So is Godzilla a good guy or a bad guy?
Edwards: I’d say he’s an anti-hero. You get into these conversations – especially with the visual effects guys. ‘What’s his character like?’ The great question people ask is ‘If he was a person, what kind of person would he be?’ And I feel like if he was a human character, he’d probably be like one of the Last Samurai. Or like a Ronin. He’s kind of like a noble, ancient warrior – the rest of his kind is long gone, and he’s happy to just keep to himself. And reluctantly only comes up when he has to correct something that’s wrong with the world. That was the character we were going for. And in the designing of his face, through trial and error and different shapes, you end up arriving at… we looked at animals like bears and dogs and crocodiles. And the one that’s probably the least likely but that we used a lot is the bird of prey. There’s something about his eyes, eye sockets and cheekbones, and then the idea of having the brow very close to the nose – that has this very noble character to it. Eagles seem very noble. They’re not any more noble than any other animal, but we look at them and think they are very thoughtful and internal and spiritual creatures. We wanted him to have that feeling and so we stole a lot from birds of prey.
ENTERING SPOILER TERRITORY SO LEAVE NOW IF YOU WANT TO AVOID
IGN: Is Godzilla the only monster in this movie?
Edwards: I think it’s out there already now… but this movie’s not going to end with just Godzilla. Which was one of our goals when we started – something that’s such a part of the Godzilla history is him fighting something else. And it felt like it wouldn’t really feel like a Godzilla movie if it was just him on his own. And so from the very beginning one of the big remits of the film was that he would have to face something. And then the real trick was trying to invent something that, whatever it was, was motivating everything. And try to come up with a scenario that was based on nature that might involve a fight. And that’s all I can say.
IGN: How hard is it to make a blockbuster with brains and heart?
Edwards: I would never assume that we have. But it’s really hard, I think. When films don’t have that, I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to. I think it’s because there’s a factory process to these movie to some extent. And if you don’t shut down the factory and start hand-making things, then it’s just going to come out like anything else. That’s the trick I think – trying to steer all the decisions that get made so you retain as much soul and uniqueness as you possibly can. Otherwise the thing just gets ahead of you, and it becomes just another movie like everything else. I was really nervous about doing this because the last thing that I wanted to do was to make a movie that I wasn’t proud of. You hear all these horrible stories about Hollywood and filmmakers like me who get this opportunity and thankfully, everyone has said, ‘If you’re going to do this, look at films you respect, and then look at the studio logos at the front.’ And Legendary and Warner have high scores on that front. They were really supportive. And everyone said that out of everybody, they are the most filmmaker friendly. And I think they really are. I was given a lot of creative freedom. I kept turning to Seamus, the DOP, whilst we were filming saying ‘How normal is this?’ No one was saying no. And he said ‘Gareth, this is not normal at all. I have never worked on a film like this… where you are given so much freedom.’ It was pretty incredible. And that comes down to Thomas Toll, the producer and head of Legendary. I’m so indebted to him. He’s protected me from everything. And let me go make the film that we all believed we wanted to see.
IGN: Has it been harder or easier than your first film Monsters?
Edwards: Way, way, way, harder. I thought Monsters was the hardest thing I could ever do. At the end of it I felt like I’d never do that again. But this was absolutely… it’s really painful. I really enjoy the pre-production; the conceiving of the film. It’s kind of like the ultimate sh*t sandwich, in that I love conceiving the movie, I hate making it, and I love sharing it with people. The bit in the middle is like the war. Pre-production is like the dream, post is like the reward, and the middle bit is like the punishment.
IGN: You mentioned in London that you didn’t know your star Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad, but rather from Malcolm in the Middle and an old episode of Airwolf. Was that true?
Edwards: I was joking! Now I’ve joked about it I’m going to have to track down that episode of Airwolf and watch it to keep the joke going. Bryan is so stupidly talented it’s embarrassing how good he is as an actor, so anything you can do to knock him down a peg or two! You don’t want it going to his head because then he’ll be too good to work with.
IGN: Can you talk a bit about the conspiracy elements of the story?
Edwards: It's really hard to come up with an origin story where you withhold the reveal and slowly build up and build up. You think ‘How on earth can we invent a story where we create Godzilla, or he’s discovered, and we never saw him before? If he was down there surely we would have seen him!’
So then it was like, ‘What if we have? What if we do know about him, and the first time we had submarines that could go to that depth, they found him straight away, and a lot of the things that went on between American and Russia…’ There’s actually a line in the film ‘The Americans though it was the Russians, the Russians thought it was us.’ Those intense stand-offs that happened in the 1950s were slightly Godzilla-related in terms of submarines going missing and things like this. So that felt really interesting, and then it grew from there, and the idea that the world was trying to keep this as secret as they could.
I wanted to do a plausible version of that, as much as we could. The touchstone film for that – by a mile – is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s such a brilliantly made movie, we couldn’t help but think of it when we were doing this. They got that balance between the military and conspiracy and the normal family perfect. You’re always looking for examples so that everybody is on the same page – ‘We’re going to try and make this type of movie and not that type of movie.’ And I was always reaching for films from the 1970s and ‘80s, as that’s what I grew up with, and that’s why I wanted to become a filmmaker. I feel like with the seduction of CGI, we sometimes lose our way with cinema in that there’s such a temptation to chuck every amazing visual shot at the screen, but after a while you become numb to it. That’s not storytelling. When you watch a set-piece, the hope is that the audience has expectations and you either twist them or trick them. You’re playing a game with them as things unfold. I think that’s more fun than just chucking a load of shots that look cool. It’s about storytelling hopefully. And those movies back then were brilliant at it, so we’re just using them as our reference.
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