Everyone’s favourite monster movie gets an injection of modernity this week with Gareth Edwards’ GODZILLA reboot, with rave reviews coming in across the web. To celebrate the film’s release THN attended a press conference with the cast and crew at the Corinthia Hotel in London to talk motion capture, feminism and Bryan Cranston’s jazz hands. The monster itself was sadly unavailable for comment…
Thomas – I heard you say that you’ve been waiting your entire life for this Godzilla film, why was now the right time for you and this group of incredible people?
Thomas Tull [Producer]: Well now was the right time because we had the rights [laughs]. But no, I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was a little kid, and we wanted to bring fresh perspective to that and we were very fortunate to come across Gareth Edwards. If somebody had said to me a long time ago ‘look, not only will you get to make a Godzilla movie, but you’ll have this fantastic young director, and you’ll have a cast that could easily be doing Shakespeare here in London versus a Godzilla movie’, I would be really excited about that.
What specifically was it about Gareth that was a real attraction for you?
Thomas: Well I saw his movie MONSTERS and I was astounded at what he did, and for such little money, but you could tell there was a real talent behind the camera. So I asked to meet him, and he came in and we spent some time together, and I was very impressed. I gave him some resources to make pre-vis and some other things, and many of the shots that you see in the movie are directly from the pre-vis. He’s the only director we ever talked to about it.
Mr Cranston, you said the script blew your mind – what was it about the script that captured your imagination?
Bryan Cranston: I think at first I was thinking that this was going to be just a monster movie, and it really isn’t. And the thing that iced it for me as far as wanting to be a part of it was that it has a very strong character driven narrative to it: husband; wife; father; son – it’s multi-generational, and I thought that was very clever.
I’ve always thought ‘Why not? Why can’t you meld those?’ because you have the great, epic, iconic battles with monsters in a monster movie, and then you also have this group of people that you follow and you care about and you root for. You can have it all, and it all dovetailed nicely into this movie.
Aaron, I wanted to ask you about [your character] Ford, and what qualities about the character you really liked.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: For me, the real challenge there was playing a Lieutenant in the navy; playing that sort of American military guy. It was a role I hadn’t played before, so I was really intrigued about doing that. I liked the fact that he was a father and a husband, and it had a really strong family element to it, and that it sort of became a fight for survival at some point. He had to almost just try and get through in order to just reach his family.
Elizabeth – [Elle] is a really determined character. She doesn’t let anything stand in her way. Do you agree?
Elizabeth Olsen: Yeah, I think it was fun to play a mother who’s responsible for her own emotions and actions because of a child witnessing it – and because of that, trying to go through things that are scary, but not let on.
Gareth, how are you the morning after your premiere?
Gareth Edwards [Director]: I feel like it was a wedding or something. It feels like a wedding, but the bride didn’t show up or something. So it’s this embarrassing moment now, like ‘Oh yeah, she left me’. [Laughs]
We heard from Thomas that even before you signed on to do GODZILLA, you had a really clear idea in your head about what you wanted to do and achieve with this film.
Gareth: Yeah, I mean that’s one of the reasons I think Godzilla’s stood the test of time – there’s just so many different ways we could have gone with this film. It’s kind of an infinite canvas, and it took about a year and a half of playing around to just land on the story we wanted to tell.
I grew up with those 70s and 80s movies; those early Spielberg type things. It was before the era of digital technology, and because they couldn’t always show the creature constantly, the first half of the movie would be these little glimpses, [building] this sense of anticipation. Films like ALIEN by Ridley Scott – you just get so many chills and goosebumps that I felt like in modern cinema, it’s so easy to just throw everything at the screen constantly, that we’ve kind of missed that style of storytelling.
So from day one our constant references were things like JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, and harking back to that era of filmmaking – even though we have these amazing tools to do justice to GODZILLA for the first time.
Gareth, when filming MONSTERS, you famously created a lot of the special effects shots on your bedroom computer. This time around, was there any chance for that kind of personal DIY input, or does a megabucks Hollywood budget deny that?
Gareth: When we started I did say ‘Can I just do one of the shots, I’m just gonna do one, for old times’ sake’, and they’re like ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever Gareth’, you know. And then after the first week it was really clear there was no way that was gonna happen; you don’t even get a spare five minutes making a film. But the beauty of it is that I was surrounded with the best of the best, like the visual effects supervisor, Jim Rygiel, who did THE LORD OF THE RINGS. We also had John Dykstra, who did the original STAR WARS movie – and so we’re working with genuine heroes of mine. Handing your baby over to people who can look after it way better than you can is an easy thing. It wasn’t that difficult to give up.
Do you miss doing those DIY shots?
Gareth: Do I miss being all alone in a bedroom? [Laughs] I look back on MONSTERS and probably my favourite part of that process was doing the special effects, because you’re on your own and there’s no stress. Making this film is genuinely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but the reward is things like last night [at the premiere] and when you get to show fans. Dreaming of the film is a lot of fun, where you can just close your eyes and imagine anything you want to see, and then showing the film is a lot of fun, but the middle bit feels like war.
Godzilla turns 60 this year. So congratulations to Godzilla…
Edith Bowman [Panel Host]: He says thank you. [Laughs]
Gareth: He says ‘rawr’.
Edith: Is that your ringtone now?
Gareth: You can do anything you want as long as at the end you go ‘rawr’.
Was there any pressure to get the movie ready for 2014 and did you face any pressure from Toho to get the rights to create a Hollywood version?
Thomas: Well in terms of Toho they were great; we had a clear understanding from the beginning with them, we looked at designs together… but from there they trusted us to make the Godzilla film they would want us to and they were great partners, so there wasn’t a lot of controversy on that front.
Gareth: I’d love to say we were really clever and were like, ‘You know what, let’s never make this film ever until it’s the 60th anniversary, because that would be perfect’. [Laughs] I mean we just got lucky in that sense, and I didn’t realise this but Ken [Watanabe] pointed it out – I’m gonna get this a little bit wrong – but you know they have the Year of the Dragon, the Year of the… it’s every 12 years it repeats, and it’s a five-year cycle thing. And then there’s a rebirth, and so 60 years in Japan means the rebirth, and so it’s highly appropriate, but… we totally planned it that way. I was actually offered the job when I was 21, but we were like, ‘No, let’s do this properly’. [Laughs]
This is a question for Gareth, but I’d also like to know what Elizabeth thinks. I thought this was a really great film. I just wonder if there’s a tradition, with films like this that the female characters have to always be supporting characters. I thought that you were great, Elizabeth, and you were the emotional centre of the film, but we’ve got three women: a wife who [SPOILERS], a wife who’s sitting at home waiting for her husband to get back, and Sally Hawkins, who’s so much of an add-on that you literally have her standing three paces behind Ken in every shot. Is that a commercial decision because men go to these films?
Gareth: Erm… Lizzy? [Laughs]
Elizabeth: Well I have an opinion about our story. Ford needs a counterpart in a way. I think his journey, and correct me if I’m wrong, has to do with trying to figure out things with his father in order for him to become a better father. And if you need to follow one character from beginning, middle and end in this film, it makes sense for it to be a Lieutenant, and someone who can navigate the US military. And I do feel like I got to serve some sort of function by also being on the ground as a nurse.
Gareth: This is probably a good time to point out that Godzilla is actually a female. So…
Elizabeth: In yo’ face.
Gareth: At the last minute we changed from ‘GODZILLA: QUEEN OF THE MONSTERS’. [Laughs] It didn’t sound too good. But I know what you’re saying. We had a version of a screenplay that had a heroine at the centre of it at one point, but you’ve got to pick a hero and we ended up with a male. And everything supports the hero in some way, but I totally understand what you’re saying – my favourite films are ALIEN and ALIENS and I think there’s so many great examples [of female leads] and who knows, if I get lucky and there’s a sequel or anything like that, then I’ll very much take on board what you said.
Godzilla is the king of the monsters. If you could have him go up against any other movie monster who would you pick and why?
Elizabeth: I hate Jaws. So I feel like that would be an easy swallow of a battle.
Bryan, how many of the old GODZILLA movies have you watched, and which one’s your favourite?
Bryan: I always hark back to the first one that I ever saw from 1954. I was a huge Godzilla fan as well; in fact I had the little figurines of Godzilla, and I would go into my mother’s kitchen and get cups and bowls and things and fill them with dirt, and I’d turn them upside down to make moulds to make my own little city. And then my Godzilla would come and crash through the whole thing. I just loved it.
I remember the Raymond Burr version of it, when they inserted him into the Japanese movie, and later on when I realised how they actually came about doing that I thought that was very clever. So by doing that, it gave it a universal appeal, so it wasn’t just in the Japanese market but it created a fervour throughout the world.
There have been some other films that have come along that have been a measured degree of success, but I’m really happy with this one because of the fact that we really took the time to invest in the characters. If you just took the storyline of the characters, you could have a separate movie in and of itself; it could be that they’re fighting to get back and be with their family, but to have both I think makes the experience more rewarding.
How long did it take you to create your idea of Godzilla? Is there anything about it you’d like to change now?
Gareth: The great thing about Godzilla is that if you had a load of silhouettes of characters in cinema history, and you went around the world and you showed people them, and as soon as someone went ‘Who’s that?’ or didn’t recognise them you threw them away, I feel like the grand final would be between Mickey Mouse and Godzilla.
I think what makes something iconic is that it has a very strong silhouette. So when we designed him we literally put settings on the computer so that he didn’t have any texture, so he was pitch black – like jet black against pure white. And we just kept rotating him and pushing and pulling to get everything just right, and it was like a Rubik’s Cube; you get one side just right and then you turn it and you ruin the other side. But you couldn’t cheat and peel the stickers off. [Laughs]
So it took nearly a year to get it to a place where we could rotate it 360 degrees and go ‘I don’t wanna change anything’. I don’t think you’re a filmmaker if you don’t feel like ‘I could have just done this’ and ‘I could have just done that’ but the one thing that I do feel, when I look at Godzilla, is ‘I don’t wanna change anything’. I’m very happy with how we got him.
You play the movie straight, you never play it for laughs. Was that always the intention, that there were going to be no gags in this film?
Thomas: Yeah, we sort of had a set of rules going in… we didn’t want to do the campy version, we wanted to imagine as best we could what would happen if you turned on the TV and Godzilla had come ashore – what would the reactions be and so forth – and that really was a choice from the very beginning, something from the very first conversations with Gareth, that we talked about and he really embraced.
Gareth: I love to take these sorts of things seriously, but if it really happened, and if there really was a giant monster who came out and did these things, it would be the most horrific world changing event ever. It would be like World War 2, or even worse, and within that you’ve got such a range of different films, like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and CASABLANCA, and we wanted to take it seriously. It’d be a very emotional life-changing event, and I just think these things are most fun for me when you really believe it and you really get pulled into that world.
There is sort of comedy within the film but I feel like the important difference is that the characters are not funny. The filmmakers can find things funny and show things that make you chuckle to yourself, but the characters that are actually going through the events are having a very traumatic time so they shouldn’t be wisecracking one liners or things like that.
Lizzy and Aaron, here you’re playing husband and wife – and obviously in the new AVENGERS film you’re playing brother and sister [Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch]; was it difficult keeping those different relationships separate?
Aaron: Nah, we do the same thing. [Laughs]
Elizabeth: I feel like when you play husband and wife, you feel like brother and sister. It might have been awkward the other way around. [Laughs]
Bryan and Aaron, can you talk a little about your father-son relationship on screen?
Bryan: I am a father, so it’s easy to roll into that. [Aaron]’s a father too, so it’s easy for that relationship to take place. When you sign on to do a piece like this, you’re looking at the material, you talk to the director and then you agree to it. And then you hope that when you get on the set you’ll make a connection… it’s not imperative that you do, but the fact that we got along and like each other just made it easier to meld into that relationship.
Aaron: Well we had this kind of feud you know, and I was just angry at him all the time. But he’d be cracking jokes a lot… you can’t stay angry at Bryan.
Bryan: He acted like my son. I would say something and he would roll his eyes and go ‘Oh great’. You know, it’s the general disrespect for the elderly. [Laughs]
If you came home, turned on the TV and your local town was being attacked by monsters, what would be the first thing you’d do?
Elizabeth: I would call my mother, just to make sure that she was capable of exiting her own home.
Bryan: I would make a sandwich and watch the play unfold. Like a sporting event.
Thomas: Maybe I’d call Bryan, and ask if I could come over and have a sandwich and watch it with him.
Bryan: You gotta see this man, it’s great! We’re all gonna die anyway, come on!
Aaron: …I really can’t follow that. [Laughs]
You said it took nearly a year to arrive at your final design for the monster. I read in the production notes that you used Andy Serkis to help, can you explain how?
Gareth: Initially the motion capture was all done by Bryan Cranston, but after a few test screenings we felt Godzilla was a little bit camp. [Bryan waves his hands in a camp Godzilla impersonation.]
Bryan: I thought it was good.
Edith: Jazz hands Godzilla! That I want to see.
Gareth: No, Andy came on quite late in the day, not what you normally do. It was all animated the long and painful way by animators, so everything you see in the film was done by visual effects companies, but Andy Serkis and his team came in because basically you’re trying to find a performance. And the fastest way to do it is to have an actor, and as we were coming through the crunch time of post-production the fastest way possible was to get Andy in, and he did a handful of the shots and found the soul of Godzilla. For a lot of the shots, like the more soulful moments, we used Andy’s performance as reference for the animators.
I think Andy gets associated with motion capture but he’s a genius actor, and it’s very clear when you look at the performance he does in motion capture and you go ‘Oh that’s amazing’, and then you look behind the scenes and you see Andy and you go ‘That would win an Oscar’. He’s just underrated I think, and it was just a dream come true for me to be able to work with him.
GODZILLA also stars Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Carson Bolde, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn and Richard T Jones. It opens in UK cinemas on Thursday 15th May.
