Godzilla (2014) director Gareth Edwards recently sat down with Empire Magazine to discuss various aspects ofthe new film, including 7 secrets about the new Godzilla movie tha many of you may not know. Read on for excerpts from the article:
[WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS]
Building the Sets
"What happens is that everything occurs in parallel. You’re working on the screenplay while you’re building sets, while you’re casting the movie, while you’re doing pre-vis and animation and all sorts of things. So what was set in stone for me, what was never going to change really, were the major set-pieces. That’s what got all my attention in a lot of the pre-production, knowing that the rest we could get right as we went along."
The desision to killoff Cranston's character
“The decision was to kill Joe Brody, the character in the movie [not Bryan Cranston]. Then we were all, ‘Who’s going to play him?’ And you look around, and Bryan’s a phenomenal actor and we thought we’d be blessed if he did it. I’ll be honest with you: we tried versions in the screenplay where he survived. And in every one we did that with, there was nothing else that character could do without being silly. If he sticks with Ford, it becomes Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and the tone of the movie becomes fun, but not the tone we were trying to do. And if he sticks with the military guys, he’s like a fifth wheel. His job was done in the storyline there. And retrospectively, when you get to see the movie, I understand [why people are upset].
“We did try to make it work. It was “all ideas welcome”, even with Bryan. But as a story beat, he becomes redundant once he’s handed over the baton to the rest of the cast.
“I also wanted people to think, “Oh! They’re willing to do that… Wow, okay. Maybe this isn’t going to end how I think it will.” It throws people a bit. I like that in movies – when you stop thinking they’re going to everything you could predict.”
Easter Eggs
“[As well as the fact that “mothra” is written on the side of the terrarium], there was when Ford was a kid, and he heads out of his bedroom, the camera goes up to a poster. On the poster, in Japanese – because obviously we all know Japanese – the title of that film is “Let Them Fight”. If you look at the images, they are M.U.T.O.s and a nuclear reactor and the Golden Gate Bridge. The movie is represented on that poster.
“In the classroom, when there’s the power cut, they’re watching a video about how a cocoon hatches on the TV when it cuts off. On the walls there are the lifecycles of butterflies.
“And at the end of the movie when Ford gets on the boat in San Francisco, the boat has ‘Go Whales Tours’ on the side, and the Japanese word for Godzilla is ‘Godjira’, and ‘Jira’ means whale, so it’s like saying ‘Godzilla Tours’.
“And those origami peace cranes in the classroom were just a nice detail that the art department put in, then once I saw them I thought, ‘You know what we should have done? They should have been M.U.T.O.s up there. Subconsciously, that would have been good.’ I kept asking the visual effects people and there were polite responses like, ‘We’ll see if we get time… We have more important things to do, like all the visual effects for the movie.’”
There were nearly 1000 VFX shots
“There were something like 990 shots – I’m not sure. The thing I’m most proud of it that most of these kind of films have closer to 2000 effects shots, and we have nearly half what these other movies have. When they said that, I was saying to the visual effects producers, ‘See? What are you worried about? It’ll be okay!’ They said, ‘Gareth, your shots are over twice as long as the average shot, which makes it even harder.’”
The Atomic Breath Nearly Had Lightening
“It was always going to be blue. At one point we dabbled with lightning, to make it a little bit more to do with nature, in terms of god-like destruction. But it was considered not enough like classic Godzilla. And that moment, actually, working out how we were going to kill the M.U.T.O., we made a last-minute decision: ‘What if he just pulls apart [the M.U.T.O.’s jaws]?’ We were going to just break the jaws, and it felt like that was too much like King Kong. ‘So what if he just vomits blue breath? Nearly a kiss?’
“We thought we weren’t going to get away with it. ‘This is absurd,’ we thought. And then we sat and did a test screening and it was everyone’s favourite moment.”
We'll cut it off there. If you want to read all 7 secrets, be sure to head on over to Empire's website!
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