Gareth Edwards is currently in Austin, Texas promoting Godzilla at the SXSW festival and quite a few news outlets have had a chance to sit down with the director and discuss Godzilla (2014). One of the sites who managed to score an interview was Collider, who spoke with Edwards about a number of topics including Godzilla's origins, additional Monsters in the film and more! You can read more about the interview below, but first, enjoy this new fan edit Godzilla Japanese trailer! The trailer features the same footage from the main trailer which was recently released, but starts out with the Toho logo and ends with the "classic Godzilla theme intro" as his smokey silhouette roars into the sky.
Now that you're all jacked up from the trailer, here are the highlights from Collider's interview with Gareth Edwards:
Collider: Can you tell me a little bit about developing the story? I was watching the trailer commentary, and you mentioned that it all started with that nuclear blast, and it grew from there.
Gareth Edwards: Yeah, I was trying to find a hook that was, A) A nod to the original 1954 Godzilla, where Godzilla’s origins were from the nuclear tests in the Pacific, and also something that was realistic. The problem with doing anything like this, especially Godzilla, if it’s an origin story, how on Earth can a giant creature like this suddenly appear? How come we didn’t know about him? That’s impossible. So the obvious solution was, well, what if we do know about him? What is parts of the government have always known and those nuclear tests in the Pacific weren’t tests; they were trying to kill it.
Those two things went *click* and we went, “Okay, that could work,” and we pitched it to the studio and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s good. Let’s do that. Where does it go from there?” And then the next year was, mainly with Max Borenstein, was bouncing around ideas trying to land on something. It was a very trial-and-error thing. I’d love to say we had the idea straight away, but we tried all sorts of things and things would start to click into place until, finally, a year and a half into it, we had something that we felt good about and the studio felt good about, and it timed perfectly with this Comic-Con piece we did that we took to San Diego. The reaction was so good from the crowd that it got greenlit. Before I knew it, I had to fly to Canada and we started filming.
Is there an example you can give of an idea you came up with that didn’t make it into the film?
Edwards: No, because anything that I really liked that didn’t quite end up in this film, I keep it in my pocket if there’s ever a sequel.
Do you feel the pressure to keep the door open for one?
Edwards: I don’t want to assume that there’s a sequel at all, because it all depends on if people like the movie. The thing that was good about working with everybody on this film was that it was like, no, this should be a standalone movie, this is something that should exist on its own. I roll my eyes when I go to the cinema and they do something at the end for the sequel. I want a story that begins and ends, and you leave on a high. That’s all we cared about when we were making this; just this film. If this film is good, the others can come, but let’s just pay attention to this and not get sidetracked by other things.
How about the design? Did it change at all during production?
Edwards: No, I mean, it was a slow process. I thought, out of all the tests we’ve got to do, the easiest one by far is design Godzilla, because it’s done, right? You just do that. And then you’ve got to get that and try it and, hmm, it doesn’t look right. So the basic idea that I said to the designers was, “Okay, it’s a real animal. It really exists. We haven’t seen it in a long time, and the only people who saw it were just first-hand testimony. They ran to Toho Studios in Japan, and they tried to explain it and draw it, and then they went and made all their guys-in-suit movies based on this real animal.” We have to make something that feels real, that when you see it, it’s the coolest most realistic Godzilla, but you can look at the Toho movies and go, “Oh, I see. I see how you would have arrived at that design based on this if you glimpsed it in the ocean.”
There's a lot more to the interview, so be sure to head on over to Collider now to watch the interview in full!
Let us know what you thought of both the new trailer and the interview by commenting below! Special thanks to Mark Draper on our Facebook Page for the link to the trailer!
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