Think fighting Godzilla sounds tough? That's nothing. Try making a movie about him.
Not only is the giant kaiju a pop culture icon whose appeal has lasted for generations, he's also a beast that can be done very well (the original 1954 Japanese film produced by Toho) and very poorly (Roland Emmerich's 1998 version). So if you're Gareth Edwards, a young British director with only one feature film to your name (2010's Monsters), trying to do Godzilla justice can be intimidating—particularly when everyone comes up to you and whispers, "I love Godzilla ... Don't fuck it up," as many did during the two years he spent on Godzilla, out Friday.
"You feel a lot of pressure doing a big film like this. I felt a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure the fans are going to put on you; there's pressure the studio's going to put on you," Edwards told the audience after a sneak preview at South By Southwest. "But it was nothing compared to the pressure I put on myself. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to direct a film like this. So I was saying to myself, 'Don't fuck it up, Gareth.'"
To make the film he wanted to make, Edwards says he tried to make a film that he could geek out over along with Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull, who produced the film. He also tried to recapture the post-Hiroshima nuclear anxiety that served as the backdrop to the 1954 original—it's a grim reminder of what happens when humanity thinks it can control nature.
"People say, 'Is [Godzilla] good or evil?' and it's a bit like asking is a hurricane good or evil," Edwards says. "It's just nature. It's not really got an agenda."
WIRED sat down with the director during SXSW to get the bullet points on how he made a Godzilla film that was both true to his vision and to the kaiju's history.
Edwards is a fan of the original 1954 Godzilla, but he didn't see it until it was released a few years ago by the British Film Institute. Prior to that he hadn't realized just how "hardcore" the original was. "I think the Japanese at that time, if they could've made a film about Hiroshima, they would've, and we would've gotten that movie instead," he says. "But there was so much censorship at the time and they couldn't make films about World War II, so they wrapped it in this monster-movie scenario. It still has the weight and somberness as it would have if it was just about Hiroshima, and that's what makes it so timeless." It wouldn't make sense to make a Godzilla with that same message, but he tried to keep the same emotional weight.
"It's that thing of wanting to give a lot of nods to the original and all the history of Godzilla, but not be restricted in terms of the story we could tell," Edwards says. "The whole point of this kind of film is that it appeals to everybody. As much as you want to make this for the fans, I think the fans would agree that the best outcome is it turns people who wouldn't normally care about Godzilla into fans."
It's now 60 years past the original Godzilla and its postwar undertones, but they're still in Max Borenstein's script and Edwards' film—they're just more subtle. "Something that's under the surface of our film but not necessarily what our film is about, is that these creatures are attracted to radiation," Edwards says. "For years we've been saying, 'Well you're not allowed to have it, but we can have it, and we can develop weapons, but you can't,'" Edwards says. "What if suddenly there were these creatures that were attracted to radiation and suddenly the tables would be turned and we'd be desperately trying to get rid of this stuff?"
"Hopefully people can come to this film and not think about anything and just enjoy it as a monster movie and have a lot of fun," he says. "But for me, what I love about good science fiction and fantasy and my favorite monster movies is that they've usually got some weight to them. There's something more truthful. We were certainly trying to find that and put that as a layer in this movie."
For Edwards, Godzilla is just a "manifestation of nature." He's like a natural disaster—a physical form for human fears that we've run roughshod over the Earth. Fear that translates into we had this coming. "If you look at all the great horror films or things that make you afraid, something that they all tend to do at the beginning is make you feel guilty," he says. "So I tried to put little things in the movie at the start that make us feel that it's our fault that these things are happening. It's always scarier when you know you did something wrong."
One of the biggest surprises when the first Godzilla trailers dropped was the presence of other kaiju. That was essential to the film, and it was decided even before Edwards came on to direct. "Thomas Tull, who is the whole reason this film is even happening, was like, 'We cannot have a Godzilla movie and he doesn't fight something else,'" he says. "That was Rule 1."
One of the biggest "gets" for Godzilla was star Bryan Cranston, fresh off his magnificent run as Walter White on Breaking Bad. Edwards says the actor initially said "No, thank you" to the role, but after sending Cranston the screenplay and showing him Edwards' last feature Monsters, the actor agreed. "I think he was just cautious because there's definitely a bad version of this film and I didn't want to make that version at all," Edwards says. "I felt like if we were going to do this we would have to do it right or not bother. I think he felt confident that we would take it seriously, and was up for it. Thank god, because he's phenomenal in the movie."
Godzilla was originally the creation of Japanese film company Toho, which still owns the character, aggressively protects it and weighed in on Edwards' film along the way. He got to tour Toho's facilities in Tokyo, and they even gave the director an audio file of Godzilla's original roar so he and his team could "create the Dolby Atmos version" of that iconic scream. "My favorite thing was [meeting] Yoshimitsu Banno—he did Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster," he says. "When I met him he took great pride in showing me this book. I was like, 'Why is he showing me this?' and then I looked and it was [a book of] the worst movies ever made and his was in there. But he didn't care because he was the assistant director to [legendary Japanese director] Akira Kurosawa and he's got so many great movies to his name."
The folks at Toho are "so excited for the film, and so supportive," Edwards says, adding that he most wants Godzilla to do well in the kaiju's home country. "You know, you're doing your version of something that's so much a part of Japanese culture, you're always worried what they're going to think. Obviously we want this film to do well but out of all the territories, I most want it to be a hit in Japan," he says. "Because then it feels like it's a true Godzilla."
These days Hollywood seems determined to turn everything into a franchise. Edwards didn't want to think that way about his film. Ask if he's up for a sequel and he says "it's not set up like that." He knows that movies with great sequels start as great movies in their own right, so he wasn't trying to think of where he would go next—or try to force things into his film just to set up future chapters. "I just wanted this film to be completely standalone; it begins and it ends and that's it," he says. "Hopefully, if you do a good enough job and people like it, you'll get to do another one. There are so many ways we could've gone in this movie and we chose this path because it's an origin story—but once you've set up the world, it'll be hard to resist if people respond to it."
