For the filmmakers overseeing the complex production of the epic, action adventure “Godzilla,” there was perhaps nothing more challenging or exhilarating than the creation of its title character.
“Toho had given us their blessing to re-envision the character, but it was equally important to us as well as Toho that Godzilla look like Godzilla,” producer Thomas Tull says. “We wanted to bring him into contemporary reality while not steering too far from the classic silhouette that so many of us grew up with, and [director] Gareth Edwards and the entire team walked that line with passion and inspiration.”
The effort to make Godzilla live onscreen with as much detail and realism as possible engendered a broad coalition of creative minds, incorporating the talents of lead creature and concept designer Matt Allsopp, and Weta Workshop, Ltd.’s creature designers Andrew Baker, Christian Pearce and Greg Broadmore, as well as storyboard illustrators, keyframe animation and texture artists at Moving Picture Company (MPC), and specialists in sound, movement and performance, all unified through Edwards’ vision for the character.
“Everybody chipped in,” Edwards remembers. “What we were trying to find was what Godzilla would look like if you actually saw him in the real world. One of the conversations we’d have quite often was asking, ‘If this was a person, who would it be?’ And after thinking about it for a while, what we came up with was the idea that he was like the last Samurai—a lone, ancient warrior that would prefer to not be part of the world if he could, but events force him to resurface. We did lots of illustrations and concepts, and it took us over a year to really get it right.”
Standing 355-feet-tall—the largest of any big screen incarnation—Godzilla was conceived from the start as an entirely digital creation that would maintain the character’s classic form and identity. A bipedal, amphibious, radioactive leviathan with armored dorsal fins spiking menacingly all the way down to his long, sweeping tail, Godzilla belongs to the imagined species Godzillasaurus, which paleontologists have jokingly linked with the Tyrannosaurus Rex or Ceratosaurus families, only much larger.
The filmmakers’ efforts to capture the essence of Godzilla ultimately took them back to 1954—to the iconic latex suit designed by Toho’s Teizo Toshimitsu, which he built with Eizo Kaimai, Kanju Yagi and Yasue Yagi. Worn to great effect by actor Haruo Nakajima, the inspired costume was transformed through Ishiro Honda’s lens into a nuclear disaster made flesh, breathing a visible atomic blast upon a decimated Tokyo. Though these early effects were groundbreaking for their time, the filmmakers knew that 60 years later they had the tools to make Godzilla truly live.
“It was incredibly exciting to take inspiration from those early movies, but Gareth’s edict from the beginning was that everything we were creating had to look absolutely real,” confirms visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel. “You want to believe that there’s this 355-foot beast crashing through the streets of San Francisco.”
Early in production, Rygiel screened for the filmmakers the first complete tests of the creature in motion. “You heard this gasp go through the room,” Tull recalls. “Gareth and the visual effects team did an amazing job giving the character a level of detail and natural movement that wasn’t possible even five years ago. It felt almost like you were seeing Godzilla in the flesh for the first time.”
But beneath the skin, what has always set Godzilla apart is his unique persona and presence. “He has an amazing effect on people in that you’re both terrified and drawn to him, which is part of the reason the character has endured for so long,” says producer Mary Parent. “Godzilla is clearly a badass, but there’s also an innocence and an integrity to him. On a primal level, you never quite know what he’s going to do. At the same time, he’s also got very heroic elements, and that dichotomy is what makes him so interesting and compelling.”
Like his human co-stars, Godzilla’s soul is etched in his face. While the new incarnation hews closely to the dimensions of his short, steep skull, broad snout and carnivore’s mouth, to imbue it with a full range of expression in battle, the filmmakers studied the faces of dogs and bears, while also incorporating the nobility of an eagle.
To direct the character on the subtleties of performance, Edwards had a powerful assist from Rygiel’s “The Lord of the Rings” collaborator, performance capture pioneer Andy Serkis, who has brought his unique art form to digital characters like Gollum, Caesar and King Kong, and helped shape the title character’s emotional arc.
“At the start of the process, I felt that in some way we could decide and control who Godzilla was,” Edwards reflects, “but, as we went along, we started to realize that Godzilla was going to tell us who he was, just like actors who have their own take on their characters. We couldn’t totally dictate what it was going to be; it was more about just trying different ideas and permutations. And, slowly, he revealed himself to us."
Slated to open across the Philippines on May 15 in 3D, 2D and IMAX 3D in select theatres, “Godzilla” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
