Director Gareth Edwards Explains How They Came Up with Design for New ‘Godzilla’

There were lots of things people hated about the crappy Godzilla movie Roland Emmerich made in 1998, from the utter lack of plot to the terrible acting. However, nothing received more criticism than the design of the monster itself, which was basically the T-Rex from Jurassic Park on steroids.

For that reason, director Gareth Edwards has put a lot more thought into getting the monster right in his Godzilla. And speaking to the media at the recent Godzilla press junket in New York, Edwards shed some light on the design process. 

The following quote is pretty long. But hey, you've already read this far. You might as well see it through. So here it goes:

Yeah, well we said to the designers—you have to try and frame it in a way that we're going to get Godzilla but try and not date it—and we said, ‘imagine like 60 years ago, Godzilla's a real animal, he really exists and then he comes out 60 years ago and he was witnessed by people in Japan. And no one took a picture but they went running and screaming back to Toho Studios and made the original films and tried to describe him to them. And they went off and made all the movies that we know and love, and in our film you're going to get to see—the idea is you're going to get to see the original animal that they witnessed.' So you should be able to correlate it and go, "Oh, I see from the description how they'd arrive at that Gojira suit", but that would give us a bit of license to bring it up to date a bit and make it more realistic potentially. And the main thing I tried to do was refine the shapes, just give it a little bit more aggressive lines in the face, and a straighter sort of sharper silhouette so that it just feels a little bit more fierce.

Impressive, Mr. Edwards. Then again, I guess we should have expected this level of insight from the guy who did a commentary track for his own trailer.

Godzilla hits theaters this Friday, May 16.

[via]