Your past work in visual effects and directing Monsters makes it seem like you were tailor-made to be the director of Godzilla, obviously on a much larger budget. How did your past experience as a visual artist and small-budget director affect this film?

Ive always been interested in sci-fi/fantasy to some extent, and I think whenever I took any jobs I always tried to give it that twist toward post-apocalypse and science. A lot of my early stuff, I was working for the BBC, I was doing a lot of visual effects from my bedroom but I worked a lot for BBC science. The great thing about that, it was during that period when computer graphics were getting better and trying to do bigger and bigger and more ambitious things. I was lucky that I got an opportunity to do a lot of work with these drama docs that were like end-of-the-world scenarios like meteorites destroying the Earth and things like that. Eventually, I bribed my way into directing shows with the hope that they would lead to one day down the line doing a feature film, but I realized how much a brick wall there is between television for documentary science and doing a major feature film.

I quit my job and gave up visual effects and went out on a limb to make this low budget monster movie called Monsters. I thought for ten years Id wasted my career because I wanted to be a director since I was tiny and went to film school with the idea that you make a short film, then Hollywood calls, and it just didnt happen like that at all for me. My flatmate at the time was studying computer animation and it was so clear to me that this was the future of filmmaking. This was back in 96, so Jurassic Park just came out, and so when I left I went back home to live with my parents. I stacked shelves at a supermarket at night and during the day I was learning computer graphics, and the idea was I was going to learn it in six months then go make a movie. It took me more like ten years to learn it. Its much more complicated than I give it credit, and Im not as good as I thought I would be.

I felt that Id wasted ten years of my career trying to figure this stuff, but retrospectively its one of the best skill sets I couldve had being a director. What you do when you do visual effects is you sit there everyday and work on a shot. You spend all day long trying to perfect the shot and make it better and better and better. If you screw it up, its a really painfulits the hardest way to learn about visuals. When a cameraman has a bad composition, he takes five seconds to move the camera to get a better composition. If youre doing painting in Photoshop and its a bad composition, youve wasted the whole day. I see it as the Karate Kid, the wax on wax off of filmmaking in that its such a painful way to learn what makes an image looks good that you end up with all these subconscious rules and instincts in your head about what to do with imagery and that helped me a lot in this film because I could speak the same language to all the visual effects artists.

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There are a couple types of monster movies. Theres the monster that lumbers off-screen and theres the full-action monster movie. What kind of Godzilla will be seeing on May 16?

Our Godzilla is 350 feet. If you literally are 100 percent accurate with that, thats an incredibly slow creature. Even if hes moving at the speed of sound, relative the background they always look like theyre in slow motion. Our starting point was always whats real. What would it really be like? Then you watch that back. Sometimes it can be frustrating to watch because the reality is even at that scale, if it was moving as fast as it possibly could, it would be like watching a film in four times slow motion or something. We had to dial that back on occasion. You dont want to contradict the scale of these things ever.

We looked at a lot of animal footage. We pulled up hundreds of clips of animals fighting and tried to find different reference styles. Thats a good basis but it wont take you the whole way. Whats interesting about watching animals is that theyre not visual storytellers. The reason why all those natural history documentaries have narration, they need to tell you whats going on and why theyre doing what theyre doing. Were obviously not doing that in our movie. Theres a little bit more performance to some of our fights. If you just copied and motioned captured an animal and left it at that, you wouldnt get the emotion of the character out. It can be so real, its not interesting.

What was the reason behind scaling up Godzilla?

We wanted him to be as big as possible, so we had a modelist build one of the cities in our movie into the computer, and we tried different experiments and all different sizes, then pictured it from ground level. We wanted him big enough that you could see him through the skyscrapers, but hes not so big that he could never be hidden because when hes omnipresent in every single shot, it takes some of the fun out of the sequences you could do. It felt like the right balance was about 350 feet, which is just about the tallest hes ever been in a Godzilla movie. Theres probably a reason he hasnt gone beyond that height really because after a while if hes too big, he cant walk down the street without smashing three blocks of buildings. When youre telling it from a human perspective, it can limit you too much if hes too big.

Ive seen in other interviews you talk about how you wanted to make this film feel as real as possible. What do you mean by real?

Obviously youre never going to get a giant massive monster smashing up a city or causing a tsunami or earthquake to seem real, but you definitely get earthquakes and tsunamis and those images are burned in our mindsthe horrific images of recent years. I was trying to pull from those visuals in the things that have haunted this generation and try to tap into some of that. At the end of the day, Godzilla is the manifestation of our nightmares about nature and what it can do when it comes to put us in our place and reminds us were not the most powerful thing on the planet. Its a literal version of that. All around the office, we all that horrific imagery up as inspiration for what some of this could look like, but at the end of the day its entertainment. You dont want to go too far with it, but the audience wants to feel like the edge of this could really happen.

The Department of Defense was also cooperating on the film, so they gave us a lot of advice about what they would do. What would you do if Godzilla really came? Its funny because youd expect them to laugh and theyre all like well, what wed probably do first is and you have this whole conversation about how they would react to it. I think theyre all out-and-out Godzilla fans. We tried to ground it in as much reality as we could, especially with the characters, trying not to create a story and hero in our movie thats just from a comic book. We wanted it to feel like these guys really exist and these are real people that were following and not stretch believability, beyond theres this giant monster in the world. Thats the free pass the audience gives you, but beyond that they want you to treat it with respect. I think people enjoy that when theyre watching a movie and they can feel that the filmmaker is taking it seriously. Its a secret fantasy. People want to know what it would really be like and have that experience of September 11th but with monsters.

So did you talk to any other experts outside the military?

We chatted with the analysts that worked on the response to Katrina. We had FEMA experts and of course the Department of Defense was very, very involved. Ive got to meet the secretary of the Navy, and we showed him some clips. One of them included the halo jump sequence with the red flares in one of the teasers. I was nervous because I thought we took some liberty with those red flares because they looked great. We decided that the reason they would have them on is so they could find each other once they land. Theyd break up and out of radio contact, they could see where one another landed. We showed him and then I was waiting for him to say no, youve got to take that out. You cant have that. He pulled out his phone and showed me a video clip of him skydiving with a bunch of the military and they had the same flares on. It was like ok, thats great. Anytime someone criticizes me, Im going to tell him that story.

When you have a monster thats rendered in CGI, whats it like shooting a film when the actors are reacting to something so alien?

It helps a hell of a lot if you say Godzillas not there. He wasnt available for filming because hes doing a play, so well have to put him in with the computer. I think the trick is to film in as many real locations as possible and try to avoid green screen because even if the actors are having to imagine the creatures theyre not having to imagine the environment as well. Theres something about the real limitations of the real place that seeps into the camera work and the performance that makes it feel more real.

The reality is that actors have to pretend all the time, even in the most highbrow drama, when theyre looking at something typically its not there. The other actor has had to leave the room because the camera is in the way and things like that. Thats the art of being an actor and always having to pretend.

One thing I did find was helpful was we had done all this computer animation of all the big sequences so we could show actors on the set this is where youre going to be. This is what youre looking at. But apart from those animations, wed done a whole bunch of sound design on top of it like roars and all the noises the creatures make. I started to realize early on that theres this voice of God microphone that they have on sets so they can talk when we have big crowd scenes. So I get my iPad out and I play these animations with audio and I put the voice of God microphone right up against the speaker so it would be blaring out monster screams and stuff. It shouldnt make a difference but it did. The takes with Godzillas roar were always better for some reason. It gave it that edge for the actors. So sound was really good for that. You can imagine a bit better you hear a roar really loud.

Ive studied the trailer and read the rumors. Rodan is in this movie, right?

The reality is theres a lot of speculation on the internet, and Ive read a lot of it because its fun to read. My favorite is the Mothra Twins in the destroyed hotel. There are two people and you see the two people, but I just love that the fans are trying to use the trailer as some hidden treasure map to what the movie would be. I dont want to spoil it because its my one pleasure at the moment, jumping online and seeing what people are saying. I dont want to ruin it for me, but I think theyre really imaginative with some of it, but others theyre right. Its scary how spot on some of the people are. I think theres a type of sport to thisdissecting trailersthat I think is the fun of a film coming out, and I think its ruining it saying too much.

You can read the first half of our interview with Gareth Edwards here.

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