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He’s the Welsh guerilla filmmaker who’s gone from a shoe-string sci-fi debut with a £10,000 budget to helming one of the this year's most anticipated movies – a $160m take of the classic Japanese creature feature Godzilla.

But, as Gareth Edwards busily puts the finishing touches to the film which should establish him as one of world’s hottest directors, the 38-year-old from Pontypool admits that, while he’s always wanted to shoot a monster movie, he still can’t believe Hollywood’s entrusted him to remake THE monster movie.

“I never expected them to offer me this,” says Edwards, recalling “going to loads of meetings” shortly after his low-key calling card Monsters was first screened to glowing reviews in 2010.

“And had you told me back then that this would be my next movie, I would have never, ever have believed it.”

A life-long fan of the infamous Toho Studios creation – a vengeful giant lizard borne of 1950s atomic testing in the Pacific – Edwards says he’s always intended his version of the story to remain as true to its origins as possible.

Speaking in the new issue of Empire Magazine ahead of the film’s release on May 16, he reveals that he wanted to be as far removed from the kiddie-friendly 1998 version of Godzilla – which boasted Matthew Broderick and a Puff Daddy soundtrack – as Christopher Nolan’s reinterpretation of Batman was from previous director Joel Schumacher's infamously camp depiction of the troubled super hero.

“Just because this is a fantasy film doesn’t mean you can’t deny what lies beneath,” Edwards adds.

“Is a giant monster ever going to come out of the ocean, flatten a city and leave lots of radiation behind? No.

“But have cities ever been destroyed and radiation traces left everywhere? Yes.

“So the effects and the devastation have to be completely real looking.”

The official Godzilla trailer:

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And, just like the 1954 original film, Edwards's flick references the US bombing on Hiroshima during WWII.

“At the time Japan wasn’t able to make movies about how they suffered through events like that,” he says.

“Yet they could make a giant monster movie which touched on all those things – it was like therapy for them, I guess.

“And here the nuclear thing is very much at the heart of the movie, as is man’s abuse of nature.

“And, as we all know, when it comes to man versus nature, nature is always going to win.”

The film stars an eclectic line-up including Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sally Hawkins.

But it’s Bryan ‘Breaking Bad’ Cranston who’s at the film’s emotional core, playing a scientist who becomes convinced that a series of recent cataclysmic events are anything but natural disasters.

“What happened here wasn’t an earthquake or a typhoon,” intones the Golden Globe winning actor in the latest online trailer, as footage of widespread decimation plays out in the background.

“You’re hiding something out there, and it’s going to send us all back to the Stone Age.”

Edwards adds it’s for that very reason that he sought out such a respected, heavyweight cast, to give the story an anchor once the CGI maelstrom that is Godzilla itself gets unleashed.

“My goal is to make a more grounded, character-driven journey,” he says.

“It was important to ensure that the audience really cared about the people up on the screen and could root for them, so when all the craziness starts it becomes all the more powerful.

“But because it’s such an important brand with so much money invested in it you have to try to appeal to everybody.

“That’s the balancing act – how to make a movie you feel is artistic and would want to see, but which also has mass appeal.”