Warner Brothers had a big day today at the convention in San Diego. Not only did we get a huge announcement about a Batman/Supoerman team-up film, but we also got a huge presentation from the cast and crew of Godzilla.
Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor Johnson and Bryan Cranston joined director Gareth Edwards to discuss the giant project. Here is the run down of the panel.
- The movie wrapped production the last few days and concluded with a night shoot in Hawaii.
- Edwards praised the studio for giving him so much freedom and said the experience was incredible.
- Elizabeth Olsen said she was surprised that the shoot didn’t feel like a huge Hollywood shoot and that there wasn’t much waiting in between scenes.
- Olsen plays a nurse as well as a mother in the movie.
- Bryan Cranston had doubts early on about taking the project because it felt “Too huge.” However, after watching Monsters and talking to director Gareth Edwards, he was totally ready to change his mind.
- It was important to Edwards that the characters stay central to the plot and not be two separate in-cohesive storylines.
- The film was under the production title “Nautilus.”
- Edwards made sure he approached directing Godzilla in the mind frame of a “passion project.”
After the panel, they showed teaser footage of the film. Here is a breakdown thanks to Russ Fischer at SlashFilm:
We’re introduced to characters first off: Cranston seems to be an engineer/investigator of some sort — we see him in hazmat gear, and later running towards a crisis event in a government installation as the rest of the staff frantically runs away. Aaron Taylor Johnson is a soldier; Ken Watanabe is seen in a control room of some kind, and Olsen as mentioned above is shown in moments that suggest she’s been a victim of some disaster. A montage of various images shows a world in crisis and deploying military forces to fight some crisis moment.
And then there’s the kaiju attack. The first monster we see is a spindly-legged insectoid thing — is this Mothra? Didn’t quite look like it, but that’s possible. The monster is attacking an airport, and there’s a great wide shot that sees the kaiju destroying a plane, which leads to an explosion the camera follows by panning across a huge set of windows, looking out from inside the airport terminal. Part of the plane’s destroyed fuselage flies right to left across the screen, and is eventually stopped as it crashes into a giant foot.
That’s the intro for Godzilla, and the creature dwarfs the other kaiju. Few shots really show Godzilla, but the scale is very effectively communicated by the relationship between the insectoid monster and our favorite lizard. The overall effect could be described — and this isn’t a literal account of the footage, but an impression of its effect — like a slow pan up from the faces of the various human characters stuck in the middle of a monster-created mess, passing a smaller beast and finally trying to focus on the father of it all, Godzilla, hidden in fire and smoke.
I definitely like what I am hearing from this Godilla reboot. Especially the fact that they might be including other monsters such as Mothra (fingers crossed). If all turns out well, this is going to stomp all over the 1998 version that was made by Roland Emmerich.
Godzilla roars into cinema on May 16, 2014!
What do you think about the description of the footage from Godzilla?
Source: Slashfilm
