by Benjamin Haines » Sun May 05, 2019 11:39 am
^ Highlights from that panel:
Josh from Singapore: “On the pacing of the film, how did you find the sweet spot for the tension-building, the action, the horror, the spectacle, and also social commentary?”
Michael Dougherty: “It’s hard. I mean, the movie really is created in the editing room and there’s a lot of material that ended up on the cutting room floor. There’s a cut that I like to call 'Godzilla: The Miniseries' because it was basically three hours. So there were much longer versions of the scenes that you saw, and as much as I would love to just bathe in the Godzilla universe for three hours, it dragged, so we had to find that right sweet spot, as you put it, and it took a very, very long time.”
Jean Baptiste from Paris: “What is your very first memory about Godzilla as a Japanese kid?”
Ken Watanabe: “I didn’t see the original - just, before I was born. I loved Mothra, yeah, and the two twins’ songs and the dancing, yeah it’s very beautiful... but I didn’t, I don’t like the, you know, Godzilla more than Gamera.”
Jerome: “Why was it so special for you to work on a Godzilla movie?”
Michael Dougherty: “It meant a lot to me because, I think I mentioned earlier in the introduction, was that I grew up watching these movies. When I was a kid, you know, 4 years old, 5 years old, I was a little half-Asian kid growing up in Ohio and I was made fun of a lot. To watch these amazing movies about giant monsters - and I already had the love of dinosaurs and animals and nature - that were made by other Asian people meant the world to me, you know. Because other than that, it was cowboys and cops & robbers and just your typical TV shows and movies growing up, and Godzilla sort of provided this weird security blanket because he was so strong, he was so powerful, but besides the fact that it was entertaining and fun, I was keenly aware even at that young age that there was a message underneath all of it, and I heard that, and that meant a lot. In the same way that Star Wars is really a movie about spirituality if you dissect it, Godzilla had this oddly subversive message to it. So that resonated and the fact that it was made by other Asian people just meant a lot and so I wanted to continue that. My first attempt at making a film - I think I was around 10 years old - was I took my family’s Betamax camcorder - yes I’m that old - and set it up and I took my pet tortoise, a box tortoise named Toni, and let her rampage through my Star Wars figures, and that was my first instinct was to make a Godzilla movie, and then I tried to do it again in college, I made a 2-minute Godzilla film, and so it’s just always been in the back of my head that I wanted to do that. I even remember when I was in college they were shooting Roland Emmerich’s movie in New York, and I was, like, a little bit jealous, a little bit angry that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, but here we are.”
Grae Drake of MovieFone asked about the scene in which