The story of the arduous odyssey to conceive a leapin' lizard that could travel 500 mph through downtown Manhattan
Director/co-writer Roland Emmerich and producer/co-writer Dean Devlin, veterans of Independence Day, imagined their incarnation of Godzilla not as the primal God/monster unleashed by the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima of the 1954 original Toho Studios film, but a living, breathing animal, capable of hitting groundspeeds upwards of 500 mph through downtown Manhattan. "We just did the math," grins co-writer/producer Dean Devlin. "If he's 200 feet tall, that's 20 stories, so one long step was a quarter mile. What are five fast steps?" The old lumbering man-in-a-suit monster of the original Japanese saga was clearly out.
But what was in? Even as they conceived their radical re-interpretation, the duo got cold feet, like director Jan De Bont, who previously abandoned Godzilla to development hell and instead made Twister with the same cast. For Emmerich and Devlin, it was one thing to conceptualize a giant lizard moving extremely quickly, but every time they realized that giant lizard was, in fact, Godzilla, the original Japanese monster popped into their heads - and they couldn't imagine that monster moving at high speed without looking silly. "Everybody tried to talk us out of it," Devlin says. "Spielberg said he talked Jan De Bont out of it so why would we want to do it?"
Fortunately, just as they were beginning to ask themselves the same question, Patrick Tatopoulos, the designer of not one but two ID4 aliens, came up with a slimmer, more agile creature that convinced Emmerich and Devlin that their leapin' lizard concept would work. The designer's radically different rendering retains the anthropomorphic proportions of Godzilla's upper body, but makes the arms more rudimentary, like a raptor's, and substitutes realistic tri-jointed dinosaur legs for the iconic thunder-thighs. While the 1950s-design Godzilla's spines looked like serrated inkblots, the new spines are shaped like shark fins, thrusting forward to create a much more aggressive profile. A massive spine anchored on each of the monster's shoulderblades gives Godzilla a winged dragon look. Tatopoulos also totally re-imagined Godzilla's head, giving it a crocodile-like feel with massive interlocking teeth and beady eyes, while accentuating the cheekbones and chin. Emmerich and Devlin were sold and soon after, so was Japan's Toho Studios, the birthplace of Godzilla. "The problem was the tone," Devlin explains. "Everybody thought of it as kitchy and cheap, but the new creature went a long way toward setting the tone. [Patrick's design] opened up all the possibilities. Animals have cunning and we wanted Godzilla to feel like a real creature, we didn't want to anthropomorphosize him."
The filmmakers realized that while their Godzilla may be bigger, more intelligent and far beyond the force of nature depicted in the original films, he's nevertheless going to sink or swim depending on how well he out-Jurassics Jurassic Park, which set the high-water mark for digital dinos. But the ever-ambitious Emmerich and Devlin wanted their titanic lizard to do more than go claw-to-claw with Spielberg's dino epic, they wanted to take on ILM, too. The Godzilla duo announced that their own recently created, self-styled ILM, Centropolis Effects (CFX) would bring the King of the Monsters to the screen with unparalleled majesty. But tackling a project as ambitious as Godzilla would prove taxing for the newly-minted effects facility.
That's why every morning, as Volker Engle, the Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor of Independence Day, prepared to face another grueling day on the mammoth project, he read a sign he tacked up on the inside of his apartment door: "Great Expectations." After all, the Godzilla saga has remained a stalwart bastion of truly cheesy special effects throughout 22 films, so using computer graphics and mechanical effects, CFX should easily deliver a bigger, better Godzilla, right? "Once they put in this line, ëFrom the creators of Independence Day,'" Engle sighs, "everybody's expectations go up."
During pre-production, from late 1996 through May, 1997, Engle, Emmerich and Devlin began outlining their effects strategy. About 25 percent of the shots would involve an actor wearing a 1/24 scale partially mechanized Godzilla costume along with a totally hydraulic 1/6 scale upper torso and head smashing through 1/24 and 1/6 scale miniature buildings respectively (the same technique used over 40 years ago on the original Godzilla). These shots represented the least expensive approach, since they could be achieved in-camera. That still left close to 150 shots, some 75%, utilizing much more costly Jurassic Park-style CG animation. To keep a tight rein on Godzilla's effects budget, Emmerich and Devlin planned to do close to 2/3 of their CG animation using Motion Capture, the method used to create the boatloads of extras in Titanic.
But could CFX convincingly generate a digital Godzilla? In March of 1997, as a handful of animators were developing Godzilla's CG wireframe skeleton in CFX's Silicon Graphics computers, the co-writers hit upon a cost-effective test. They conceived a teaser/trailer that wouldn't be part of the final movie but would give audiences a peek at their new monster. A la Bambi Meets Godzilla, a massive foot comes crashing down into a museum, crushing a T. Rex skeleton, as his powerful tail whips past camera. The trailer effectively slammed Jurassic Park and left audiences salivating, but it was also an early sign of trouble. Given just a few weeks to create Godzilla's CG foot and tail, CFX felt about 70% pleased with the result. "We were just setting up the ëplaying field' as we say in Germany," Engle explains. "Godzilla still looked CG, but we felt if we put a couple months more work into it, we could make a pretty damn believable close-up of every piece of the creature." The problem was, they didn't have a couple months to massage every shot. Godzilla was scheduled to open on May 20, 1998. They had just over a year to finish almost 400 very demanding shots.
[ continued on page 2 ]