GODZILLA MINUS ZERO Director Takashi Yamazaki Finally Gets to Watch King Ghidorah Destroy His Hometown
Takashi Yamazaki has been waiting since childhood to watch King Ghidorah tear apart his hometown, and with Godzilla Minus Zero, he finally got to make that happen himself. That's one hell of a way to fulfill a childhood dream!
The filmmaker, who won an Oscar for his visual effects work on Godzilla Minus One, brings the legendary three-headed kaiju into his latest Godzilla movie. For Yamazaki, unleashing King Ghidorah on Matsumoto City, Japan, is something he's wanted to see since he was a kid.
In a recent interview with Variety, Yamazaki explained that his obsession goes back to the 1964 film Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, which featured the monster flying over the very city where he grew up.
He recalled: "When Ghidorah made its silver screen debut in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, it was the first kaiju to appear in Matsumoto City, the same city where I was born and raised.
“I was very excited to go to the movie theater and see Ghidorah smash up my hometown. But when I got to the theater and saw the film, Ghidorah flies over Matsumoto Castle, and that was it. So I was disappointed."
Decades later, Yamazaki found himself in the perfect position to correct that childhood disappointment. As the director and VFX supervisor of Godzilla Minus Zero, he could finally give Matsumoto City the monster attack he'd always wanted to see.
He explained: "With Godzilla Minus One, I was able to make the movie I wanted to see as a child. King Ghidorah appears in Matsumoto City, which is the same city where I set that scene, and it smashes it up. It’s really a dream come true for me. At the same time, I really love King Ghidorah as a kaiju because the design is amazing."
Yamazaki also singled out one particularly terrifying King Ghidorah sequence that he was proud to bring to life. The scene, which appears in the trailer, involves a mother and baby being lifted into the air by Ghidorah's gravity beam before falling.
He shared: "You see it in the trailer: there’s a mother and a baby in the house, and they’ve been levitated by Ghidorah’s gravity beam, and then they fall. This shot came out brilliantly. At first, I was struggling, trying to figure out how we would shoot this.
“We built the set, and this piece had a little bit of a tilt to it. We used drones to shoot around it, so we had our visuals, which we fleshed out with VFX. It’s a very scary and violent scene, and it tells us a lot about King Ghidorah’s power. It also serves as an indirect expression of how much terror and fear it can incite within people."
It's pretty awesome that Yamazaki went from being a disappointed young Godzilla fan to directing a movie where he gets to unleash one of his favorite monsters on the city he grew up in.
For fans of King Ghidorah, it's also cool knowing that the filmmaker bringing the iconic kaiju back to the big screen has such a personal connection to the character.
Godzilla Minus Zero is now playing in theaters, and it looks like Matsumoto City finally gets the destruction Yamazaki has been waiting decades to see.