Inside ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’: How an R Rating, Filming in IMAX, and Epic Kaiju Battles Broke Franchise Tradition

[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Godzilla Minus Zero.”]

“Godzilla Minus Zero” is gnarlier (it well earns the franchise’s first R-rating) and more cantankerous in its sound design. Still, any fears that the follow-up to 2023’s beloved “Godzilla Minus One” would sacrifice spectacle for sentiment can rest at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Director Takashi Yamazaki returns to direct, write, and aid in the VFX work on his kaiju clobberfest, which is set two years later, focusing on the family comprised of former kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter, Akiko (Sae Nagatani), as they attempt to resume normal life in the aftermath of Godzilla’s attack. While Shikishima’s allies such as Kenji Oda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) have used the tragedy as a springboard to rebuild against all odds, the arrival of a dragon-like beast threatens to dismantle the short-lived peace. Shikishima and his allies try their best to combat the extraterrestrial threat while debating whether Godzilla is worth the risk of resurrection, acknowledging that sometimes the only way to beat one kaiju is with another.

With this film, Yamazaki burrows into the pointed theme of survivor’s guilt that has characterized his two (and hopefully counting) takes on Godzilla, through new characters like Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) and Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), exploring how greeting a new day can feel like its own penance. Indeed, how this film plays with Japan’s atomic grievances, tapping into a generation’s latent rage and the notion that opportunity is just tragedy that has shed its skin, feels like a culmination of 30-plus years of storytelling with the character. After watching all the “Godzilla” films this year in anticipation of this one, I can say that “Godzilla Minus Zero” rewards ardent fans of the franchise by building on certain mythologies while cleverly subverting others. Furthermore, it complicates our relationship to the catharsis of a good creature clash by presenting meekness, restraint, and peacekeeping with their own reverential power.

After the movie’s premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, where the sounds of scorched earth, smelted scrap metal, and kaiju roars rattled in my brain, I tried my best to unravel Yamazaki’s monster mayhem, where, in a spoiler-filled chat, we discussed the influence of “The Thing”, “Intolerance”, and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, how the historical fluidity of Godzilla’s greatest foe proved apt for the film’s thematic provocations around adaptation and rebirth, and the creative possibilities that working with IMAX sound and scale afforded him.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. It was conducted via translator.

IndieWire: “Godzilla Minus Zero” breaks the franchise tradition in two key ways: It’s the first Japanese production filmed in IMAX and the first to carry an R rating. How did those production choices help you tell the story the way you wanted?

Takashi Yamazaki: During pre-production and even production, we had conversations with our team that, yes, extreme visual representation or going about the visual expression of the film in the way we were thinking could risk our rating. But I felt, especially for the themes that we were exploring and tackling, to properly communicate that, we could not run away from an R rating. So yes, of course I’d love for kids and families to be able to see this film, but when I weighed everything on a scale between going for the rating and possibly editing or censoring what the message was supposed to be, going all in on conveying this vision won out.

‘Godzilla Minus Zero’Courtesy Everett Collection

Where we really see the rating apply is in focusing on the bodies that have been charred and incinerated by atomic bombs and Godzilla’s atomic breath.

I could see other films benefiting from more abstracted visual expression or at least visuals that are a bit more sugarcoated, but I did not think that was the case for this film. It was important to show it all in a direct manner.

On the note of IMAX, you used actual aircraft to record engine noises and played monster roars in a mountain dam to capture the acoustics of the kaiju roars. How did the IMAX technology impact your approach to crafting the film’s sonic landscape?

When people hear the term “IMAX,” the focus tends to be on the visual aspects and the imagery. While that’s fair, IMAX’s capacity to express various sounds and create a sonic experience is quite amazing and underrated. When the team and I decided to film “Godzilla Minus Zero” in IMAX, we watched a lot of films to prepare, and no matter the film, I remember walking away from my experiences feeling very shaken to my core. I wanted to evoke that same emotion. When the kaiju roar in this film, I wanted the audience to experience a very real sense of fear. I think back to when we were monkeys and predators would chase after us. That’s the type of fear I wanted people to experience, that sense of being out in the wild and feeling tense because you hear the roar of something that would chase after and eat you.

In a lot of ways, I think the sonic threat is greater than the visual threat back in the day when we would meet predators. When we took the kaiju sounds to record in the dam and hit it with the sound, we wanted to specifically record how those sounds bounced around the environment, into the trees, into the atmosphere. I think what that process did for us is that it took these fantastical creatures and brought them into the real world. Before you see the kaiju, you hear them, not unlike how we might have run from predators when we were monkeys.

What specific animal sounds did you use to craft the roar of the newest kaiju you introduced, Ghidorah?

We looked at various libraries and tapped into some older Ghidorah recordings and then mixed those with recordings of animals such as deer, hawk, tiger, and even some human voices. I wanted to keep the image of the original Ghidorah but add a modern interpretation to it, and something is fitting about Ghidorah’s roar being this amalgamation of all these different creatures. There were various roars we auditioned, but once again, it had to work on an acoustic level, which is where testing the sounds in the dam came in.

Min Tanaka in ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’Courtesy Everett Collection

You introduce several new characters, and I found myself most compelled by Min Tanaka’s Kanji Murakami. He courses with righteous fury and trauma but does not know how to channel it into anything but revenge. What drew you to craft the emotional spine of this movie around this?

For me, I would say that thematic backbone would be about the twin poles of human foolishness and arrogance. When you look at Murakami’s ideology and actions, I don’t think he thought about what would come after his revenge was actualized. What was on the other side of his actions? What new hate would that create? I think his story, in part, is the story of human history: how acting on hate leads to a chain of events that keeps spiraling onward. On an individual level, we come face to face with a moment where human action can do something, and that was what I wanted to see through his character.

Looking at Godzilla at large and what gave birth to Godzilla, this film is really a reflection of that era. I think at the time of those earlier films, there was a huge fear of what nuclear warfare could mean. People were seriously grappling with this question of “Are we going to go into war again?” That was an anxious tension when Godzilla was born and a byproduct of the sentiment. Those anxieties are very much the fabric of the social context of the people. Exploring Hiroshima was central to “Godzilla Minus Zero” for that reason, but also, in incorporating that history into the main drama of this film, I hope that it hints at how we break the cycle that has defined human history and go in a more hopeful direction.

Focusing a bit more on the kaiju, you previously described making a kaiju film as kagura … “a dance to please and calm the gods, where you place these problems into the shape of a kaiju to help process some of these worries, almost like a ceremony.” You have two “shapes” here with Ghidorah and Godzilla. What were you trying to fill them with?

I think there’s always a dance that happens whenever a “Godzilla” movie is made. It is almost as though the filmmaker and creative team are trying to quell something. The Godzilla movie in and of itself becomes an offering to the gods.

Every time I feel a “Godzilla” movie is released, there’s some sort of imbalance that’s happening in human society that Godzilla is course-correcting. Looking at the two kaiju that are battling it out and sort of what they embody in this film, Godzilla has been spoken about at length in that he originated from this idea and fear of nuclear weapons and the overall terror of war. We have something a bit more abstract in Ghidorah; he is this unknown terror that comes from the sky. So we have, on one hand, war, and on the other hand, terror that comes from the sky. I think the fact that mankind has to rely on war, they have to borrow its power to quell something else, is interesting; it’s almost as if they have to tap into a forbidden realm for salvation given their circumstances.

Ghidorah has always been a kaiju that can adapt — I think of how he becomes Mecha King Ghidorah in Kazuki Ōmori’s 1991 “Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah” — and here, his power set includes assimilating genetic material. It feels fitting given Ghidorah’s powers in past films, but where did this idea originate?

In terms of the look of how Ghidorah “assimilates,” I was quite inspired by John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” where the creature absorbs its surroundings and then turns it into a part of itself. It cannot be divorced from the environment it is in. That feels in line with Ghidorah. For the very first form of Ghidorah as well, I wanted to pay homage to Hedorah, particularly in how it sort of “consumes” and how it moves.

‘Godzilla vs. Hedorah’Courtesy Everett Collection

“Godzilla vs. Hedorah” is probably my favorite Shōwa film. Watching Godzilla and Ghidorah fight made me think of Ishirō Honda’s “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster,” because of the famous fight between those two where they use the environment — such as boulders — to fight. You incorporate Ghidorah’s gravity beam in this film, which can turn a city into ruins and then turn those ruins into weapons. Talk about including the environment more in these fight sequences you crafted.

That’s interesting. Perhaps that final fight could be seen as a reinterpretation for modern audiences of what Honda was doing in his film. Overall, I did feel the idea of the environment itself being a part of the clash or “joining in on the fight” was interesting. When the monsters fight, it’s not in a vacuum; there’s always collateral. For Ghidorah, I talked with the team about how his gravity beam — despite being called that–has not been seen taking advantage of gravity in a way onscreen before. I thought tapping into that would make for a very interesting visual element for these fights.

You’ve also cited Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” as an inspiration, and the influence shows in the film’s opening with Ghidorah and in the dogfight scene. Why did you feel the language of “long takes” was necessary for these scenes?

These longer shots give a very almost claustrophobic feel where you can’t escape your environment. There was a long take in the middle of Cuarón’s film, where we track a soldier who has to climb upstairs and fight his way up and out of this town that’s become a battlefield. There is no respite in the form of a cut. That had a huge impression on me because through that technique, Cuarón made it so that, as an audience member, even if I wanted to, I could not escape; I could only carry out the mission or die.

In kaiju movies, when there’s a kaiju attack, you can use cuts to either cut to a scene where someone successfully escapes or cut to a scene where they die. There are really only two options. You can create a different dramatic sensation that complicates that binary by having these long takes where these characters are saying, “I have to face this; I have to do something about what’s in front of me because there is no escape.”

Ultimately, I wanted to give the audience this feeling of being unable to escape from a Kaiju, but also because you’re in a movie theater, you also can’t escape from watching that as well. What Cuarón crafted with “Children of Men,” I wanted to create but with a kaiju lens.

To bring up another cinematic reference, you mentioned that D.W. Griffith’s film “Intolerance” inspired you. With this film, you wanted to create a story where “If a small family can attain a small happiness, the world will be OK.”

I believe that the path to happiness around the world is the collective happiness of the individual. “Intolerance” explores this lack of empathy among people. In “Godzilla Minus Zero,” I think this very small happiness in the Shikishima family unit–a unit which is the smallest unit in society–is poignant; despite the tragedies happening around them, if there is even a glimmer of hope and happiness that this very small unit of mankind can bond with each other and be present, perhaps that means all of us can be one step closer to achieving more of the same. So much of this movie deals with “infection,” but in seeing the Shikishima not only cheering that happiness but allowing it to grow even amidst wartime, I think that can be contagious and hopefully spread to their neighbors, and then larger units of society.

GKIDS releases “Godzilla Minus Zero” in theaters on Friday, November 6.