Behind the Scenes of Godzilla Minus Zero, Toho’s Mightiest Blockbuster Yet
This gigantic blockbuster was made by a surprisingly small and close-knit crew.
Godzilla Minus Zero is a big movie in more ways than one. There’s the titanic anticipation among fans for the next movie in Toho’s longest-running kaiju series, as well as the immense pressure on director Takashi Yamazaki and his crew to follow up the historic success of Godzilla Minus One. “There was certainly a lot of pressure, but by embracing that pressure, we had to challenge ourselves to dig even deeper and find something very original,” producer Kazuaki Kishida tells Inverse. And yet, the crew that accomplished this massive technical and creative endeavor was much smaller than you might think.
Kishida was one of four members of the Minus Zero creative team who came to this year’s New York Comic-Con to talk about their contributions to the film, which premiered at another of the Big Apple’s major fall events, the New York Film Festival, where Inverse’s Katie Rife called it “a triumph of special effects.” Those effects were handled by Shirogumi, the VFX company where Yamazaki has worked since 1986. The company and its culture came up quite a bit in Inverse’s conversations with Kishida and his fellow below-the-line creatives at Comic-Con, who share a sense of camaraderie and pride in their work that was obvious both at the panel and in Inverse’s interviews with the crew.
The Water Boy
Visual effects artist Tatsuji Nojima is known around the Shirogumi office as “The Water Boy,” a nickname he earned through his experiments with creating realistic water VFX. (Godzilla emerges from, and returns to, the ocean in every one of his movies, so there’s a great need for this type of work.) This started as a hobby, but eventually Nojima’s efforts caught the eye of Yamazaki, who promoted Nojima from a humble compositor to his current role as a VFX artist. Nojima was 26 when he won an Academy Award alongside his colleagues on Godzilla Minus One, making him the first Gen-Z Oscar winner in the category.
“There wasn't a single live-action shot that we could use to shoot practical or use as a plate.”
Godzilla Minus Zero was shot for IMAX; this increased Nojima’s workload, as the larger frame size increased the number of pixels in each frame. At the panel, Nojima broke down the scene of Godzilla rising from the ocean depicted in the still above: Unlike similar shots in Godzilla Minus One, “there wasn't a single live-action shot that we could use to shoot practical or use as a plate” for this sequence, Nojima said, revealing that 2 billion pixels eventually went into the water effects for this single shot. “To put the shot together, there were two of us — the animator and myself,” he said, to gasps from the audience.
After the panel, Inverse asked Nojima if he planned to stay within this very specialized realm of special effects. “I’m starting to branch outside of just doing water,” he said, adding that he had also worked on Ghidorah’s blue gravity beam for Minus Zero. “Going forward, I'd love to continue to pursue and find visual expression that none of us have ever seen before, something completely fresh.”
An Unexpected Sound
As the film’s sound designer and foley artist, Natsuko Inoue’s main concern was creating a distinctive audio identity for Godzilla’s adversary, Ghidorah. At the NYCC panel, she described the importance of recording analog sounds: “We're trying to create these roars of creatures that don't exist,” she said. “But by using speakers and projecting [these sounds] into the real world, capturing the reverb, the echo, the reflection of the sound with the mic, it manifests it in our world. And that's what we did with Godzilla Minus Zero. We literally took sound and manifested these creatures and made them exist in our world as we know it.”
This was followed by a very cool BTS video that’s unfortunately not online as of this writing, following Inoue and her crew as they traveled to a dam outside of Tokyo, set up huge stacks of amps around the huge, multi-layered structure, and recorded the sound of Ghidorah’s roar as it echoed against the wet concrete. She then took the audio back to the studio, and with the help of production sound mixer Hisafumi Takeuchi, she layered the different sounds captured at the dam on top of each other, adding processing for additional distortion.
After the panel, Inverse asked Inoue why they went to a dam specifically to re-record Ghidorah’s roar. “For Godzilla Minus One, we went to a baseball stadium, played Godzilla's roar, and recorded it,” she said. “With Godzilla Minus Zero, we wanted a more twisted texture to Ghidorah’s roar. So we thought a lot about what type of environment might give us an unexpected sound. And we thought that the curved slope and architecture of the dam, if we hit it with sound, might dissipate it in a very interesting kind of way.”
It was a lot of extra effort, but it was worth it: “The first time we sent that roar out on the speakers, I could see the relief and the confidence in everyone's eyes, and we knew we had Godzilla and Ghidorah,” Inoue said.
Loud and Soft
For Takeuchi, the biggest challenge going in to Godzilla Minus Zero was finding the right balance between quiet and loud. “Of course, fans are going to go to movie theaters expecting a lot of intense sounds,” Takeuchi said at the NYFF panel. “But as important for me is the contrast in the sound. We [could] just crank the volume up and make the whole movie very loud, [but] that would diminish the emotional journey people go through.” So his emphasis was on a dynamic sound mix, as well as holding back on big audio cues — Ghidorah’s roar, for example, or Akira Ifukube’s iconic “Godzilla Theme” — for as long as possible in order to increase their impact.
“I think there are different types of loud.”
But, of course, a movie with kaiju battles is going to have its thunderous moments as well. “I think there are different types of loud,” Takeuchi told Inverse after the NYCC panel. There’s the “one [that] you want to experience, and just simply loud where it gets distracting, and takes you out of the film.” While mixing the battle scenes, Takeuchi started with ear-splitting and gradually deducted decibels until he reached something more comfortable: “Fine-tuning the loudness comes down to triaging for me, where you start to subtract things that aren't necessary and aren't delivering information to the audience,” he said.
The goal was to find a sweet spot where the viewer can feel Godzilla’s roar rumbling through their body, but don’t feel the urge to cover their ears. “There’s a point where it almost distorts, but even that becomes part of the experience, because it makes you feel something,” he said.
Filmmaking, Japanese Style
The financial success of Godzilla Minus One gave the Minus Zero team the opportunity to scale up the film’s budget, and the size of the production team along with it. Still, Kishida told Inverse that Shirogumi only added a few people to the VFX department for this latest film, going from a staff of 35 to around 50 people.
The reason for this, according to the producer, was basically to preserve the company culture: “Shirogumi could have chosen to scale their team up quite drastically, but they didn't choose that path,” he told Inverse. “That's part of Shirogumi's company culture. They want all the artists on the same floor. Yamazaki-san can roll around on his chair and look at everyone's monitor, seeing what they're working on. That increases the speed of the feedback.”
At the NYCC panel, Kishida referred to the practice of “getting the best performance out of a smaller team,” as he put it to Inverse, as the “Japanese style” of filmmaking. As the film’s writer, director, VFX supervisor, and chief storyboard artist, Yamazaki personifies this approach, according to his producer. “He has a very clear vision, [and he] has a path to how he realizes and sees that vision on the screen. So we create a common language among the team of what we're trying to achieve before we even put it into an audio-visual format.”
“It was a very efficient way to make a movie without a lot of waste.”
What’s the benefit of working so small? Aside from the sense of unified purpose, Kishida says the constant communication that comes from having the entire effects team working in the same office leads to more efficient filmmaking. “I want to say there may have been one scene that we fully cut,” he said. But “camera angles aside, we used all the shots that we took. So it was a very efficient way to make a movie without a lot of waste.” And with the amount of effort that clearly went into every shot in this movie, not wasting footage is just common sense.
