Godzilla Minus One Director Reveals How Just 35 People Did 610 VFX Shots in Eight Months
84Back in the late 70s, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are taking audiences to the final frontier — or bringing the final frontier to Earth. A young Takashi Yamazaki is rapt at the massive spacecrafts onscreen, and whatever doubts he'd had about this Spielberg person quickly give way to awe. Coincidentally, the very same VFX studio that captured Yamazaki's starry eyes in middle school, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, would someday become his competition, contending for an Academy Award with his colossal epic, Godzilla Minus One.
For the final feature in our FYC screening series with Landmark Theatres, Collider was excited to sit down with Yamazaki to discuss what our own Chase Hutchinson calls, "one of the most thrilling takes on the character in recent memory." Godzilla Minus One smashed into theaters in December 2023 and has since garnered critical acclaim, an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and has even become Japan's highest-grossing film in the U.S. in history. It's an ambitious take on Toho's most iconic kaiju that explores another look at the titan's World War II origins, and the people and homes that were devastated by them.
During a conversation with Collider's Steve Weintraub, Yamazaki talks about how Spielberg, a filmmaking god as far as he's concerned, first inspired him to become a director, what it was like meeting him at the Oscar luncheon, and what this nomination means to him and his crew. This marks only the second time a director has been nominated, placing Yamazaki in the same ranks as Stanley Kubrick. He discusses how they managed to tackle 610 VFX shots in only eight months, which scenes proved to be the most challenging, the Godzilla Minus One sequel timeline, and so much more.
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