Original subtitles

Why do people love giant monsters?

I don't know.

Why I love giant monsters is because they wreak havoc.

I love monsters a lot.

And to have a monster that's the size of a skyscraper

is just the best thing in the world.

There isn't a culture on Earth that doesn't

tell stories about monsters.

I think because they represent part of ourselves.

It's that constant battle between our more elevated

human nature and are much more animalistic, ferocious, feral,

and violent, and scary nature.

With most giant monster kaiju films,

there's some upset giant creature

that is getting from point A to point

B, whatever its purpose is, and just

messing up things in its path.

It's as simple as that.

What are the must see giant monster movies?

Horror film, science fiction films,

they mirror the anxieties of the age.

And the 1950s was the Communist menace

and fear of nuclear war, atomic war,

and the effects of radiation.

So you had all of these movies like Invasion

of the Body Snatchers...

They're after you.

They're after all of us, our wives, our children, everyone.

They're here already!

...I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

So people look the same, but they're not.

There's some thing that crept into Bill's body.

They're evil like your neighbor.

It could be an alien, or a pod person, or a commie.

Or giant bugs, because of radioactive fallout

from mankind's messing with atomic energy.

Them! is probably the one that leaps to mind.

Them!

Them!

Them!

Them! is a classic giant bug movie.

One of the family of Formicidae, an ant.

An ant? I don't believe it. It's not possible.

When these creatures become so big,

that they can dominate the human race,

I mean, how do you fight that?

How do you fight this creature that has zero interest in you

other than as maybe food?

The practical effects that were used,

seeing those giant mandibles in frame and people

touching the hairy bristles that were just

giant porcupine quills, that stuff really,

really was quite visceral.

You think about a movie like Them!

and you think about the look on people's face.

The performance is everything, right?

Because we can't linger our camera

too long on these creatures because you're

going to really quickly see that this is pretty ridiculous.

I can only imagine how difficult it was to perform

amongst those physical props.

So as an actor, you have to give it your all.

It's very cool to watch how they did this.

And what they did with the budget they had.

And it makes you wish that a lot of these movies that came out

in the next few years had as much of a budget

because some of them didn't quite look as good.

We just made spiders big, ants big.

Whatever it was, just made them bigger.

Was it as creative as it could be?

Not necessarily, but it was more effective

in that each of these giant creatures was totally relatable.

We know what a spider is.

We know what an ant is.

And to imagine them that big, that's the horrifying part is we

know what it is.

I have never seen a black and white film

about a irradiated giant animals on the attack,

which I haven't loved.

There is something some eternal 10-year-old inside of me that

just wants to see giant spiders or giant ants march on Santa Fe.

Jesus!

What the hell is going on?

I mean, what the hell is going on!

They might not be very big compared to King Kong

or Godzilla, but one of my favorite giant monsters

are the Graboids in Tremors, which

are these underground slugs that basically have the ability

to like jet propel themselves underneath the Nevada desert

and then pop up and eat people whenever they please.

Tremors is the best monster movie of the '90s, full stop.

Probably one of the smartest monster movies

you're going to get just in general.

The characterization in that movie is fantastic.

The ensemble is amazing.

It's scary.

The humor works.

Roger that, Burt, and congratulations.

Be advised, however, there are two more,

repeat, two more mother humpers.

It takes two guys that we

all can relate to in some way.

They're are good old boys.

They're guys that, like, you would have gone to high school

with.

They have no special skills, really.

They are not scientists.

I don't even know if they're bright.

Well, I'll tell you.

Nobody handles garbage better than we do.

And then it puts them in a monster movie.

Tremors also capitalizes on the Jaws POV

like you were in the killer perspective.

No way!

And that is horrifying.

And the practical effects of that movie still hold up.

When they trick the one Graboid into smashing into the cement

wall, and then they, like, dig up one end of it,

and Kevin Bacon picks it up.

I found the ass end.

You feel the scope.

You feel how big that thing is because they created that thing, you know?

And it just feels real.

When the Graboid comes smashing through Burt Gummer's wall,

and the tentacles come out, it's just so good.

It does kind of take that old school Western idea

that if anybody tries to invade us, we've got guns,

and we're Americans, and we'll blow your ass away.

It's got that message, but done in an amped up

kind of satirical way.

Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't you,

you bastard?

There is a gleefulness to the movie

that's very hard to recreate.

It's been often imitated, but very hard to recreate.

There's just something very genuine.

It was coming from a genuine place.

And no one saw it coming.

I want to watch this movie tonight.

So good.

Get inside! Get inside!

Cloverfield is a perfect Godzilla film for America

because you care about the people.

There is nothing I can do about that.

The girl that I love more than anything is dying,

and it's my fault. She should have been with me tonight,

and I let her go.

Cloverfield makes

you care about this romance falling apart

and these goofy young people in Manhattan.

...and bring some guy to my party?

You haven't talked to me in weeks.

- God, man. - Sorry.

Come on.

And you're seeing these emotional dramas between people.

This soap opera element of it is very American.

Rob and Beth totally had sex together.

I knew it.

And it's about their survival.

Cloverfield showed you can be a successful American

young person, your life is great,

and at the drop of a hat...

And hang on to the people that you care about the most.

God.

God.

What the hell was that?

What was that?

It can all be taken away by terrorists, or giant kaiju, or

an invading army, or whatever.

Like, you are not safe.

No matter how much money they put into the military,

it's not going to last forever.

And it's coming.

And partly, it already has come with 9/11.

I think without taking into account 9/11

as context with Cloverfield, you're

missing the point in the way that you would miss the point

if you didn't talk about the atomic bomb

when watching Godzilla.

It's the same connection, and it's why it works.

It works because we're exorcizing

demons through this film.

Cloverfield, for me, is one of those movies that just feels

about as close as you can get to seeing a giant monster attack

because the way it was shot.

You're in it.

Doing a found footage approach to that, I think,

was absolutely brilliant because it's putting you on the ground.

You're basically looking at eye level,

looking at soldiers running around,

and all the camera has to do is go...

and you're just seeing a giant monster

face looking down at you.

That's really horrifying.

The most important part of the Cloverfield creature

that I think dare I say why it was successful

was the fact that we understood his motivation.

The common trait with kaiju type creatures, giant monsters,

is that they are just knocking over buildings

with no specific reason other than violence.

And Cloverfield was a newborn, brand new baby hatched out

of an egg that found itself in an environment

that it was afraid of.

So it was never really trying to destroy New York.

It was just trying to find its mom.

Are you guys seeing this shit right now?

My god.

God.

If you can imbue a creature with a motivation, one

that works for the story, it makes

everyone's job so much easier.

And it makes the consumption of that creature

by an audience so much more easy and rich.

Nope.

Nope, my gosh.

I haven't seen a movie in so long

where something as simple as a cloud became menacing.

OJ, it's in the cloud.

It's like the other side of a Joni Mitchell song, right?

Like, clouds, when I see them up and down.

And now, I'm fucking terrified.

In Jordan Peele's Nope, you've got this spacecraft that

is ultimately revealed to not be a spacecraft,

but to actually be this interdimensional,

interstellar creature that has just decided

to live above the desert.

And then once we get into that creature,

as it devours those people, it squishes them in the mouth.

It was so good and so singular.

I had never seen anything like that before.

Once you realize that people are getting sucked up

into this thing and then going through its digestive tract,

I was just like, this is awesome.

And then it, like, when it regurgitates

all of that blood on the house, that's nightmare imagery.

You never imagine a farmhouse being covered in blood.

Jordan takes you inside and you're living what

this character is experiencing.

then you pop out for the wide.

Every kaiju movie is about nature.

And this is absolutely a kaiju film.

Even though there's not a fight, it's still a giant monster

and it's eating people, but there is no expectation

that they're going to kill it.

Website like Cyber Dominion will

pay $5,000 to $100k for photographic evidence

of UFOs and shit.

They just want to take a photo of it.

But it opens up,

you know, into this kind of butterfly.

It's more dangerous because it's beautiful.

But yet, it becomes more lethal when it really reveals itself.

It's a film about the feeling of being observed

and the observer.

You can identify with the alien.

You can identify with the band of heroes

because we're all in that space where

we're going back from being the subject to being the watcher.

Are we behind the camera?

Or are we in front of the camera?

That's a weird position to be in.

And that drives you crazy.

And you see what happens to the monkey.

You see what happens to the monster.

And you see what happens to people of color

when they're treated like cattle to be herded

or anything that takes your difference

and makes it a gimmick, something to sell.

So people who say that that movie didn't have the same kind

of cultural, or socioeconomic, or racial undertone the other

two of his films had are wrong.

It's right there.

They're somewhat slow and lethargic until inflamed

by the smell of blood.

What if circumstances magnified one of them

in size and strength?

Then expect something that's fiercer,

more cruel, and deadly than anything

that ever walked the Earth.

There's nothing out there.

Nothing in the mist.

Man, as the dominant species of life on Earth,

will probably be extinct.

You know, King Kong and Godzilla

are not just film history, but they are cultural iconography.

You know, like, they almost represent like America and Japan

in various ways, but, like, they just are pop culture.

Like, they transcend just being, here's these great movies.

My all-time favorite giant monster

film from the classic era, you've got to go with King Kong.

There's a magic to that movie

that is really timeless.

It's still galvanizes you when you watch it.

Did you ever hear of Kong?

It's pure fantasy at a time when things like John Carter...

you know, Burroughs and all that stuff...

was still so popular.

So the idea of going out into the jungle

and finding dinosaurs, and giant spiders, and King Kong,

it still felt like that was possible.

There were unknown parts of the world that you could discover.

King Kong is worshipped as a god

on this island of natives.

And he's not a bad guy.

He's just a misunderstood big giant ape

who happens to fall in love with Fay Wray

because she's just so beautiful.

And he actually saves her life.

And the human men are horrified by this romance

because he's a giant ape.

But we've got something he wants.

Yeah, something he won't get again.

One of the elements of the original film that isn't given

the credit that it's due is the set design of that jungle

and the matte paintings.

It didn't look like a jungle.

It looked like a fairy tale.

And that allowed... the audience's suspension of

disbelief went along with that.

The 1933 Kong, it still holds up

and it's still a pinnacle.

And it's still like a masterwork not only of like storytelling

for the era, but like, technically what they were doing

on display in terms of, like, creating this like fully living,

breathing creature, you know, that really was cotton

and rabbit fur, you know, Kong brought that to life in a way

that I don't think anything else had done before.

There's something so moving

about him lost in the city and fighting for his life.

He's destructive.

He's killing people.

He's smashing planes out of the sky,

but we're rooting for him the whole way.

It's not really so much about, no, we were

attacked by a giant monster.

It's really more about we kind of brought something

here that shouldn't have been here

that was out of its element.

And we shouldn't have done that.

And it's kind of sad and it's kind of our fault.

A really bitter sweet kind of movie,

and that's why I think it really resonated with so many people

and still does.

What does it matter?

Airplanes got him.

It wasn't the airplanes.

It was beauty killed the beast.

Peter Jackson's King Kong was a work of art, technically.

I think the smartest thing about that particular King Kong

was the performance capture utilized

to get that King Kong to be emotive

and to be humanized, have the audiences feel

the empathy that we had only felt

with the original King Kong.

He spanned that distance of time.

And it's like Peter Jackson did what the first King Kong did,

which was make you feel for it.

Peter made a great movie

that was sort of a modern retelling of the original film

with modern special effects.

The thing that was lost for me in it

was the fact that Kong was no longer a capital-M Movie Monster

who stood upright and was bipedal,

and instead was just turned into a giant kind

of silverback gorilla.

One of the things that was really important to me

Skull Island was

bringing back that capital-M Movie Monster vibe.

Early on in my thought process, it

was almost like what would have happened if Kong didn't

get taken off the island.

Could this Kong actually just be an extension

of the older version?

Truly, the first image in my mind

was Kong just silhouetted by the sun set against that orange sky

with the choppers flanking him.

And I've never seen a monster movie

where you bleed in, apocalypse now

over some insane kaiju battle.

I've just never seen that.

And I think so much of cinema right now

and preserving the religious element

of the theatrical experience is like giving people something

they haven't seen before.

I don't know what it is about Godzilla that

is so compelling to people that it's still

much more so than King Kong I think, in a pop cultural sense.

People love him and are drawn to him.

It appeals to something primal that much

more so than King Kong.

You know, Frankenstein is more popular than the Wolfman.

I don't know why.

American audiences know this character as Godzilla,

but the name "Gojira" actually is pretty self-explanatory

because it's a combination of "gorilla,"

the Japanese pronunciation of gorilla,

and then "kujira," which is the Japanese pronunciation of whale.

So it's this large creature, you mash them together,

and you have a creature that can traverse land and sea.

There would be no Godzilla without The Beast

from 20,000 Fathoms.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

The idea of atomic power

unleashing a natural predator was really

most potent in that film.

When we released the bomb, the heat

generated melted the ice in which this beast

was imprisoned and freed it.

There's a bomb testing.

This ancient dinosaur comes out and wreaks

havoc through America.

And from this kind of humble, but very popular movie,

you get Godzilla.

And Godzilla takes this idea of nuclear power

unleashing a natural predator.

And gives it a resonance that Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

didn't really have.

Godzilla might be one of the quintessential examples of using

horror or sort of fantastic elements

to deal with trauma in a way that maybe if you dealt

with it more directly, then people wouldn't just

wouldn't want to talk about it.

This is nine years after the end of World War II.

Think about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

And I don't think it was even a complaint that the weapons had

been used against Japan so much as the realization

that there was now a new terror in the world.

And the representation of this terror

would be in the form of this giant monster figure.

When you go to the original '54 Gojira, it is

a dark story of cultural PTSD.

Then Godzilla became, in the ensuing years, a toy.

They sort of redesigned the Godzilla a little bit

to seem more kid friendly.

Eyes became a little bit rounder and a little bit more cartoon

like because they realized that Godzilla was

becoming a sort of superhero that kids

really latched on to and loved.

And I was one of those kids.

So I still have a soft spot for that design.

As a kid, you want the giant monster to be your friend.

And with Godzilla, it was fun to cultivate sort of that feeling

that he's on our side and he loves us, which is not

really where it started at all.

To be a little kid and getting

to see this stuff on TV and these bright insane colors

and this music just, you know,

it was just overwhelming.

To this day, if they're on, I watch them.

There's this tendency to want to dismiss the silly films,

but even the ones that maybe don't have a deeper meaning,

I also enjoy.

I mean, I'm someone who likes, you know,

Godzilla versus Megalon.

Some people just aren't fans of that.

The Godzilla of Godzilla versus Megalon

is not the Godzilla of the original Gojira.

It's an arc in that series where it starts

off very gritty and realistic.

And over time, it becomes a parody of itself.

They go through this cycle.

And then they have to reset.

And then they do that a lot.

When I was a kid, Godzilla was more like a hero, you know.

And he was fighting and beating up all other monsters.

And that's what I wanted.

And I knew that, back in 2004, this

is the last opportunity to make old school, man and suit,

Godzilla, which I love.

I knew that, you know, they're going to reboot it,

you know, but it's not going to be like the Godzilla

that I loved when I was a kid.

Godzilla can be hero, can be, you know, scary, can be fun.

It's just like the final big firework carnival.

So let's have fun.

A great Japanese kaiju has a mixture of creature

that comes from nature.

So there are elements of reptiles or mammals,

but they also have a mythological elements to them,

almost a fantastical aspect to their design.

Typically, they don't just take an animal

that we're familiar with and just, you know,

make it 200 feet tall.

There's always flourishes to them.

What I find so compelling about the Japanese point of view

is that they are fearless in respects to aesthetics

and certain choices about these creatures because they go crazy.

I mean, some of them are absolutely zany.

Did you ever see the movie Big Man Japan?

That is nuts.

The stuff makes no sense whatsoever

biologically speaking.

But that's what's so wonderful about it.

As a creative person, I realize how stifled my creativity must

be because I could never come up with that kind

of wonderful lunacy.

For me, Mothra always

has a special place in my heart because, ultimately, she

ends up being a mother, right?

So there you go. Come on.

You got to go with the mother.

The idea of, yeah, big moth.

That'll be scary.

Well, how do we summon it?

Let's have identical twin tiny people and they'll sing.

Mosuraya, Mosura.

It's like, wait, what?

I remember watching Mothra, and they were on,

and my dad coming in, like, what the hell are you watching?

Because it is hard to explain.

Ghidorah was always my favorite

of the entire Toho stable.

Back in the first run, they tended to, like,

give the monsters human qualities,

and anthropomorphize them a little,

and kind of made them almost cuddly.

Ghidorah was the one who didn't.

Ghidorah was a vicious bastard in every film he appeared in.

And, you know, it's a great design.

It's like a classical dragon with three

heads and the golden color.

It's just a very striking creature to look at.

Gamera is my second favorite giant

monster kaiju from Japanese kaiju monster movies.

He is a turtle.

He's essentially like Mothra, represents

the good and the heroic.

And he inspires hope in people that

are being attacked by other giant kaijus

or other forms of evil.

Now those films are really kind of silly,

and Gamera is fighting a monster that

was basically a giant butcher knife with eyes and legs.

And then Shusuke Kaneko came along in the '90s

and completely reimagined the character, put him

into a series of serious, mature, beautifully

crafted films starting with Gamera:

Guardian of the Universe.

Then Gamera 3, I think is, out of all

the Japanese kaiju films from any studio, it's my favorite.

It has a really powerful story.

It has some really interesting themes to it.

It has amazing monster action.

And it is just shot and composed and dramatized in a really,

really powerful way.

The Gamera 3 takes a goofy impossible character

and turns it into a pretty serious film

about the poisonous effects of anger and revenge

on the human soul.

Japan had a closed society for 400 years

in which access to the country was strictly

limited that undoubtedly has shaped

a kind of cultural sensibility for many, many years, centuries

after.

And maybe kaiju are a place where some of this

gets worked through and worked out

this idea of things coming from outside, from beneath the ocean,

from the sky.

So all of these things being dislodged from the Earth

and coming strangely enough at Japan.

Before Bong Joon-ho directed Parasite,

he directed The Host, which is a giant monster film which

is actually about income inequality in South Korea,

but by extension, and throughout the industrial capitalist world.

And so you do get the thrills of a giant monster movie,

but you also get this kind of touching, funny, slightly

heartbreaking story about people who are living on the margins

because they're living, you know,

making it paycheck to paycheck.

You know, the first 30 minutes of that film

from meeting the family and the river attack,

that's perfect filmmaking.

And the creature, that in itself feels fresh.

And it was so inelegant in the way that it moved

and the way that it almost tripped over itself.

And you just had this sense that it lived a pained existence.

The beauty of his filmmaking is all of the set

pieces relate to character.

When this monster starts tearing through things,

in the panic, he loses track of his daughter,

tries to rescue her, grabs the wrong girl's hand.

Looks behind him and the one thing

that he was supposed to do right,

which is protect his daughter, fails.

And you have that great shot of her just

there, as like, you know, it's framed

in a way where the creature isn't even fully in the shot.

Its tail grabs her and rips her out of the frame.

So this family who have had this rough patchy relationship

now have to come together to break away from the government

that's trying to keep them quarantined

to go find this missing girl.

It was layered with great creature design, cool ideas,

and then this Korean point of view that was...

all of it was different than what I was expecting.

So the film kind of left me gobsmacked at the end of it.

I was like, this was powerful.

Bong Joon-ho and that movie, like,

it's just such an incredible piece of filmmaking where all

of the spectacle, all of the genre,

all of the things that people would normally write off

as, like, it's just monsters running around, whatever, like,

it's all based in character, and it's all

based in like relationships.

Let's do this.

The less said about the Roland

Emmerich Godzilla, the better.

But I have to say, I was very impressed

with the first American Godzilla of the trilogy

that came out more recently, Gareth Edwards' film.

Gareth Edwards made this film called

Monsters before Godzilla.

It was really one of those DIY efforts

where Gareth had a hand in everything

even the VFX and creation of the monsters themselves,

but it was one of those kind of handheld, you know,

found footage movies.

The monsters were just used sparingly.

And, you know, he did the same thing

with Godzilla for better or for worse or to the detriment

of some fans.

Open fire!

But it was smart, you know.

It was just smart to blend that kind of docu style

to both movies.

I really enjoyed the fact that it was shot from kind

of a human's eye view in a sense where

you don't quite see everything that's going on as you wouldn't.

If Godzilla was really rampaging through your city,

you would not get a great look at him.

Edwards really kind of choreographed the whole thing

in such a way that you really identified

with the people looking at this giant monster

that's come to destroy them.

We've just been wired and coded

that when we see a giant monster movie,

we got to get the spectacle.

And so I respect Gareth for doing what he did.

And then, of course, Mike Dougherty steps in,

and he's like, here we go.

Let me give you...

let me give you all the monsters,

and you're going to see them all the time.

It's tough because there's

a lot of baggage.

Whenever you're dealing with a legacy character,

there are expectations that the fans have.

But at the same time, you can't craft a movie just for the fans

because then you're alienating your larger general audience.

So you have to find the right balance between the two.

Dougherty's movie, I mean, I don't know what

else you could want, you know?

I mean, I still watch every once in a while.

I'll throw the Rodan attack scene where Rodan

shows up for the first time.

Bear McCreary's music is just like, boom, boom, boom, boom.

We got jet fighters flying in.

Rodan doing spins.

I get chills even thinking about it.

I'm like, this is exactly what I want from a kaiju movie.

This is incredible.

When I came on board, they said,

well, we want to do a sequel.

Would you mind using Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah?

And I was like, yes.

Like, no, I would not mind.

I mean, that's just like the best party in the world

this to go hang out with that crew.

I actually wanted to use more.

But then Adam Wingard just went, I'm going to top that.

I'm going to give you a buddy movie, where King Kong is

the hero, and he's John McClane, and he's

going to take on Godzilla.

Godzilla versus Kong has

a gorilla that uses a magic ax.

It's like... and it's funny.

I believe King Kong.

I don't believe he would use an ax.

You draw your own line.

Godzilla versus Kong, I thought

was very fun and a welcome surprise, but it just...

we haven't figured out how to make you feel anything the way

that you felt something with the first Godzilla.

We just haven't figured it out because he's not ours.

He doesn't belong to us.

He belongs to them.

He belongs to the Japanese.

I think any good franchise, it's

able to constantly reboot itself to reflect

the fears of the time.

And so if the first Godzilla film

was reflecting fear of the nuclear age,

then you get to like Hedorah.

You know, he was called the smog monster which

is way less cool in America.

But, you know, Hedorah is technically an alien,

but he feeds off pollution.

And that was coming out in the '70s

when, like, Tokyo was famously gross polluted city.

And to me, in addition to Hedorah being,

you know, symbolism for, like, Tokyo and pollution,

he's just a great foe in that canon.

The Godzilla films always started as a response

to things that were affecting the Japanese people.

And the same thing with Shin Godzilla.

It's hard not to see that film, which

was released in 2016, as a reflection on Japan's response

to 2011, the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear crisis

with the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

And Japanese government's

inability to respond quickly, and swiftly,

and protect its citizens.

It is a funny movie, but it is about almost like

Terry Gilliam Brazil-esque in terms

of the madness of bureaucracy.

Like, let's have a meeting to have a meeting about having

a meeting about how we deal with a giant kaiju in this country.

Godzilla's outside, and I'm stuck in meetings.

But that was part of the point that we

have to deal with bureaucracy and decision making.

And I get it, and it's great.

But Godzilla Minus One is a whole different level

of Godzilla movie.

And if it weren't for the original Godzilla,

I would say it's the best.

It's really, really delving

into characterization, and not only that, but the waste

and the horror of war itself.

You can almost take Godzilla out of Godzilla Minus One

and you would still have a hugely compelling

story, the devastation of war from the Japanese point of view.

I really haven't seen that many films that I think really

tackle what it felt like to have gone through this experience.

Midway through, there's possibly

the greatest Godzilla destroys a district

in Japan sequence ever filmed.

There's this thing that happens with this tail

where his spikes jut out.

And, you know, like, something really, really bad is about to happen.

It had me crying, which I had no idea would be

happening in a Godzilla movie.

The Godzilla monster effects are so much fun.

The devastation is, of course, everything

you want from a Godzilla movie, but it has this beautiful core

that you walk out of the theater feeling like, yes, human life

is precious, every single one.

And that's not what you expect from a Godzilla movie.

Ultimately, there's something about kaiju

that is very cinematic, right?

You go to the movie theater.

You look at the big screen.

And so things were better suited to the big screen

than big monsters destroying cities, right?

The appeal of giant monsters and kaiju

is that these are forces so big, so beyond our control

that we can't even begin to truly

defend ourselves against them.

In fact, they sometimes don't even really notice we're there.

Like, it gives us the impression of how we treat insects,

how we crush their houses, and step

on them like they're nothing.

I think this is very true of most monsters and most kaiju,

which is that at the end of the day,

there's actually like an intense tragedy to them

and an intense loneliness to them.

Whether be King Kong, or Godzilla, or any monsters,

everybody, every day, the most painful thing

that happens over and over again is that you're misunderstood.

And to me, kaiju and monster films just

fundamentally tap into that core feeling of being misunderstood.

I believe he is the power.

Mothra.

Gamera.

Have you found anything yet?

Say over. - I just said it.

- I know. Say it again. - Over.

I know an enemy when I see it.

Two, three.

We can capture him alive.

Why, you're crazy.

There's been a lot of great Japanese horror films

that are very moody and subtle.

And then on the other side of the coin,

you have movies that are absolutely out of their minds.

This guy has been shoving metal into his own leg.

40 kids or whatever killing each other

in the most brutal of ways.

You could just feel everyone just be like,

"Oh, my God."