Frank Darabont was recently drafted in to Gareth Edwards' forthcoming Godzilla reboot, and the writer/director has been talking about the work he's done on the film's new script.
"What I found very interesting about Godzilla is that he started off definitely as a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki," explains Darabont to io9 . "And some of the atom bomb testing we were doing in the South Pacific in the subsequent years.
"The giant terrifying force of nature that comes and stomps the shit out of your city, that was Godzilla. Filtered through the very fanciful imaginations of the Japanese perception. And then he became Clifford the Big Red Dog in the subsequent films. He became the mascot of Japan, he became the protector of Japan… I never really quite understood, the shift.
"What we’re trying to do with the new movie is not have it camp, not have it be campy," he continues. "We’re kind of taking a cool new look at it. But with a lot of tradition in the first film. We want this to be a terrifying force of nature. And what was really cool, for me, is there was a very compelling human drama that I got to weave into it.
"It’s not that cliched, thinly disguised romance or bromance, or whatever. It’s different, it’s a different set of circumstances than you’re used to seeing. And that’s tremendously exciting as a writer when you’re asked to do something else."
Godzilla opens in the UK on 16 May 2014.
