It's quiet - maybe too quiet in the multiplexes right now. With Europe in thrall to the World Cup, the big Hollywood studios are holding their fire until the competition ends on July 12th. But five days later, a 400foot tall mutant reptile lands on our shores, and the blockbuster season begins in earnest. Courtesy of director, Roland Emmerich, and producer, Dean Devlin, - the team which brought us Independence Day - Godzilla has been widely touted as the big event movie of the summer. Stretched out on sofas in a London hotel, the pair seem relaxed and unconcerned about its prospects, despite a lukewarm reaction from critics and audiences in the US.
"Roland is the president and I'm the minister of defence," says Devlin, describing their working relationship. "He makes decisions, and I make sure they're carried out. Also, I suppose he brings a European sensibility to the films, while I'm the child of Hollywood parents, and have more of a popcorn mentality."
Movies don't come much more popcorny than Godzilla. It was 44 years ago that Japanese producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, came up with an idea for a film about a 400-foot tall reptile attacking Tokyo. After flying over the Bikini Atoll test site, Tanaka decided the creature would be raised from its slumber by a nuclear explosion, a plot point of some resonance to a Japanese audience less than a decade after Hiroshima.
Tanaka called his monster Gojira, joining the English word "gorilla" with kujira, the Japanese for whale, although the American version was re-cut and re-named Godzilla, with extra footage featuring Raymond Burr as a reporter. Godzilla was always something of a minority cult in the West, but in Japan the franchise went on to spawn 21 sequels, in which the giant lizard combated other rubber-suited bit players such as the Smog Monster and Mechagodzilla. Over the years, the character of Godzilla became more sympathetic and childfriendly, and the films became inextricably associated with a kind of hilarious low-budget kitschness, where the chief pleasure lay in laughing at the obviously cardboard sets and effects.
But with a brand name recognised around the world, and a central character who seemed to chime in perfectly with the modern fascination with dinosaurs, it's hardly surprising Sony Pictures was enthusiastic about a new, bigbudget version of the story. In fact, Godzilla had been in development for several years before Emmerich and Devlin agreed to take it on (at one point, Speed director Jan De Bont was signed up to direct).
The pair had earlier passed on the project, seeing the script as too tongue-in-cheek for their particular brand of comic-strip action. "We had problems with the script, which was essentially about two monsters fighting while the human characters looked on," says Devlin. "We weren't interested in doing that, but we thought we could concentrate more on the human characters and also get that classic monster movie pathos, where you feel sorry for the creature when it dies." Junking almost all of the script they'd been given, the two went back to a storyline closer to Tanaka's first movie. The nuclear theme of the original was updated to the 1990s, with the French shouldering much of the blame for Godzilla's mutation because of their nuclear tests in the Pacific.
In this incarnation, Godzilla makes his way to New York, forcing the evacuation of Manhattan and hiding out in the city's subways, avoiding all attempts to flush him out. Matthew Broderick is the scientist who comes to understand what's going on, Maria Pitillo is an ambitious TV reporter, and Jean Reno is a mysterious French secret agent. The film has, to put it mildly, echoes of other movies (Frankenstein, King Kong, Jaws and Aliens spring to mind) continuing its makers' magpie inclinations when it comes to plotting.
German-born Emmerich and self-confessed Hollywood brat Devlin have been close collaborators since Devlin acted in Emmerich's 1989 intergalactic war movie Moon 44. Devlin hung up his acting boots to concentrate on writing and producing, working with Emmerich on the JeanClaude Van Damme vehicle Universal Soldier, the enjoyably trashy sci-fi fantasy Stargate and the huge hit that was Independence Day. With their talent for re-inventing and re-invigorating hoary old genres for the 1990s, the pair must have seemed the ideal choice to tackle the Godzilla project.
Not surprisingly, there are no rubber monster suits on show this time around - unlike its predecessors, this modern creature is an amalgam of animatronics and computer-generated effects. Shooting on the streets of Manhattan, the actors didn't get the chance to see their giant co-star, who was represented on set by three men carrying a long pole. Emmerich and Devlin are specialists in sci-fi and fantasy, but Godzilla is their most technically demanding and effects-driven movie to date. Devlin doesn't believe technology gets in the way of the movie, though: "Everything in films is an effect - the sets, the costumes, the lighting. I don't see the new technologies as anything but an extension of that."
Unlike Independence Day, which depicted global war, carnage and destruction in a jolly, sunlit palette of bright colours, Godzilla is a much darker-looking, rainswept movie shot in muted tones. Emmerich admits: "We wanted a different look. For Independence Day, we went for that classic disaster movie feel. In the original 1970s disaster movies, everything was lit quite brightly, and you would always have four or five people in each frame. We wanted to draw on that, but we really had to fight for it - the studio was horrified by the idea of describing it as a disaster movie.
`Now, of course, everyone's making disaster movies. I suppose that's the way in Hollywood - everyone's always trying to repeat last year's success." He is scathing about the way in which he feels current releases such as the upcoming Armageddon have slavishly followed the Independence Day template.
Immediately after completing the European stage of their promotional duties, the pair heads for Japan, where Godzilla is a national institution and the movie is expected to be a huge hit.
But it already looks as if they offered too much of a hostage to fortune with their boastfully macho tag-line, "Size Does Matter". A collective raspberry from the American critics was easy to shrug off, but box-office figures have been disappointing. Godzilla took $72 million in its opening weekend at the American box office - well short of Sony's target of $90 million, the record set last year by Steven Spielberg's Lost World over the Memorial Day weekend (the traditional opening of the US summer blockbuster season). Since then, Godzilla has slithered alarmingly quickly down the charts, and its final figures now look likely to fall behind less heralded blockbusters like Deep Impact.
Both men insist that they made Godzilla for the fun of it - difficult to credit for a movie which reportedly cost $120 million to make, with another $50 million for marketing - and Emmerich is dismissive of the current media fascination with the details of costs and box-office grosses. "I think it's terrible. Films are becoming something else - it's all about the event, and the media making stories out of these kinds of things. It was the kind of situation we couldn't win after the success of Independence Day. If you don't go bigger, you're seen as failing, but that's not the way we think."
Well, yes, absolutely ... but it's strange to hear this familiar complaint coming from this quarter. After all, it's only two years since brilliant marketing and hype helped propel Independence Day to record-breaking profits around the world. At that time, they didn't seem to have much difficulty with the practice of trumpeting record-breaking US audience figures as part of a marketing strategy. The advance hype has already had one unexpected effect, with the other studios so terrified of being stomped on by the big lizard that they held back their own blockbusters until later in the summer. They may be regretting that now, as Godzilla's decline makes space for surprise hits such as The Truman Show. But Devlin seems unfazed by the lukewarm response (Godzilla's international receipts will more than likely push it into comfortable profit). "Whatever anyone says, it's already the biggest monster movie ever made. I don't see that as a failure."