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In 1945, toward the end of the Second World War, firebombings carried out by American B-29 Superfortress planes killed about a hundred thousand people in Tokyo. They also rendered the city a wasteland, and left a million people homeless. As the journalist Mark Gayn wrote, arriving there later that year, Tokyo had become “a man-made desert, ugly and desolate and hazy in the dust that rose from the crushed brick and mortar.”
As far as settings for monster movies go, that decimated landscape would seem an odd choice—the very raison d’être of such films is to show a colossal creature laying waste to a city. What’s the point of smashing up one that’s already been destroyed? But, as Takashi Yamazaki demonstrated in his 2023 film, “Godzilla Minus One,” a brutalized metropolis can still serve as a compelling backdrop. The film, set between the years 1945 and 1947, depicts a society struggling to recover from war, only to be reduced, once again, by the arrival of a kaiju (as giant monsters are known in Japanese, and to fans of the corresponding film genre). The film was lauded for its deft balance of human drama, convincing historical detail, and special effects. Christopher Nolan called it “tremendous”; Steven Spielberg reportedly watched it three times. On a trip to Tokyo, Tom Cruise told Yamazaki, “You’ve entertained me for hours.”
Yamazaki, who is sixty-two, is a crowd-pleaser whose œuvre ranges from animated children’s fare to historical dramas. He has long been interested in postwar Japan; his breakthrough, “Always: Sunset on Third Street,” from 2005, was set in a sentimentalized version of late-nineteen-fifties Tokyo. He is best known as a purveyor of exquisite, artfully engineered special effects, a talent at the center of his take on “Godzilla.” For most of its seventy-two-year history, the creature has been brought to life by actors in elaborate latex-rubber outfits lumbering through intricate miniature sets of cities. Yamazaki’s Godzilla was entirely computer-generated, and his meticulous approach gave the character new speed and danger. The film was particularly acclaimed for its water sequences, in which the craggy-skinned beast relentlessly pursued boats and naval vessels, like a reptilian Jaws.
“Godzilla Minus One” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. As Yamazaki told me when I visited him in the offices of Shirogumi, the visual-effects company at which he has worked since he was an art-school student, in the nineteen-eighties, the nomination shocked him. “I had no idea it had even been submitted,” he said. Toho, the film’s producer, put the film up for consideration shortly before the deadline, after encouragement from a member of the film’s legal team.
In March, 2024, “Godzilla Minus One” became the first movie in the franchise’s history to win an Oscar. The film’s much anticipated sequel, “Godzilla Minus Zero,” which opened in U.S. theatres this week, is set two years after the first film, and pits the titular monster against Ghidorah, a three-headed, dragonlike creature. When Yamazaki set out to make “Godzilla Minus One,” he was worried about living up to the success of “Shin Godzilla,” which was the highest-grossing live-action film at the Japanese box-office in 2016. Directed by two venerated figures in Japanese pop culture, the animator Hideaki Anno and the practical-effects legend Shinji Higuchi, the movie cast its monster as a parable for the government’s fumbled response to the Fukushima nuclear accident. Yamazaki saw the film when he was in the early stages of planning “Godzilla Minus One,” and loved it. “I thought, How am I going to make something that stands up in the face of ‘Shin Godzilla’?” Making “Minus Zero” felt similarly daunting. “Last time, my rival was ‘Shin Godzilla.’ Now my rival is ‘Godzilla Minus One.’ ”
Toho Studios is tucked away in Setagaya, a leafy western suburb of Tokyo. Its first soundstages were erected in 1932, and the facility has produced some of Japan’s most iconic films. These include the miniature scenes from the original 1954 “Gojira,” retitled in English, a little excitedly, as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” It remains the country’s largest filmmaking facility; roughly three hundred projects are shot here every year. Huge murals line its exterior walls: the cast of “Seven Samurai”; a psychedelic Mothra (a kaiju from the 1961 film of the same name); and a towering Godzilla.
When I visited, last December, Yamazaki and his crew were in a vast soundstage whose entrance was marked simply “31”—a reference to the film being the thirty-first live-action Godzilla movie to be produced by Toho. (An additional five have been produced in Hollywood.) The cast was between takes, and there was commotion all around. Most of it centered on a life-size reproduction of part of the clock tower on the roof of Wako, a department store in the tony Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza, scarred by a kaiju attack. Enormous lights flooded the area. A crane, scaffolding, and ladders surrounded the faux building like the legs of some massive insect. Wind machines stood at the ready. In the opposite corner, Yamazaki’s director’s chair was stationed in front of a pair of monitors. Other members of the crew sat beside and behind him, monitoring scripts and schedules on screens of their own.
The scene they were shooting involved a plot to draw Godzilla’s attention to Ghidorah, the flying invader, in hopes that it might prevent the latter from destroying the city. The effort was partly spearheaded by Kenji Noda, the bespectacled scientist who had led the attempt to subdue Godzilla in the previous film. The human characters were about to be subjected to the concussive explosion of Godzilla’s fiery breath—the actors had to play out the effects of the blast, which would later be added digitally, along with Godzilla himself.
The first director to generate Godzilla entirely with C.G.I., rather than a suited actor, was Roland Emmerich, who did so in his 1998 Hollywood reboot. Anno and Higuchi’s “Shin Godzilla” was the first Japanese production to do the same. Yamazaki told me that he “never once considered” using an actor in a suit. “The fun part of suits is that the person inside can use it to express themselves,” he said. “And Godzilla’s moving right in front of you, on set, in-camera—that’s another plus. But I wanted to do more complex things.” Digital effects, he explained, can achieve many tricks that would be impossible with a physical suit, such as subtly altering the proportions of the monster’s head or feet to accentuate its size, or precisely calibrating the ripples and flow of water around a submerged creature.
In the studio, Yamazaki strode through Styrofoam carved to resemble rubble, toward the clock tower, then climbed up a ladder to survey the scene. A crewmember handed him a tablet. On the screen, Yamazaki could see a view of the room, with a meticulously rendered model of Tokyo in 1949 superimposed over it. He could point at any part of the studio and see both the virtual city and where Godzilla would appear in it, as though he were playing a giant version of Pokémon Go. The use of augmented reality, Yamazaki told me, is a crucial part of how he sets up sight lines and camera angles.
Yamazaki’s process did involve one physical version of Godzilla: at the far wall, a stagehand raised a long pole with a color printout of the monster’s face affixed to one end. Yamazaki called out adjustments—higher, lower, a little to the left—until it matched where the C.G.I. Godzilla was onscreen. The cast had their sight line, and Yamazaki headed back to his chair. The crew switched on spotlights to mimic the glare of the blast. Then the wind machines kicked in with a roar. Behind the clock tower, the actors ducked and cowered as wind and dust washed over them, flattening their hair and sending papers flying.
Yamazaki is a precise filmmaker. His cast and crew are usually filled with frequent collaborators, and he has a keen sense of budgeting. As a result, his shoots are unusually efficient. This lean approach has attracted a great deal of attention abroad; Hollywood studios reportedly spent a hundred and sixty million dollars on 2014’s “Godzilla.” By comparison, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “Godzilla Minus One” cost “a mere $15 million.” Neither Yamazaki nor Toho would confirm this figure, but, in a 2024 interview for Japan House Los Angeles, he explained, “I’ve learned strategies to economize.”
In American visual effects, single shots are generally the work of many individual specialists—“riggers,” who build digital skeletons of models, “lighters,” who deal with lighting, and animators. Their work moves in a so-called pipeline, and one specialist’s delay, or the director’s dissatisfaction, can ripple down the line. “In my company, one person handles multiple tasks,” Yamazaki continued. “Maybe there’s only one or two people creating a finished shot. There’s no waiting for others to finish, no blaming of others.”
I asked Yamazaki whether the Oscar meant that he had a bigger budget this time. He smiled—as he does frequently, looking like a kid who’s just received a coveted toy. In a way, he has. On set, I often caught him mimicking serpentine monster heads with waving hands, or making explosion sounds, as he watched the camera feed on his monitors.
Yamazaki was born in 1964 in the city of Matsumoto, at the foot of the Japanese Alps. (The city, digitally “de-aged” to its postwar appearance, provides a major setting of “Godzilla Minus Zero.”) His father worked at a wholesaler for industrial bakeries; his mother was a kindergarten teacher. They nurtured his creative talent with art supplies and plastic-model kits. “I’d always build them in crazy ways,” he told me, with a chuckle. “I’d get a battleship and turn it into a carrier.”
Yamazaki first saw Godzilla in the theatre in 1971, when he was seven, after he begged his father to take him to a revival screening of 1964’s “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.” In Japan, the years between 1971 and 1974 are known to aficionados as the Second Kaiju Boom. (The first started in 1966, when a television series called “Ultraman,” which features an alien who dispatches giant monsters with martial arts, became a huge success; the second wave began with “Kamen Rider,” a show about a cyborg biker.) “The streets were filled with kaiju back then,” Yamazaki told me. “But everyone knew the king was Godzilla.”
The Godzilla franchise can seem like a kid-friendly monster pro-wrestling league, but it began as a thinly veiled criticism of nuclear testing. The first Godzilla, 1954’s “Gojira,” was partially inspired by an incident in which an American hydrogen-bomb test irradiated a Japanese fishing boat. Radiation sickened the entire crew, and one member later died. A subsequent investigation revealed that tuna contaminated in previous tests had likely made it to market, sparking a public outcry.
At the time, references to nuclear danger were rare in the country’s mass media. During the U.S-led Allied occupation of Japan, which ended in 1952, American officials actively suppressed information about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese authorities, to curry American favor, continued the practice. But “Gojira,” as a science-fiction movie, didn’t face the same kind of scrutiny as other films. Critics derided it as “vulgar,” but crowds flocked to see it. The film “was one of the greatest Trojan horses in the history of cinema,” Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2014 “Godzilla,” told me via e-mail. “It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to see what is really happening in the 1954 movie. The fact that monster ‘B movies’ were held in such low regard worked in its favor . . . bypassing censors and studio execs, tapping directly into the hearts and minds of the younger generation.”
One day, when he was a boy, Yamazaki was playing in a forest grove and came across a discarded magazine with a feature about how monster movies were filmed. It explained that they involved actors wearing monster suits. “It was a big epiphany,” Yamazaki told me. “There are adults who play kaiju, and get paid for it!” During his third year of junior high, Yamazaki made a short called “Glory.” He bought film with money he earned working a paper route, and shot on an 8-mm. camera that he had begged from a friend’s uncle. In the short, a group of refugees from a post-apocalyptic Earth search for a new planet to call home. Inspired by the futuristic vehicles of Hollywood productions of the day, such as “Star Wars,” “Alien,” and “Blade Runner,” Yamazaki designed a six-foot-long spacecraft out of plywood, the surface of which he and his friends decorated with parts from plastic-model kits. The director’s exacting standards were already in evidence; at one point, he angrily redid another boy’s work, sparking a fracas. The film débuted at the school’s annual arts festival. “That’s where it all began for me,” Yamazaki recalled in a 2023 interview. “The sense of exhilaration I felt is a major reason why I’ve kept making films.”
After high school, Yamazaki enrolled in the Asagaya College of Art and Design, in Tokyo. In 1984, while still a student, he took a part-time job making models at Shirogumi. Founded, in 1974, by the animator Tatsuo Shimamura, Shirogumi originally specialized in producing effects for television commercials, in addition to making films for special events and expositions. The beginning of Yamazaki’s tenure coincided with the “bubble era,” when Japan’s economy soared, partly fuelled by huge exports of consumer products. Shimamura taught Yamazaki how to build miniatures and operate motion-control cameras, the cutting edge of special-effects technology at the time.
In the early nineties, a young director named Shimako Satō came to Yamazaki for help with a film about a schoolgirl sorceress, “Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness.” “Super low budget,” Yamazaki recalled. “But she was strict, and wouldn’t tolerate any half-assing it.” Since they didn’t have the money to create traditional special effects, Yamazaki and his colleague Kiyoko Shibuya used the newly released program Adobe After Effects to produce digital ones. (Shibuya has since directed visual effects for many of Yamazaki’s features, including “Godzilla Minus One,” for which she shared the Oscar.) “Eko Eko” went on to win an award at the small but well-regarded Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, and Variety noted its “visual flair.” “That positive attention is what made me think I’d like to try directing,” Yamazaki said. He paused and laughed. “I mean, if the director’s going to be so demanding, I should just do it myself.” Yamazaki and Satō married in 2012.
In 1997, Yamazaki pitched an original script to Shimamura. The film, titled “Nue,” was named after a chimera-like monster from Japanese folklore. Shimamura persuaded a producer, Shūji Abe, to put up enough money for preproduction, and Yamazaki to begin scouting locations and even holding auditions in Australia. But Abe didn’t raise enough to make the full film, and the project lapsed. Yamazaki then pitched Abe a smaller film, “Juvenile,” a coming-of-age story about a young boy and a robot. It was released in 2000, to commercial success, launching Yamazaki as a director.
Yamazaki has since made twenty-one movies, many of which are hits in Japan. He is now arguably the country’s most in-demand director in the world. Despite this, he maintains a notable humility. While filming, he often sat with different groups at lunch in the commissary, sometimes producers, other times stagehands. There was a great deal of laughter. At Shirogumi, Yamazaki worked in the same room as the rest of the effects staff, sitting at the same sort of desk, and on the same sort of office chair, on which he scooted himself around to check on the progress of work.
This summer, I met Yamazaki for a final interview at Toho Studios, where he was supervising the audio mix of the new film. He looked a little haggard. When I asked if he was looking forward to taking a vacation, he laughed. “I don’t really take breaks. I prefer to keep working.” As we spoke, a series of percussive explosions, punctuated by Godzilla’s distinctive screech, issued from the dubbing studio next door. (The sound was created for the 1954 film by drawing gloved fingers covered in pine-tar resin down the E string of a contrabass; for “Godzilla Minus Zero,” Yamazaki and his sound designer, Natsuko Inoue, rerecorded the sound being played from gigantic speakers onto the wall of a dam, to further amplify its reverberatory impact.)
Despite his upbeat personality, Yamazaki can seem obsessed with dark periods of Japanese history. His film “The Eternal Zero,” from 2013, is based on a controversial novel by a far-right nationalist politician and portrays the sacrifices of kamikaze pilots. “The Great War of Archimedes,” from 2019, chronicles the construction of the Yamato, Japan’s largest battleship. Even “Godzilla Minus One” lingers on the weapons of war, from battleships to a distinctive prototype fighter plane that appears at the film’s climax. “Some people mistake me for being pro-war, because I put weapons in my films,” Yamazaki told me. “I hate war. I think most who watch ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ will come away disgusted by war.” (One of the film’s central characters is tormented by vivid memories of the bombing of Hiroshima.) “I want world leaders to watch it,” he continued. “I want them to see what happens when they press the button—that, even if your side wins, that this is what’s happening under that mushroom cloud.”
Yamazaki is already ramping up for his next projects: two forays into Hollywood. The first, “Grandgear,” is a giant-robot epic that will be produced by J. J. Abrams’s company and released by Sony. The second is “Nue”—the film he tried and failed to make at the beginning of his directorial career. It is now backed by Scott Free, the production company co-founded by Ridley Scott, one of the directors who first sparked Yamazaki’s love of special effects.
“Everything’s thanks to ‘Godzilla Minus One,’ ” Yamazaki said, a little quietly. “It really expanded my world.”
The first film’s title score, newly arranged, pulsed from the dubbing studio. Yamazaki chuckled and said, “That’s from the end of the film.”
I asked if I could see it, feeling a little like Yamazaki must have felt asking his father to take him to the movie in Matsumoto in 1971.
“Not yet,” he said, cracking another smile. “But it’s going to be good.” ♦