Godzilla 1998’s original director reveals how film might’ve come up if he wasn’t replaced
Jan de Bont, the original director of 1998’s Godzilla, revealed his vision for the film, stating how different it may have turned out if he wasn’t replaced.
Jan de Bont, the original director of 1998’s Godzilla, recently revealed his vision for the film, stating how ‘different’ the movie may have turned out if he wasn’t replaced. It is pertinent to note that De Bont was chosen to direct TriStar Pictures’ version of Toho’s Godzilla in 1994, but was immediately replaced by Roland Emmerich as the former had a ‘higher budget’.
Emmerich’s Godzilla turned out to be a huge disappointment after it got released in 1998. Though the film earned a high profit in terms of box office, critics uniformly panned it for its bad script and direction. Due to negative reviews, Godzilla 1998 never received its planned sequels and now the original director reflected on how he might have prevented all the negativities regarding the film.
‘We had a really good script and everybody loved it’: Godzilla original director
In a recent interview with Yahoo! News, Jan de Bont stated, “I really wanted to make Godzilla, I wanted it so badly. I loved what he was in Japan. I love that it wasn’t so perfect.” He further added, “It was a guy in a suit! It was so great. The movements, there was something human about it. The guy in the suit was sweating like a pig and he said he was losing two pounds every minute because it was 125lbs and it was rubber… he said he could only do one take at a time.”
“We had a really good script and everybody loved it. [But] the reason they got rid of me is because they said my budget was higher than Roland Emmerich. I said that’s impossible because they’re going to use the same effects people as I do and they’re going to charge exactly the same. Because the guy was in the suit, the motions were very different to what a dinosaur would do and that was very attractive to me, said Bont
