When we think of the kaiju cinema of Japan, we conjure up images of giant monsters ravaging destruction upon the country—fitting for a term that translates to “strange beast”. Most famous of them all is the iconic Godzilla, beloved as a being of ferocious strength and feared as a warning for nearly 70 years. But what does it mean to be a kaiju film, to create one? What’s the driving purpose behind kaiju cinema?

Filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki has a poetic answer: “It’s a rather Japanese view of things, but there’s a thing in Japanese religion of giving shape to various concerns and problems,” he tells me, during the Tokyo International Film Festival world premiere of Godzilla Minus One, which has debuted on Letterboxd in its international opening weekend with a whopping 4.2-out-of-five star average. “The process of making a kaiju film is like a kagura, a dance to please and calm the gods, where you place these problems into the shape of a kaiju to help process some of these worries, almost like a ceremony.”

Ever since the first Godzilla roared onto Japanese screens in 1954, there have been no fewer than 37 films featuring one of the most recognizable monsters in movie history on both sides of the Atlantic, a number that doesn’t include films like the original Mothra nor the various fifties and sixties dubbed edits for international markets. The latest of these films, Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, serves as a postwar reimagining of the kaiju, and as a kickoff event for the 70th anniversary celebrations.

With the movie finally arriving to terrorize international audiences following a successful domestic release, I met with Yamazaki to discuss his history with the franchise and what goes into updating such a classic and internationally beloved character.

If there’s one thing that has allowed the idea of Godzilla to endure for more than half a century, it’s his malleability—the ability for interpretations of the character to adapt to changing times. Godzilla was an incredible spectacle at the time of its release, revolutionizing practical effects to the point of kick-starting an entire genre of tokusatsu (a Japanese term for media featuring heavy special effects) filmmaking and various imitators, both good (’90s trilogy kick-started by Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe) and… not-so-good.

Yet what made the original idea of Godzilla’s character stick in the minds of audiences, both then and now, was his status as a stark reference to the horrors of nuclear war. This was a beast transformed by radiation, unleashing destruction—a monstrous metaphor for the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a parallel not lost on the original audiences of the mid-fifties.

With a legacy and history such as this, it’s a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of any director. According to the man tasked with bringing Godzilla to life in this latest interpretation, the project has been given the space and time needed to succeed, with development first being discussed before the pandemic and a few years following 2016’s aforementioned Shin Godzilla, the last Japanese interpretation of the character.

According to Yamazaki, initial discussions to produce Godzilla Minus One evolved from casual ing comments to something more serious in 2019. “Just after I finished making The Great War of Archimedes was when I received a formal offer, but I was first approached to make the film quite a while before that, during the production of Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 [in 2007],” he recalls. “I really wanted to do it because I’m a big fan of the series. However, there’s a sequence in that film where Godzilla appears, but it was so difficult to put together it took half of the VFX team on that film just to make it a reality, so I thought it would be too difficult to make a two-hour film in that way, so I asked if we could wait.”

He continues, “Later we got Shin Godzilla, which was an incredibly well-made film, and with all the extra experience I had making a variety of films since that time as well, it made me think I could finally do it. With Covid and other things, we couldn’t move forward with the project for a while, so it took some time to finish. We finally filmed the project last year, and while the VFX took some time, I managed to get the project as close as I could to what I wanted to create.”

Yamazaki has been handed much of the control over shaping every aspect of Godzilla this time around, overseeing not just the film’s direction and script but VFX, too, thanks to his experiences with CG effects on many of his prior projects, including Stand by Me Doraemon, Dragon Quest: Your Story and Lupin III: The First. Having found critical and commercial success on these and other movies, like his reinvention of Space Battleship Yamato, the director proved he could be trusted to handle beloved franchises with care.

It’s here that Koichi inadvertently meets a similar lonely soul in Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), a woman with no one but a baby that she rescued from a dying mother, and he pledges to take care of them both. The pair somehow create a happy home for their found family upon these ruins of destruction—of course, it’s then that Godzilla returns and attacks Tokyo, mutated and stronger than before, with Koichi and a group of civilians coming together to try and take the monster down.

Typically, Godzilla films are set during the era in which they’re produced, rather than being historical retreads, so it’s unusual that the latest installment takes place 70 years ago. According to Yamazaki, the benefit of returning to this moment in Japanese history for a modern Godzilla story is as a warning and lesson, which is also part of why Japanese Godzilla films tend to differentiate themselves from internationally produced Godzillas.

“The point of international Godzilla is that he’s a really powerful monster, but a Japanese Godzilla is halfway a godlike creature in many ways,” Yamazaki explains. “Not necessarily a religious god, but more like a Japanese god, a malevolent and destructive one. He’s a metaphor for nuclear weapons, war—you could view [him as] Covid in this film—the nuclear power plant in Shin Godzilla, and that metaphor for these incidents is important to a Japanese Godzilla like this.”

This idea of comparing Godzilla to a god, and the creative process to that of a religious ceremony, defines the artistic production of Godzilla Minus One. “As I started making the film, I began to pile up all these concerns towards things like war, and I could put them into the shape of Godzilla and calm them in a sense,” Yamazaki says. “It’s not like this is my purpose for making the film, but as I did, I really began to think of the essence of kaiju films being a bit like this.”

Although hope exists within these characters, forming the bedrock of a rebellion against indiscriminate destruction, Godzilla’s purpose is, above all, to instill fear. In the opening scene on Odo Island under the cover of darkness, the violent murder of an entire stationed battalion of soldiers—bar our protagonist, frozen in horror—is a monster in its true form. Here and in other moments of this film, Godzilla has never been so terrifying.

This is intentional. Whereas Godzilla has been a lot of things to Yamazaki, this is the essence of the creature; from a fan’s perspective, Yamazaki’s favorite films in the franchise are those that mystify Godzilla as something truly frightening. He notes a desire to set the story in “an era where things weren’t okay” in order to create the desired impact for his Godzilla.

Few creatures or characters in film have retained their relevancy or remained as resonant for as long as Godzilla, never mind one that can be remade and reinterpreted into new forms all over the world. Yet as much as the title and setting suggests a move backwards, this is a return to the roots of one of the world’s most iconic movie monsters on the eve of its 70th birthday. One that, perhaps, answers the question about what defines a kaiju film.