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Your movie For
the Love of Godzilla - in a few words, what is it about?
For
the Love of Godzilla is a labour of love. Godzilla
and kaiju fans getting
together from all over the world to talk about the infamous monster
franchise. I edited it together as a documentary and produced it. What
inspired you to make a documentary about Godzilla
fandom in the first place?
I
wanted to try and film and put together something meaningful for kaiju
& Godzilla
fans. A raw documentary style film of myself and other Godzilla-enthusiasts seemed the way to go. I knew a number of them through social
media like YouTube, Twitter & Facebook.
Being a Godzilla
fan yourself, how did you first encounter the franchise, and what were
your initial thoughts on it? I
believe it was a
combination of watching the VHS home video release of Godzilla 1985 and
Channel
4, here in the UK, showing late-night Showa era Godzilla movies. To a younger experience, it was that Hanna-Barbera Power
Hour (in the USA) cartoon on TV as well. I’d covered a bit about
Channel 4
showing Godzilla
movies in the past, on YouTube. Your favourite Godzilla
movies - and some you could do without? I like them all,
Gamera and
Ultraman as well.
Back to For
the Love of Godzilla - what can you tell us about your directorial
approach to the subject matter? I believe my approach was guerrilla-style, in a sense, but
I tried to make
something nice and polished for Godzilla
fans to enjoy and come back to watch again. It was a group effort, indeed. During making the 55 minute documentary in
2017 sadly Haruo Nakajima had passed away, so I hope I
made the King of the Monsters, himself, a nice send-off. Nakajima, of
course, played Gojira
(Godzilla) for most of the
Showa era film
series,
starting in 1954 – rest in peace. Do talk about For
the Love of Godzilla's guest contributors, and how did you find
them even? It
was a great honor to work with other Godzilla
fans through social media.
Matt Jacobson aka GOJIRA851 was already a huge x-plus kaiju figure
collector and I’d always liked his videos. There was the younger, Will
Krebs, who spoke fondly about doing the documentary and let me use his
stop-motion cartoon bits as indents between Godzilla-fans being interviewed or
talking to the camera. It was nice to get genuine Godzilla-fans in there, like
film critic David Gelmini, and a few female Godzilla-Fans like Barbara Guilard
(kaiju & Asian-film enthusiast) and Bane Hellborne of EMZT Radio.
Thank you to everybody that got in on the film.
Matt Jacobson |
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David Gelmini |
Any stories about Godzilla
fandom that didn't make it into For
the Love of Godzilla? I’d have loved to have gotten Will Krebs to speak on his love for Godzilla, but
time ran out. He did a lot of his own work at the time, so these things
kind of happened. It was a nice time frame of Shin Godzilla (2016) getting
released too, and having my friend Alex Reed (of Doctor Slime [2018] fame)
join me in a look at the film as it was being released in UK cinemas that
summer. The $64-question of
course, where can For
the Love of Godzilla be seen?
It
should be on Vimeo & YouTube, but atm, the film has been picked for
South Africa’s Kaiju Film Festival. It’ll be online in the near future
after the festival, in which it can be seen in 2022 – if all goes to
plan.
In
2021, the Kaiju Film Festival was hosted by Dawna Lee Heising aka the
“Queen of Kaiju” [Dawna
Lee Heising interview - click here] – just to add.
Anything you can
tell us about audience and critical reception of For
the Love of Godzilla?
To Godzilla
fans reasonably positive, and I think we all had fun filming our
parts for the finished production, back in 2017.
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Your/your movie's website, social media,
whatever else?
Please,
keep your eye on the Kaiju Film Festival:
https://kaijufilmfestival.wixsite.com/comiccon
As
usual, I’m on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/MrSheltonTV2
Thanks for the
interview!
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