Timecrimes Director Nacho Vigalondo Has The Best Idea For A Kaiju Movie
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This may be the best news you hear all weekend, and you might not even know why. Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo isn’t about to let the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Gareth Edwards have all the fun when it comes to giant monsters, and plans to make a kaiju movie of his very own.
In certain circles, Vigalondo is fairly well known, but he’s far from a household name for general audiences in the U.S. He’s contributed segments to horror anthologies like The ABC’s of Death and VHS: Viral, but he’s probably most widely recognized for his 2007 sci-fi thriller Timecrimes. His most recent offering, Open Windows with Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey, got high marks coming out of the recent Fantastic Fest, and I saw him at the Seattle International Film Festival a few years back talking about his alien invasion rom-com Extraterrestrial, which is also great.
He’s this bubbly, super enthusiastic ball of energy, and is also totally adorable. You seriously just want to give him a hug (he’ll probably hug you back), and it’s this combination of drive, gusto, and filmmaking chops that make the idea of him directing a monster movie so appealing. And he wants to go the traditional, guy-in-a-rubber-monster-suit route, which is awesome, though he plans to bring his own unique set of tweaks. Talking to Film Divider, he said:
The script I finished and want to get financing for is a twist on the kaiju eiga genre, the Godzilla genre. It’s going to be the cheapest Godzilla movie ever, I promise. It’s going to be a serious Godzilla movie but I’ve got an idea that’s going to make it so cheap that you will feel betrayed. You’re going to be so frustrated by it, it’s not even possible.
It’s hard sometimes for the enthusiasm and excitement of the spoken word to come across when printed on the page, but it’s hard to deny that it does in this instance. You have to be curious to see how “cheap” this is, if it turns out, but he doesn’t stop here. Vigalondo continues:
The way I wrote the movie – and I don’t want to explain too much – I found a way that is honest and logical to make Godzilla in a costume, destroying cities, models all the time. I wrote the movie in a way that the story has a twist so it makes sense to do Godzilla this way and I’m going to try to be the guy inside the costume because I love filmmaking to the core and I’m a film lover, one of dreams is not to direct a Godzilla movie but to be inside the costume and destroy the cities. I want to be the guy in the costume.
Yeah, that’s right, he doesn’t just want to make a monster movie where the monster is a guy in a suit, he wants to be the guy in the suit. He wants to be the one stomping through a scale-model of some major global metropolis. How could you pass up that opportunity? He wouldn’t even have to act as much as he does in Timecrimes, he could just roar and kick and pretend to shoot fire out of his mouth. That sounds like a damn fine time to us.
