Hollywood Popular Artists

Jan 23rd 2013, 14:41

With all of the controversy currently swirling around the upcoming "Godzilla" reboot from director Gareth Edwards, the actual movie has taken a backseat to the stories about producer fights, rewrites, and potential leading men.

But there is a new "Godzilla" movie on the way from some seriously talented individuals, and one of them, the newly hired Frank Darabont, recently spoke with io9 about his task of rewriting the script and restoring the radioactive monster to his rightful place.

See what Darabont had to say after the jump!

A key point of Darabont's take on the project is the allegorical elements of the original Toho film, so it sounds like we won't see Godzilla protecting the Earth from other monsters.

"What I found very interesting about Godzilla is that he started off definitely as a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And some of the atom bomb testing we were doing in the South Pacific in the subsequent years. The giant terrifying force of nature that comes and stomps the sh-- out of your city, that was Godzilla. Filtered through the very fanciful imaginations of the Japanese perception," Darabont said. "And then he became Clifford the Big Red Dog in the subsequent films. He became the mascot of Japan, he became the protector of Japan. Another big ugly monster would show up and he would fight that monster to protect Japan. Which I never really quite understood, the shift."

Another one of Darabont's goals is to not shoehorn a tired human story into the film. (Think of everything that Shia LaBeouf does in "Transformers.")

"What we're trying to do with the new movie is not have it camp, not have it be campy. We're kind of taking a cool new look at it. But with a lot of tradition in the first film. We want this to be a terrifying force of nature," Darabont said. "And what was really cool, for me, is there was a very compelling human drama that I got to weave into it. It's not that cliched, thinly disguised romance or bromance, or whatever. It's different, it's a different set of circumstances than you're used to seeing. And that's tremendously exciting as a writer when you're asked to do something else."

"Godzilla" is expected to level a city near you on May 16, 2014.

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