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00:00A science fiction monster can be explained scientifically and combated technologically.
00:08We have to kill them.
00:09It's that simple.
00:10A monster boils down all of our fears into something that we can see.
00:16I literally went under my seat and I said to my dad, tap me on the shoulder when it's
00:21over.
00:22That's a big part of what science fiction is.
00:25It is.
00:26The fear of the creature in the forest and now letting us feel it in a safe place.
00:30It's fun to be in a darkened theater and imagine your world ending because of a giant lobster.
00:36I have dreams.
00:37Creatures are coming at me.
00:39Must go faster.
00:40Suspense starts in the stomach.
00:42And it goes up to the throat.
00:45And then it comes out as a scream.
00:49It's this primeval instinct in us to escape the bear in the woods.
00:54Will is alive.
00:56Science fiction monster movies allow us to explore those dark parts of ourselves that we don't
01:01want to admit actually exist.
01:03This is a creature who asks why he is here.
01:06What is he for?
01:07Who created him?
01:09And we always beat them at the end, which was our way of keeping the boogeyman at bay.
01:14At bay.
01:33You're a horror guy, as you tell me every time we talk about this.
01:56So the question is, where is that interzone, that crosstalk between horror and science fiction?
02:03The great distinction is the fuel for the early horror tales has to be spiritual.
02:09It comes from the belief of good and evil.
02:12And then there comes a point in Western literature in which the element includes now science.
02:18Science. So today it's radioactivity, genetic engineering, robotics.
02:23And before our monsters came from folklore, mythology, demons, the supernatural world.
02:30Yes. We create these monsters as composites that warn us about the possible adversity of the natural world.
02:38And one proof of that, I read somewhere that dragons are universal because they are the composite of the three main predators of the anthropoids.
02:48Snake. Snake, feline, and large rapacious birds.
02:54So it's a mashup of archetypes.
02:56Yeah. Of things that you need to be afraid of.
03:00So fear of teeth and claws and being chased and all those things is a healthy thing.
03:05And it cycles in our brains and our nightmares and in our monster movies.
03:10I actually think dinosaurs are the best monsters because they actually existed.
03:23Like a lot of the crazy monsters in films and in science fiction, you can console yourself by saying,
03:29Yeah, but it's not real, really. It's not real.
03:31Whereas with dinosaurs, you can't do that. They were real.
03:34Like it makes it more scary.
03:39Jurassic Park really deserves classic status.
03:42I myself remember gasping, and I think a lot of people in the audience did,
03:47at the first shot where they pull back and give you a wide-angle view of this giant, giant dinosaur.
03:53We, as an audience, are going through exactly what the characters are going through.
04:05We're seeing for the first time ever in human history, dinosaurs alive.
04:10When I was a kid, I used to take my popsicle sticks,
04:16and I would basically glue them together in the form of a dinosaur,
04:20and I would bury it, and then I would wait a week.
04:23Until it fossilized.
04:24And then I would go looking for it again.
04:26That was my closest moment of trying to be an amateur paleontologist.
04:30Cut to years later, and you're working on Jurassic Park.
04:32Jurassic Park, yeah.
04:33You know, and Michael Crichton just came up with the perfect concept.
04:36I'll tell you one conceptual line.
04:39I'm writing a book about dinosaurs and DNA.
04:42Yeah.
04:43And that's all he would say.
04:44Right.
04:45Well, I got sent the book.
04:47I got to the scene where the Tyrannosaurus Rex licks the windshield with the kids inside.
04:52Right.
04:53I said, I got to make this movie.
04:54I never even finished the book.
04:55I called up, and he said, Steven just bought it.
04:58Well, what happened was...
05:00And you know what?
05:01You know what?
05:02It was the very, very best thing that could have happened,
05:04because I would have made it like aliens.
05:06I would have made an R-rated scare the crap out of your movie.
05:09And you made it just scary enough, but still a movie for kids.
05:12Because I was the 12-year-old me telling that story.
05:19Well, some of those dinosaurs, as you know, were Dennis Murren and CGI special effects.
05:24Steven Spielberg would be on a bullhorn off camera and be going,
05:29I'm making some dinosaur sounds.
05:31Hammer?
05:32And we'd be looking at a tennis ball.
05:34But some of them were Stan Winston puppetry.
05:39When we came to this clearing and saw this life-size, full-sized Triceratops.
05:54And the seven people who were making it blink and breathe and do things were kind of hidden behind it.
06:01Oh, that was something.
06:08Steven Spielberg, he wanted the dinosaurs to have some monster abilities and to be seen as monsters.
06:16But I was brought in to make sure that sixth graders didn't send him nasty notes about things being wrong.
06:23There was a scene where the velociraptors come into the kitchen and are chasing the children around.
06:29And Steven wanted the raptors to come in and stick out a tongue like a lizard or a snake would do.
06:37And I said, we know for sure that dinosaurs did not do that.
06:42And so we decided the raptor looks through the window and it snorts and it fogs up the window.
06:48And only a warm-blooded animal can do that.
06:54Science fiction monster movies are very much about the monster of humanity.
06:58In Jurassic Park, our scientist, John Hammond, very much wants to recreate dinosaurs
07:04to prove that he can do something no one else has done.
07:07And that creates a chain of disasters that in turn creates a physical monster.
07:12The literal manifestation of the bad actions of those humans.
07:17I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion.
07:21Something that was real.
07:24Something that they could see and touch.
07:30John Hammond represents a ringmaster.
07:33Right.
07:34He's the Ringling Brothers of bringing these species back to life.
07:37And his intentions are pure.
07:38Yeah.
07:39He wants everybody to come see these dinosaurs.
07:41He wants children to get tears in their eyes when they marvel at these creatures that they only could see in storybooks.
07:47And at the same time, he is blind to what he's doing.
07:50That's right.
07:51Like all mad scientists.
07:52Yeah.
07:53And Jeff Goldblum is such a great conscience.
07:55Oh, yeah.
07:56He's the voice of the audience.
07:57He says, nature will find a way.
07:58He says that.
07:59Life finds a way.
08:00Life finds a way.
08:01And he's right every single time.
08:03Life breaks free.
08:04It expands to new territories.
08:05And it crashes through barriers painfully.
08:07Maybe even dangerously.
08:08But, well, there it is.
08:11You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will breed?
08:16No.
08:17I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.
08:21This idea that in Jurassic Park the female dinosaurs are capable of changing so that they can reproduce is brilliantly foreshadowed when Sam Neill gets into the helicopter before they get to Isla Nubler.
08:33And he's got two seat belts that are both female, but of course they can't stick together.
08:38So what he does is he ties them in a knot round his waist.
08:42And that is, that's the whole film, isn't it?
08:45It's the whole idea that life will find a way.
08:48Evolution is an innovator that finds a way to survive even though against all odds it shouldn't be possible.
08:56I mean, it's quite clearly the moral at the heart of Jurassic Park is that you can't control nature and you shouldn't play God.
09:02But I kind of left Jurassic Park really wanting to see dinosaurs come to life.
09:11Theoretically, we can retro-engineer a bird genetically to make an animal that would have dinosaur characteristics.
09:20We could right now produce an animal that would have a dinosaur-like head.
09:25It would have arms and hands instead of wings.
09:28Some semblance of teeth and we're not finished yet.
09:31We're still trying to deal with the tail.
09:34But when it really comes to the science of making dinosaurs or making anything genetically,
09:41I think it's actually a cool thing to do and I, and I don't see anything wrong with it at all.
09:47Are we seeing a pattern here?
09:50The early atomic scientists, the contemporary AI scientists, everybody only sees the rosy future, the upside.
09:59That's right.
10:00Exactly.
10:01As they said on the Westworld poster, what could possibly go wrong?
10:04And that gets the audience excited because the audience is going to see what went wrong, not what went right.
10:09You know.
10:10Who cares about what went right?
10:11It's not fun if it goes right.
10:12It's no fun at all.
10:13You're quoted as saying that Frankenstein is your autobiography.
10:18So are you Frankenstein's monster or are you Frankenstein himself?
10:22Not the creature.
10:23You're the creature.
10:24What happened to me is when I was growing up and I felt different to the world I was growing up,
10:31I did feel out of place.
10:32And when I saw the monster play with forces that were outsized to his comprehension, I thought this creature represents me.
10:41There was a purity and an innocence to him.
10:44Yeah.
10:45And I empathized completely with him and I felt immediately a kinship and I thought the impact emotionally for me was that big.
10:54It was life transforming.
10:56When you look back, the foundation of science fiction can technically be put on the shoulders of Mary Shelley.
11:10Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was very much the birth of science fiction.
11:14Shelley is one of the first authors to think about science and explore its impact on society.
11:19Mary Shelley, she was living at a time when science was beginning to gain a foothold.
11:26So there was a belief that the world was understandable in a way that didn't involve religious or mythological mysteries.
11:34Mary Shelley was visiting science lectures, people like Galvani, to see how newly discovered electricity was involved in living processes.
11:42The story of Frankenstein, it's really about a scientist who has the arrogance to think that he alone can create a living being.
11:54This idea of being able to create a human being from bits and pieces of other human beings is so potent.
12:00And it is echoed all over the movies, but that's when it really is crystallized.
12:06In the first film version, Thomas Edison's 1910 Frankenstein, the creature is made not through electricity, but through a chemical process.
12:14Thomas Edison was considered the father of electricity, so he didn't want electricity to have any negative connotations.
12:21In the 50s and 60s, Victor Frankenstein creates his creature through atomic energy.
12:26In Kenneth Branagh's 1990s version, we have lots of images of the creature itself shooting from one tube to another tube until it's finally taken out of the final tube by Frankenstein in a very wet and messy birthing scene.
12:41And so literally, he's created the first test tube baby.
12:45In the famous 1931 film, Dr. Frankenstein has a dead body on a gurney and then the body twitches.
12:56At that point, Dr. Frankenstein falls in somewhere between hysterical and triumphant.
13:03In a way, this sums up all the fears and all the hopes you would have about making synthetic life.
13:08How awestruck we should be that we could do it and how scared we should be that we could do it.
13:13Now I know what it feels like to be God.
13:18The problem of Frankenstein, of course, is that when Victor Frankenstein creates something that's ugly, he throws it out of his laboratory.
13:25And this transforms the creature into a monster who will eventually kill those people he loves most.
13:32Subtitle of the book is The Modern Prometheus, which had to deal with the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to Earth, which was a violation of the natural order.
13:42The creature realizes that he is that violation of the natural order.
13:46Did you ever consider the consequences of your action?
13:52This is a creature who asks why he is here. What is he for? Who created him? Who made this happen?
14:00Those are fascinating questions. And those questions begin with the Frankenstein monster.
14:05So as long as people are thinking about that, people will be making Frankenstein movies or movies that are very obviously based on Frankenstein.
14:12I'm working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it.
14:17Somehow I get the feeling you don't get out much.
14:20The fly is really an updating of the Frankenstein myth of trying to play God with new technologies and the idea that scientific hubris can ultimately lead to destruction.
14:33So I invent this teleportation device and I experiment on myself, but unbeknownst to me, there's a fly in the pod. The audience sees it, but I don't see it.
14:50And then I, sure enough, I come out of the other thing. I seem to come out okay at first, but by and by, you realize that my DNA has been fused with the fly's DNA.
15:11You don't see an instant transformation as you do in, say, the Hulk.
15:17What you see in the fly is a far more realistic portrayal of what is likely to happen in that situation, which is a slow and disgusting breakdown of cells to the point where basically he's falling apart as he is slowly mutating into a revolting hybrid of these two distantly related species.
15:39I'm becoming Brundlefly.
15:42I remember five different stages of makeup.
15:46I'd have to get there at three in the morning or two in the morning because I had some prosthetics, you know, and I had funny teeth, too. I had a few different stages of teeth.
15:59I got a kick out of it.
16:04What these movies grapple with is that question of what happens when we do something we shouldn't? And what are the ramifications of that? And what is the fallout? And these movies are about that. The fallout is monsters.
16:22To me, when I see a science fiction monster movie, it's about taking our angst and our fantasies and our terrors and making an escape, a nightmare that's safe.
16:31Yes.
16:32You know, because when you're left alone with your nightmare at three o'clock in the morning, you're not safe. But when you go into a movie theater, you're safe. There's people around you.
16:40And you know it's going to last a certain amount of minutes.
16:43That's right. It's a defined thing.
16:44And things are going to get resolved.
16:45Except for Alien.
16:47I saw it on opening night in 79 when it came out at a big theater. And man, people were screaming so hard they were throwing their popcorn.
16:56Me too. I mean, there's that figure of speech, hide under your seat.
17:00Yeah.
17:01It was not a figure of speech. I literally went under my seat and I said to my dad, tap me on the shoulder when it's over.
17:16The Xenomorph from Alien and Aliens is the best movie monster ever, because it is the scariest alien monster ever.
17:25I think what is terrifying about the Xenomorph is it was barely on screen, it was very underlit, lots of flashing lights.
17:35And I think that's very much the power of the first Alien movie as a scary movie is it left a lot to the imagination.
17:42It's like the classic monster movie. And on top of it, you know, it was the first woman heroine, which we have seen in a major motion picture.
17:51Are you there, Ripley?
17:52I'm right here.
17:53I was sent the script of Alien. And I think, frankly, commercially speaking, they thought, let's make the hero a woman.
18:03No one will ever guess that this young woman turns out to be the lone survivor.
18:10And I liked the purity of that. We weren't making any kind of statement.
18:13And I think the other reason, of course, it appealed to me was that it was a rockin' good part for a woman.
18:19I'm for killing that damn thing right now.
18:21Well, let's talk about killing it. We know it's using the air shafts. Will you listen to me, Parker? Shut up!
18:27So what possessed you to take Ripley, who wasn't given a first name, none of them had first names, and say, let's make her a woman?
18:37You know, I hadn't realized the importance of women's lib and how women aren't really included, because I was brought up with a very strong mother.
18:46Yeah.
18:47I had already accepted that women will rule eventually anyway, whatever we do about it.
18:51Yeah, yeah. And that...
18:53And so you weren't making a statement. You were just observing the world that you knew and reproducing it.
18:56Sure. I said, why not? Why not? Yeah.
18:58To give Ripley the punch and power was the right thing to do.
19:01Yeah. And science fiction has always been a genre that pushed boundaries of gender, conformity, racism.
19:08It's a stage where anything goes.
19:10Yeah. Her character is about facing her fears.
19:14Sure.
19:15And over the course of a number of films, she became a, you know, kind of a global icon for feminism.
19:21Yeah.
19:22It really was the first movie where you had a woman that wasn't the victim, and that was major.
19:29For years, it was a man's job to slay the monsters in science fiction.
19:33The women, at best, were either sent home so they'd be safe...
19:36Stay here, Kate.
19:37...or they had to get rescued from the monsters.
19:40Or, even worse yet, they themselves were the monster.
19:43She'll tear up the whole town till she finds Harry.
19:46Yeah, and then she'll tear up Harry.
19:48Ash, when Dallas and Kane are off the ship, I'm senior officer.
19:54Ridley Scott did such an amazing job in portraying Ripley as a straightforward human.
20:00And then Jim Cameron took it to a whole new level with aliens setting up the relationship of Ripley and Newt.
20:09Hard to believe there's a little girl under all this.
20:12And then paralleling it with the queen and her offspring.
20:21The queen alien has sort of organic flowing lines to her because she's feminine, she's hideous, but she's also very beautiful, which is fitting of an elegant, you know, matriarch of an alien society.
20:35So by the time I kill her children and try to escape with mine, it's not like bad versus good.
20:47It's two mothers fighting for the life of their offspring and I think it's done with, you know, respect for both species.
20:56Happily, he gives Ripley the edge.
21:00Get away from her, you bitch!
21:05I watched Aliens for the first time when I was 12 and I had never realized that women could do the kind of things that Sigourney Weaver was doing on screen or look that way or talk that way.
21:18The whole thing just blew my mind.
21:21There was this primal power that she had based on just this desperate need to survive and save this child.
21:32And I think that becomes that archetype of that female hero.
21:42I think an audience likes to see women succeed and slay monsters.
21:47There wouldn't be as many franchises of the Alien movie if it didn't work.
21:51When the original Sigourney Weaver Ripley arc of the Aliens franchise ends, we get a brand new awesome female monster killer.
22:00Alice in Resident Evil.
22:10When Resident Evil came up, I was just really excited.
22:13I was a huge fan of the video game.
22:15Video games, you know, I think it answers something very elemental in human beings, which is we're fascinated with dangerous situations.
22:26And the closest we could get to them without actually being in danger, you know, we love.
22:34The Resident Evil universe is all about Frankenstein.
22:37I mean, the Umbrella Corporation is using their technology to create these things that could very well go out of control.
22:44T-virus is fantastic, it's not much an adaptation.
22:48And surprise, surprise, they do!
22:54One of the things that makes Alice a strong character is she fights what people might believe is, like, unbeatable odds.
23:03But she doesn't give up, and ultimately over six movies she triumphs.
23:09I think monsters tell us everything about ourselves.
23:11I think the things that we're the most scared of makes us who we are, in a way.
23:19Monsters, in a lot of ways, are representing our fears.
23:22Are we gonna go too far?
23:24What do we still need to learn about this world?
23:26What are we not prepared for?
23:28Which is why I think it's so powerful and cathartic to see a woman slay her monster.
23:33And men too, but to see that figure of a woman literally staring down her fear and conquering it?
23:42We often think about science fiction as a genre that celebrates boys and their toys,
23:46and yet there is a space for people of all different races and genders and creeds and colors,
23:51and perhaps even species, since we're being science fictional, to explore their hopes and fears and convey them to others about life in a high-tech society.
24:00Science fiction at its best, questions, challenges, or belief on what are we?
24:09Yeah.
24:10What makes us human?
24:11Where do we fit in society?
24:13Or shakes us, or tries to shake us out.
24:15Yeah.
24:16So monsters are above nature, superhuman or supra-human.
24:21Yeah.
24:22They allow us to question things that are eminently human.
24:24Yeah.
24:25Right.
24:26Now don't you think that the film, the thing, follows that same principle of making us fear the other in human form?
24:32Absolutely.
24:33And that's a point of the story that I always am fascinated in the Carpenter film.
24:37Yeah.
24:38Because ultimately it's about our place in the universe, and that's what makes that story so important.
24:44Somebody in this camp being what he appears to be, right now that may be one or two of us.
24:48By spring it could be all of us.
24:50So how do we know who's human?
24:53The Thing is an incredibly influential movie in science fiction because it gets at one of our most basic fears.
24:59That we might not be able to tell the difference between good and evil, or between ourselves and an evil alien imposter.
25:06The film follows the story of a group of scientists in the Antarctic who find a frozen alien.
25:11What is it?
25:12When the alien thaws, it turns out to be an incredibly hostile shape-shifting organism that wants nothing more than to absorb us and conquer the world.
25:21As it absorbs people, it becomes unclear who's real and who has become the monster.
25:27We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.
25:29We're gonna find out who's the Thing.
25:30You've got a monster story and we're going to solve the monster story by doing experiments. That is classic science fiction.
25:40The blood from one of you things won't obey when it's attacked. It'll try and survive.
25:49Crawl away from a hot needle, say.
25:52The blood testing scene in The Thing is one of the great scenes, I think in all movies.
25:58All the protagonists tied up.
26:01At least one of them is actually the monster itself.
26:05I'm watching Kurt Russell testing the blood.
26:09Where the tension is just unbelievable.
26:12This is pure nonsense. Doesn't prove a thing.
26:15We'll do you last.
26:16When that thing screeches up, you know.
26:29That was worth the price of admission.
26:35The Thing in The Thing, in some ways it's one of the apexes of that kind of old school analog monster.
26:42Like, was actually there on the set with the tentacles and the teeth.
26:48I mean, this is pre-CGI.
26:50Guys weren't doing this kind of stuff.
26:53But the ultimate threat here in The Thing isn't even the monster itself.
26:59It is what The Thing evokes.
27:02The paranoia and terror that engulfs that station.
27:05It is advantage.
27:07The Thing was based on a story who goes there by the most influential magazine editor really in the history of science fiction.
27:18A writer named John W. Campbell, Jr.
27:20Did you have any plan in mind as to what you wanted Astounding to be?
27:25I wanted to be a good science fiction magazine and, oh yes, I wanted to learn how to be an editor.
27:30So he began to establish a group of writers for his magazine that became the pantheon of modern science fiction.
27:37Robert Heinlein, for example.
27:39Isaac Asimov.
27:41John W. Campbell, Jr.
27:43What he wanted were people who would write stories in which the science was realistic.
27:50Realistic in the sense that the scientific culture be represented accurately.
27:55He certainly shifted science fiction from boys' adventure stories in space to serious considerations of what the future might be like.
28:04And that set up what some writers think of as the golden age.
28:09Campbell said that he got the idea for this story who goes there from a very personal incident that happened to him as a child.
28:15One day he came home, saw his mother in the kitchen and started talking with her and became increasingly confused by her odd responses to his questions.
28:24It wasn't until his mother actually walked in that he realized he had been talking to her twin sister.
28:30This sort of uncanny moment, moment when he thought he saw someone he knew and it turned out to be a different person, stayed with him for all his life.
28:37He ain't tying me up.
28:40Then I'll have to kill you, child.
28:43Then kill me.
28:45The thing is definitely about the monster within.
28:48And how those monsters within us that would allow the fear to overtake you to the point where your friend you don't trust.
28:58You go down that road and it can be monstrous.
29:09I would say that, you know, in Pacific Rim, four square science fiction robots and giant monsters, you don't get any more science fiction than that.
29:17In Pacific Rim what I love is of the myriad of solutions that we can come up with to kill 25 story monsters.
29:24The one solution that probably would come at least is let's create 25 story robots.
29:30Robots, right.
29:40The great majority of monster movies, you killed the monster at the end.
29:45So it's you stand that fear up and then you kill it.
29:48And you kill it by ingenuity, by willpower, by courage, whatever it is.
29:51And so I think there's an element that we create the monster so we can destroy it.
29:56Of course.
29:57Like in the 50s and all these bee monster movies.
30:04I certainly saw the blob when I was a kid.
30:07And the fact that some oozing mass of sticky goo is going to kill me is a really good idea.
30:14It's a very bee movie, horrible, stupid idea, but it's actually works pretty well.
30:18Bee movies in the 1950s emerged because the horror genre went into decline and something had to fill the void.
30:25And science fiction was just the right fit for independent producers with just enough rubber monster suits to create something on the cheap.
30:33Well, Creature from the Black Lagoon was probably the first one that I remember getting sucked into.
30:38And it kept me from swimming in lakes for years.
30:40The killer shrews. I remember being quite frightened by it.
30:46At the end, people are claustrophobically in this sort of shed.
30:50I thought that was terrible.
30:51And I still have dreams of fangy kind of creatures.
30:55There's a 1953 film called Robot Monster.
30:58The monster was a guy in a gorilla costume with a diver's helmet made for $20,000.
31:04Completely ridiculous.
31:05And yet audiences bought it and it made over a million dollars.
31:09The monster movies of the 1950s, you can see very clearly the way they sprung out of World War II and the atomic bomb and this incredible fear about what had been unleashed.
31:21Never in the history of the United States a monster of such size and power.
31:25People have discovered that radiation can change genetic structures and create, well, odd kinds of monsters.
31:32The granddaddy of all atomic monster movies has got to be Godzilla.
31:43Godzilla embodies the anxiety and the terror of a nuclear attack.
31:46Of the nuclear age, right?
31:47Absolutely.
31:48Sure.
31:49It's not a surprise that it emerged as a science fiction neomyth from Japan, which had actually been bombed by nuclear weapons.
31:56And in that way, monsters respond to the zeitgeist at the time there.
32:01Right, at the zeitgeist.
32:02So monsters are incredibly apt at embodying the abstract in flesh.
32:09Godzilla was made less than a decade after the atomic bombings and there were a lot of issues that were taboo.
32:19Japanese people could not speak amongst themselves or in the media about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about the defeat, and about the fact that Japan, even after the war, remained subservient to the United States.
32:30In Japan, you know, you can't make a movie about that stuff. But what if we make a movie about a giant monster, who Americans invent this bomb.
32:41It wakes up the monster and one of our cities gets destroyed and leaves radiation everywhere.
32:46And they're like, oh yeah, that's fine. You can make that movie.
32:48It's like, okay, cool. It's called Godzilla.
32:51In Japan, the name is Gojira.
32:53It is a combination of two words.
32:55Gorira, which means gorilla, and Kujira, which means whale.
32:59So it literally means gorilla whale.
33:01The legend is, this was a nickname of an overweight Toho Studios employee.
33:06The producer heard that nickname and loved it so much, he gave it to the monster.
33:11The first film is hardcore, very meaningful science fiction.
33:16And then, you know, they obviously think, what can we do next?
33:20And, well, let's have Godzilla fight another creature.
33:23And it became a bit silly.
33:25And so Godzilla was transformed from being this vengeful force to being more of a protector and defender for Japan.
33:35In our film, we wanted to bring back a little bit of the kitschiness in a modern concept.
33:39Because Godzilla is such a beloved character from Japan, the creators of Godzilla had a Bible.
33:47It was this thick.
33:49And in it was all the do's and don'ts, what it can do, what it can't do.
33:52And we like threw it away.
33:55I hired one of the production designers of Independence Day, Patrick Tartopoulos, to kind of give me a new Godzilla.
34:03And I said, if I cannot make that Godzilla, I'm not making the movie at all.
34:07The first shot that we had about Godzilla was a shot from the street looking up.
34:12And the first question we asked is, what's happening with the genitals?
34:17Should we see them?
34:20And it's funny, because as joke as it is, Emory says, you know, I think she should be a female.
34:25She should have kids.
34:29In many regards, we were trying to reinvent Godzilla.
34:32Godzilla, I think that the people in Japan felt, don't reinvent our Godzilla.
34:37We like our Godzilla just the way he is.
34:43I think when you're trying to make a science fiction monster movie, you're always looking for what's it really about.
34:48When we made our Godzilla, we definitely wanted it to be serious again.
34:55You know, at the end of the day, it's a giant monster movie, two massive creatures smacking the crap out of each other.
35:01But all that stuff's pointless if it hasn't got something at the heart of it that it represents.
35:07And so I feel like there's this sort of Western guilt that we don't really acknowledge or talk about.
35:15We nuclear bombed a country, and I think Godzilla in our film was representing that coming back to haunt us in a way.
35:23Science fiction movies could be very cathartic. The reality is in all of these movies, humankind ends up defeating the monster.
35:31The world is saved.
35:33And we come together when we most need to.
35:42It's hard to come up with an original story.
35:44I mean, there's a lot of writers out there nodding their heads.
35:46I think we're all influenced by the stories that came before us going back thousands of years by myths, legends, fairy tales.
35:54I think the worst films just refer to other movies.
35:57Yeah. The best films somehow connect you to something that you've actually experienced.
36:02Yes. Well, Stranger Things has done that very well.
36:05It touches on a lot of the movies that you and I and others have made, but it does it brilliantly.
36:08It's an amalgam of genres, but all having to do with one thing, and that is you love those kids.
36:17And you do not want anything bad to happen to them.
36:20And Stranger Things, for all of its brilliant imaginings, are about those characters.
36:27All I know is Will is alive. Will is alive!
36:31He's out there somewhere. All we have to do is find him.
36:33We had a pretty steady, healthy diet of science fiction and horror movies growing up.
36:38They very much influenced Stranger Things.
36:41A lot of our favorite stories and movies and books growing up all revolved around children dealing with a terror of some kind.
36:49Yeah, I mean, like, Spielberg has a history of putting children in traumatizing situations.
36:55So does Stephen King.
36:56They would take very relatable characters like families and kids who, it felt like our family, it felt like our friends, it felt like us, and then put them into these extraordinary situations.
37:06Stranger Things, it's about a kid who goes missing. He vanishes into, like, thin air. And I'm one of his best friends and we go look for him. We go on crazy adventures and they confront this girl. She has powers. Then we confront other things like monsters.
37:32Monsters. Not just monsters. One monster. The Demogorgon.
37:40The Demogorgon has sort of this, like, ultimate movie or TV monster feel to it. Almost like the prototypical nightmare monster.
37:48We wanted to create a monster that we could build practically and we wanted to go back to that old school style filmmaking.
37:54And the thing is that once you commit to that, to building a suit, it limits you.
37:59It was also very important that it was very weird. Because to us, you know, the weirder design is, the scarier it is.
38:07And sometimes it's simple things like removing, taking the eyes off.
38:10By the creature not having a face, it really evokes the same idea of something in the shadows. A figure that you can't quite make out, but you have a familiar shape.
38:18But without any eyes, you don't know where it's looking, what it's thinking, which is terrifying.
38:24The Demogorgon, he's really tall. I would say he's probably like seven foot one.
38:29It's Jack's height. He has this, his face looks like a tulip, a flower. And it opens up with all this teeth and slime.
38:37We can't wrap our brains around what this thing is and we can't pinpoint what to do and what it is.
38:42That's why we're afraid of it. And it looks pretty creepy and it's trying to kill you.
38:47The Demogorgon head was the most remarkable part of the entire Demogorgon suit.
38:53Because I don't see the way I normally see, I don't hear the way I normally hear, it makes it easier to feel like the monster.
39:00The direction I was given by the Death Rovers was very concise. I was the shark from Jaws.
39:05That I was this creature that came from this other dimension to feed.
39:07I think monsters who threaten children are particularly terrifying because it triggers this response in humans to protect the young.
39:16Children are the ultimate vulnerability. These kids are right on the brink of becoming young adults.
39:23So some of the unleashing of this other world, I think is metaphorical and it allows us to think about what does it mean to pass from a state of childhood into being a teen.
39:38Sometimes you tangle with monsters and sometimes you're sucked into a pool.
39:43Maybe these things don't happen literally, but it's a really horrific, terrifying process to grow up.
39:48Who are you? I'm Maria.
39:54Stranger Things is, in and of itself, a kind of Frankenstein monster TV show.
40:02It is all these different parts of all these different elements of pop culture.
40:07All right, here I go, okay?
40:10Okay. Here we go.
40:12All kind of sutured together to create this new kind of beautiful, horrifying thing.
40:19Out of the way! Out of the way!
40:21The whole bike chase and the van flip is obviously a not so subtle nod to E.T.
40:26Well, dressing up Eleven, we just couldn't help ourselves.
40:28A lot of Winona's character was based on Richard Dreyfuss.
40:32Her Christmas lights are his mashed potatoes, basically.
40:34Will!
40:36When you're a kid and you're experiencing these films, there's a sense of wonder and awe and fear that just, it stays with you for the rest of your life.
40:46What we wanted to do was try to recapture the way those movies made us feel.
40:51Sci-fi is an escape for so many people.
40:57And I feel those monsters, not just the demogorgy, helps everyone in the world move on and feel good about the world when the world isn't doing well.
41:08Well, I think what would inflame my imagination when I was a kid was simply fear.
41:13Fear, I think, you know, I needed to do something to protect myself against everything that I was afraid of.
41:19Most everything when it got dark, I was afraid of.
41:24A lot of my process starts with dreams and nightmares.
41:27It's all getting out those childhood terrors and just making everybody else feel it.
41:32Yeah, yeah, you kind of exorcise them from your own life and then you foist them upon strangers.
41:36Not everybody else, right, exactly.
41:38And we love it and we can't get enough of it and so we can't stop.
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