(3 of 4)
Devlin and Emmerich approached the project gingerly, having rejected four previous overtures from Sony to take charge of Godzilla. The monster appeared to be unmanageable. Jan De Bont (Speed) tried to tame the beast for a while but gave up after Sony balked at the budget he wanted for a script that had Godzilla battling a shape-shifting beast. James Cameron (Titanic), Tim Burton (Batman) and David Fincher (Alien 3) were among the directors at one time considered to update Godzilla. When Steven Spielberg, who knows from dinosaurs, heard that Devlin and Emmerich were contemplating the movie, he tried to talk them out of it and called the remake a silly concept. Emmerich, who was to direct the film, responded with a smile, "I don't know. Big Lizard eats Big Apple. I like it."
The two were persuaded to do the film by Chris Lee, now Columbia's president of production but then head of its TriStar division (both owned by Sony). The partners put on hold a movie they had in the works, dubbed Project X, about ("I kid you not," says Devlin) a giant meteor on a collision course with Earth. Lee was also the most persistent of the studio execs in persuading Toho to lend out its famous monster. Still, when he saw Tatopoulos' model just hours before it was unveiled for the Toho board of directors in Tokyo, Lee was stunned. "It was just so different," he says, "so improved." Devlin says he heard of a little more consternation: "'You have to do this in stages! Show them the face first, then show them the body, then...'" But Emmerich was adamant, and they all headed for the Toho boardroom. Says Lee: "It's 15 guys, in increasing age, all looking very stern." When the model was unveiled, there was an audible gasp.
"It was a heart-stopping moment," says Lee, who knew Toho could sink the proposed Godzilla then and there. Some quick talking took place. Says Emmerich: "I told the Japanese guys the biggest difference would be that the creature is very lean because he's very fast. I also told them, 'Guys, we either do it like this, or we don't do it at all. It's your trademark, but if you don't do it this way, I'll go make another movie, and you'll have to find someone else.'" That argument carried some weight: Toho was the Japanese distributor of Devlin and Emmerich's Independence Day and made a bundle from it.
Careful not to invoke the name Sony (and thus stir up intra-Japanese competitiveness), Lee asked the Toho board members to think of the pair's model as the "Tristar Godzilla," a line extension of their own "Classic Godzilla" franchise. And most important, he says, "we left the model in the boardroom overnight so they could get used to it." Whether persuaded by all or part of the delegation's arguments, Toho gave its blessing the next day. Says Tatopoulos: "The Japanese told me that the new Godzilla is miles away from the old creature but that I kept its spirit."