DIRECTOR Gareth Edwards' reboot of the Godzilla franchise turned part of Cypress Mountain into San Francisco Bay Area Park last week during location shooting on the North Shore.
The 3D production, starring Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, David Strathairn, Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe, began principal photography on March 18 at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Shooting is expected to continue around the Lower Mainland, Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and Hawaii through the end of June.
The film, with the working title of Nautilus, will be released in IMAX 3D on May 16, 2014 with Warner Brothers distributing the film worldwide, except in Japan, where it will be distributed by Toho, the studio which produced the original science fiction Kaiju film Godzilla back in 1954.
Vancouver has a connection, albeit tenuous, to the original production - in the spring of 1956, TransWorld Releasing Corp. released an edited version of the film theatrically in the United States titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters! with newly-shot scenes of New Westminster-born/Hollywood actor Raymond Burr interspliced in with the original Japanese footage. Burr played an American reporter covering the monster's rampage through Japan for an English-speaking audience.
