Bigger budgets, bigger crews, bigger explosions. That’s usually the Hollywood formula for a blockbuster. But in 2023, a certain radioactive reptile came along and proved that Hollywood might be overestimating just how much money it takes to make a big impression.
Made for less than $15 million — pocket change by blockbuster standards — Godzilla Minus One delivered spectacle on a scale that seemed to defy its modest budget. And with a visual effects team of just 35 artists, the Japanese production outgunned Hollywood heavy hitters like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — which, for perspective, had a production cost of $250 million — to take home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Its sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero, arrives in North American theaters November 6, which is as good an excuse as any to revisit how director Takashi Yamazaki and his team managed to make so much movie with so little money.
For starters, Yamazaki had sort of a home-field advantage. Before directing, he began his career in visual effects, eventually building a longstanding relationship with Japanese VFX studio Shirogumi. For Godzilla Minus One, he not only wrote and directed the film but also supervised its visual effects. That meant the team could forgo much of the back-and-forth that typically comes with producing CGI. Working alongside his artists in the same office, Yamazaki could simply walk over to someone’s computer, offer feedback, and approve shots on the spot. With roughly 610 effects shots to complete in 8 months, bypassing a few layers of bureaucracy (and a few hundred emails) made quite a difference.
And when it came to stretching the budget, Yamazaki’s team had a few tricks up their sleeves. Take the film’s recreation of post-War Tokyo. Rather than construct an elaborate period set, the production transformed a parking lot into a small stretch of 1940s Ginza. The surrounding city, including entire streets of buildings, was added digitally. So when Godzilla came stomping through the city, many of the buildings he reduced to rubble had never actually been built in the first place.
Some of the production’s most ingenious tricks were also its simplest. Instead of using expensive hydraulic equipment to simulate a boat rocking at sea, the team turned to a decidedly old-school practical effect: having the actors sway in unison. By combining this little bit of on-set trickery with modern CGI, they made the vessel appear to be at the mercy of the ocean. All aboard the world’s least expensive motion simulator!
Of course, the actors could sway all they wanted. Getting the water around them to behave was another matter entirely. For the film’s spectacular ocean sequences, the team had to combine real footage shot at sea with digitally generated waves, splashes, and a very large Godzilla. Enter VFX artist Tatsuji Nojima, who had been experimenting with water simulations in his spare time using a supercomputer he’d built at home. His work impressed Yamazaki so much that the director actually added more ocean scenes to the film. The simulations were hardly simple, generating so much data that the team had to delete finished ones just to make room for the next. Rather than forcing the production to scale back its ambitions, Nojima’s expertise gave Yamazaki reason to aim even higher.
Even Godzilla himself wasn’t built entirely from scratch. The team started with a digital model originally created for a Japanese theme park attraction then adapted it for the big screen. And rather than use elaborate muscle simulations, which Yamazaki felt would make Godzilla look too animalistic, the animators focused on his skeletal movements, preserving the lumbering, slightly stiff quality of the original rubber-suit performances. It was a marriage of old and new: using cutting-edge CGI to pay homage to the days when bringing Godzilla to life meant putting a guy in a rubber suit and telling him to stomp around.
Still, Yamazaki has been careful not to let the film’s success become an excuse for the industry to start slashing VFX budgets. For one thing, $15 million is actually a substantial sum by Japanese filmmaking standards. And the team’s remarkable efficiency wasn’t something that happened overnight. Rather, it was the product of years of experience, collaboration, and a close-knit working dynamic that allowed a small group of artists to accomplish something extraordinary. You can’t expect the same results from any 35 artists you happen to put in a room.
With Godzilla Minus Zero, Yamazaki and his team have one enormously tough act to follow. But whatever the sequel brings, Godzilla Minus One has already made its mark, proving that some of cinema’s biggest achievements don't require its biggest budgets. After all, money isn’t much use without knowing what to do with it, and creativity has a way of making limited resources awfully limitless.
