We imagine Steven Spielberg is the kind of guy who would be distraught if he learned he made someone cry. Not only does he make great films, but he seems like a really nice man, too. But, he did make Gareth Edwards cry once, after reviewing the Godzilla reboot of 2014.
Steven Spielberg has made some of the best movies of all time, and he is without a doubt one of the best directors to ever live. It makes sense, then, that his opinion would mean a lot to his peers. So, when Gareth Edwards started a chain of new movies in the MonsterVerse with his 2014 version of Godzilla, and Spielberg gave it praise, you can understand Edwards’ emotional reaction.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast to discuss The Creator, Edwards touched on the topic of Godzilla, and how Spielberg’s comments affected him.
“When we finished – I don’t know if you’re familiar with publicity tours, where some filmmaker has to sit in front of a camera and do a million interviews, but apparently they exist. We had to do that for Godzilla, and I was fried by the end of it,” Edwards said. “Me and the writer Max Berenstein were like ‘Let’s go have a party, let’s just do something, we’ve got to celebrate this.’ So, we go to the Cineramadome, we watch the movie, then we’ll hire a house and we’ll just all have a house party and have drinks with all these people.”
The party didn’t quite go to plan for Edwards, though. Turns out, when you make one of the best monster movies of the decade, everybody wants to ask you about it. Not feeling up to even more questions, Edwards and a pal left the party behind and headed into Hollywood.
“At about 2am or 3am, I look at my phone and there’s an email. I recognize the email address, it’s Peter Jackson’s email… and there’s a video attachment, I open up the video… and there’s a guy with sort of grey hair and a beard, and I’m thinking ‘Is this Gandalf?’, and I don’t know what’s going on, it’s really weird,” Edwards continued. “So I go outside and I start putting my headphones on, and as soon as I put the headphones in I recognize the voice, and it was Steven Spielberg.”
“Peter Jackson was filming him on his phone, and basically, Spielberg had just watched Godzilla… Spielberg started speaking about Godzilla, and it was nice to hear it, and I just started crying. I literally just collapsed. I hardly ever cry, it just felt like that’s why I did it, all the pain of whatever it was, was just worth it for that little video clip. It meant the absolute world to me,” he added.
I think I would do the exact same thing, so don’t worry about it Gareth. For more from these two great filmmakers, check out our list of the best Steven Spielberg movies, or have a read of our The Creator review to see what we make of Edwards’ latest. You might also want to figure out how to watch the Star Wars movies in order to see where Edwards’ Rogue One falls into the timeline. For more on monsters, here’s what we know about Demon Slayer season 4.