In one of the biggest surprises at last year's Comic-Con, director Gareth Edwards showed up in Hall H brandishing a brief, tantalising trailer for the new Godzilla movie.
Today the film - due for release in May 2014 - gets a proper 'bells and whistles' panel, with cast members, special footage and more. Hopefully that 'more' entails some more details about the actual plot of the movie, as they still remain scant.
Follow minute-by-minute updates from the panel live with us below!
Please note that all times in this live blog are Pacific, which is eight hours behind the UK and three hours behind the East Coast.
Hello and thanks for joining me at the start of another packed day here in Hall H at Comic-Con. Coming up today we have Godzilla, The Hunger Games, Wolverine, X-Men and the much-anticipated Marvel panel.
We're just finishing up the panel for new Jeff Bridges film Seventh Son but we'll be right underway with Godzilla in a few minutes.
Clip time. A black-and-white shot of a peaceful beach, before a nuclear explosion. The word 'GODZILLA' comes into focus and the audience go wild.
The moderator for the panel is Chris Hardwick of The Talking Dead, a fan favourite here at Comic-Con. He reintroduces the clip we saw last year.
It's still just as stunning and visually impactful. Out comes director Gareth Edwards and cast members Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Bryan Cranston.
Someone from the audience shouts "I love you Hal." Ooh, retro.
Edwards: "We finished shooting a couple of days' ago. We were in Hawaii doing a night shoot and pretty much soon as it wrapped we got on a plane to San Diego to see you guys."
How did the shoot go? "I know everyone comes on stage and sucks up to the studio, but genuinely, Legendary and Warners couldn't be more supportive. The creative freedom we had and the general goodwill we had from the producers was incredible."
Olsen: "I actually expected it to be really different. It felt small, it felt creative. I never waited around two hours for a setup. It felt like an independent, smaller production in a way. I play a nurse and a mother."
ATJ: "What Gareth brings is exactly that, an intimacy as a family. The way he wanted to shoot it was... it happened to be a big budget art film. It had a lot of emotion and journey through with these characters. I had a fantastic time."
Did Cranston watch the old films every week as a kid? "Are you asking me that because I'm the old guy? Godzilla was always my favourite monster when I was young, because he was unapologetic. With King Kong it was like ''mmmm hmmm". I didn't wanna see that, I wanna see destruction, I'm a boy. At first I didn't know this was a good project for me because it was so huge."
Cranston continues: "This is so enormous, but then I talked to Gareth for several hours, then I watched his movie Monsters, which was terrific. He was able to make a monster movie also into a character-driven component. That's what he did with this Godzilla movie."
How does he balance character with the monster? Edwards: "We took a lot of time trying to figure out the storyline and the characters we followed, and that it wouldn't be two separate storylines."
Edwards: "We filmed it in Canada and on the way into Canada, you go through US immigration. When we first arrived they were like 'why are you here?' and we were like 'making a film' and they were like 'which film?' and we had a code name Novelis. I sort of lied a little bit about what it was. He obviously looked me up on the internet and came back and was like 'are you directing Godzilla? Don't fuck it up, man.'"
Audience Q&A time. Did Edwards feel the pressure to live up to the classic Godzilla series? "I put more pressure on myself than everyone else combined. I've wanted to do this my whole life. We've worked very closely with Toho and it's very important to us that we fit with the Toho legacy."
Only time for that one question. "We've brought something to show you," says Hardwick, before Cranston pretends to unzip his flies. Cranston: "I call it Godzilla."
IT'S A TRAILER, of course! Only the briefest of trailers, but wow. The effects are incredible.
That's a wrap on this briefest of panels, sadly. Join me again in around two hours for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire!
Written by
Neil Wilkes
Neil Wilkes
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