According to Pink Tentacle, Gojira can belt out blobs of fire because (s)he has "a “uranium sack” and “nuclear reaction sack” that produce radioactive fire-breath and energize the body." Note that his brain is actually kind of small, which explains that whole Highland Fling dance he does when he beats down his adversaries.

Gamera has organs that store "lava, oil, coal and uranium." Too awesome. If these images were being made today, he might have an ethanol storage organ too.

This is one of my favorite monsters, Guiron, who battled Gamera in Destroy All Planets. Sadly, nothing about these organs can explain why two hot alien ladies kidnapped those little boys and fed them drugged donuts while Gamera and Guiron fought outside their spaceship.

And here's Anguirus, who has two sub-brains to control the extra-armored lower legs.

Kaiju Anatomical Drawings [via Pink Tentacle]

An article published in Science today has the details. According to the New York Times:

Scientists attribute dead zones to a process that begins when nitrogen from agricultural runoff and sewage stimulates the growth of photosynthetic plankton on the surface of coastal waters. As the organisms decay and sink to the bottom, they are decomposed by microbes that consume large amounts of oxygen. As oxygen levels drop, most animals that live at the bottom cannot survive. “The overwhelming response of the organisms in our coastal areas is to migrate or to die,” [lead author Robert J.] Diaz said. “To adapt to low oxygen water, it has to be a part of your evolutionary history. It’s not something you can develop in a 40- or 50-year time period.”

About 400 coastal "dead zones" have been identified, and their combined area is comparable to the U.S. state of Oregon. Many are doubling in size every year.

This is bad news for sea life, but even worse for human life. Most of the areas affected are in regions where people raise fish and lobsters in fisheries. Areas hit include the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea, where the times reports only "microbes" can live now. More recently, China and Norway's Kattegat Sea have grown dead zones, and some are appearing in the United States off the coast of South Carolina and the Pacific Northwest. At least we're safe from Godzilla, who wouldn't be able to swim to shore through the oxygen-destroyed waters.

Oxygen-Starved Ocean 'Dead Zones' [NY Times via KSJ Tracker]

We know about J.J. Abrams going into the toy store in Japan and seeing all these Godzilla figures and being inspired to make this film, but at what point were you contacted and asked to come onboard to direct?

Basically, J.J. and Drew were talking about the story, and they went in and pitched it to Paramount and they immediately said "Okay, we'll make it." It wasn't like, okay write a script and then we'll put it into development. They were like, We love the idea, we'll make it, we know where it goes, we know when to open it. Apparently Drew walked out of that meeting and turned to J.J., because they'd pitched it as if they had everything, and he said "J.J., that's all we have!" J.J. said, "No no, we're gonna do it."

It all happened very, very quickly, so Drew went off and wrote a 60 page outline which we called a "scriptment" because it was a weird hybrid between a script and a treatment. That was what they showed me. J.J. and Bryan Burk, who has been his producing partner for years, came to me and showed me the treatment. I read it and they said I should meet Drew. The thing is... it was clearly filled with a huge amount of special effects. I was thinking, "We can't just go out on the streets of New York and film this as is. There's going to be a lot of effects work." I'd never done effects work before, and I was also in the middle of of putting this film together that I'm hoping to do now called The Invisible Woman, and we were in the middle of a casting snafu and J.J. was like "I want you to do this! Do this first and you can do that film right after." So I said to him, "Why do you want me? It's such a heavy visual effects thing." And he said, "Because I know that you love character, and that's what we want. We want a sense of realism."

Then I got very excited, because I was reading it and I was seeing all of the crazy detail, I thought if we could really do this, against this epic scale... on the page it read like a Roland Emmerich-sized Independence Day kind of movie. But I thought, if do it in this kind of intimate, naturalistic style... And I wanted to do some improvisation and other things to make it feel real. That was very exciting to me, and they said great, so J.J. and Drew and I got together and started talking about the direction to take the outline and we fleshed it out further.

That's basically how I got involved. I'm going to guess they had their pitch around January or February, and then Drew wrote up that very extensive treatment very quickly. By the end of February I'd already read it and was on board, and we started developing the treatment further and going into production on the teaser trailer. There was no script when I got on-board, so from when I got on to the release date, is still under a year, which is crazy. In fact, we didn't even have a script until four weeks before we started shooting. Drew was still working on Lost, and we were working on weekends and talking about how to rework the story, coming up with the structure of the flashbacks and all that stuff. It was all madly coming together because we knew that we had this release date, and we also knew we wanted to finish this teaser trailer and get it onto the front of Transformers.

We thought for a movie that didn't have any recognizable people in it, we thought it would be great to tease people with that trailer on the front of a huge movie like Transformers, and we had no idea what kind of a reaction we'd get. All of that, working on the script, readying the trailer, was all happening at once.

How different was this experience vs. your other feature film, The Pallbearer?

It was very different, although it's funny because the casting process was very similar in that... it's funny, because when we did that film I wanted the main character to be someone you didn't recognize, and who you'd meet as that new character. When we cast David Schwimmer at the time he was on the first season of Friends. We thought it was this show that had just begun, and he was part of a huge ensemble, and in it's first season it wasn't a hit, it was only sort of a middling success. However, right when it began filming it became this monster smash, and we knew this because we'd be out on location filming and kids, little kids, would come out and surround where we were shooting, and then we realized, "Oh, we don't have an unknown cast."

In this case, we thought it was critical to cast people you didn't realize, because in trying to create this "reality," and create this illusion that you're watching found footage. If you're supposed to be looking at someone's camcorder, you don't want to end up seeing Will Smith, because as great as he is, that immediately tells you that you're watching a movie.

The actual process itself was different, and not just for me, because I'd never done effects before, but also for the visual effects people as well. I went to them and I said "Okay, I don't know how this is done, but this is what I want to do. I want it to look handheld, and I want it to be continuous takes." I thought it was critical that this needed to look like a handheld film. Our escape route has always been that we could put in a jump cut, but I felt if we used that in this, people would feel cheated. So when we met with the vfs people, they suggested shooting on steadicam and then adding shake later, but the problem with that is that anyone who is doing these kind of videos that you see on YouTube every day, which is really our audience, will say "Hey, that's not authentic." So they had to figure out a way that it could all be done handheld.

Also, in most films you have all these shots that are like a small shot here, a few seconds there, and it would all be very containable and the visual effects people would know exactly how many shots they'd be working on. But, with this film since we were doing everything in continuous takes, we'd shoot a scene and I'd ask them "How many effects shots is that?" and they'd say, "Well, we don't know." Instead of doing many shots, we did one long shot that would basically take in all the effects of many shots.

It was also really different for the crew, because I was having the camera operators run the cameras as unprofessionally as possible. And the focus pullers as well... focus pullers lose their job if they're not dead on when someone walks into a room and hits their mark. I'd be saying "No! You're too dead on! This is autofocus on a handheld consumer camera, it has to go past them, and come back." They'd say, "Well, this is the kind of thing that gets me fired." I told them, "Not on this movie!"

I also wanted to be able to use the handheld camera as a basis for improvisation as well. Instead of shooting the scene a normal way where you'd have several angles, I'd only have one angle. I would also shoot the rehearsals, because you never know if something great was going to happen. Then after we'd done the scenes a bunch of times, I'd say "Okay, forget the words and lets just try something else. You know what the scene is about." I'd let them go and improv the scene, and a lot of times those ended up in the movie, because they felt more understated and natural.

Were you inspired at all by the original 1954 Gojira film?

Yeah, absolutely! That's actually an incredible film, and we've seen the bastardized version here in the United States. Most people are familiar with the film and have seen the Raymond Burr intercut scenes, but that movie is far inferior to the original. It came out the same year as Seven Samurai, and is considered to be a masterpiece in that country. It is a great movie, and it's very haunting.

There's no question that we were aware of the fact that the monster in that film was really a metaphor for the anxiety of that time. That was definitely the idea here that we wanted to create our own national monster the same way Godzilla did to create a monster of our time.

When you worked with artist Neville Page who designed the monster, what inspirations did both of you draw from? What was that like?

We wanted it to be totally original. He is really amazing, he has this thing I affectionately call his "Wall of Terror." You walk into this office and there's this very colorful wall of pictures, and immediately you want to walk over to it and check it out. However, the closer you get to it, the more quickly you want to look away. They're images of intestines and body parts and all these different things because there's a very biological, evolutionary logic to his work. He was coming up with all of these different features for the monster, and drawing from nature for this.

In working with him I was very interested in what the creature was going through, and we came up with the secret that the creature was a baby. It was this enormous baby that was going through terrible separation anxiety, it didn't know what was going on, and it was pissed. I wanted a creature that would be ferocious and angry, but also that there would be fear in the eyes. He showed all these sorts of fearful eyes, like how horses have a lot of white showing under their eyes when they're scared. He would always come up with these diabolical features that the creature would have. He has a singular talent, and he's really amazing.

So, at the end of the film, after the credits, a walkie-talkie crackles to life and you hear... something. What is it?

Yes, you do hear something! That's another sort of radio chatter moment. I don't actually want to give that away at this point, because it is decipherable. That's the very last thing we did on the mix, I sort of jumped up to the microphone and did this thing. I know someone will figure it out, but I don't want to give it away yet.

Early in Cloverfield, when the monster first attacks New York, we see nothing of the giant beast — only the destruction it's leaving behind. As bloodied people stumble from the wreckage of leaning skyscrapers, dazed and covered in a thick layer of dust, one cannot help but recall the first, terrifying images that leaked from New York after the World Trade Center was hit. Most of it came from shaky, amateur footage. Likewise, Cloverfield is shot to look like it comes from a handheld camera dragged around by a group of rich twenty-somethings fleeing the wreckage of a party. So Cloverfield isn't just reenacting the attacks. It's reenacting TV news images of the attacks too. There is something genuinely shocking and brilliant about those moments in the film when you know you're watching scenes so clearly inspired by 9/11. It feels risky and wrong, and therefore you are profoundly relieved to see the comical, rubbery monster come on the scene, stomping and roaring and shedding lice the size of great danes. That creature, who does all the appropriate monstery things like resist conventional weapons and open its mouth really wide to reveal layers of weird teeth, is profound reassurance that we are firmly in the realm of fantasy. New York has not been attacked. It's just a silly dream about a monster so goofy-looking that you can hardly look at it without giggling. (Don't believe me? See the Cloverfield monster do its funky chicken dance in our morning spoilers.)

Director Matt Reeves knows what he's doing with his monster, bringing it blundering into the story whenever we get too close to remembering the real disaster that inspired it. In fact, one of the most genuinely horrifying scenes in the film has no monster at all. Several characters decide to rescue their friend from a sixty-story building that has collapsed against another one. Exhausted and in shock from watching their other friends die, they climb those sixty flights up the non-collapsed building, and jump into the slowly-crumbling one next door to get to their friend. Nothing is more terrifying than these vacant, tottering buildings whose blasted walls howl with wind.

And then, just as you start to contemplate those other blasted buildings, those other terrified people trapped inside them, the monster arrives and suddenly everything is fun, B-movie goodness. It takes smart writing and directing to make a movie like this, that pushes raw historical tragedy right into our eyeballs and then deftly distracts us with old-fashioned entertainment.

Sure, you can go see Cloverfield for the stomping and roaring, and you won't be disappointed. But when the movie's images of a destroyed New York fallen into chaos haunt you for days afterward, you'll start to realize that Reeves and his twangy-ass monster have given the U.S. its first great movie about 9/11.