New York City, Meet Your Unmaker

Stage 27 at Sony Pictures is a building big enough to keep most of a 747 dry, although not on this August night because rain is falling inside, drenching a yawning, dimly lit canyon of jagged granite ripped open by a giant lizard. The full-scale set is a picture of subterranean destruction left by a reptile 200 feet high that has tried to crawl through the subway tunnels of New York.

The canyon, seven stories deep, is made of painted Styrofoam, but the red-paneled subway cars dangling from the severed rails above are real. (They’ve got to be kidding. Imagine what this cost.) At the very top of the set at one end is the familiar sight of a white-tiled Manhattan subway station wall and the words “23rd St.” The platform is deserted. No one’s around because you-know-who has just been here.

Visible only on a black-and-white television monitor behind the set, two dark figures in Army fatigues and combat boots creep cautiously through the tunnel, flashing searchlights and exchanging words that are difficult to hear.

Finally, one of them emerges from the ghostly make-believe into the dank, semi-dark surroundings where a crew of film technicians crowd around the monitor and director Roland Emmerich wearing knee-high rain boots. It is Matthew Broderick, the Ferris in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and Tony Award-winning star of the Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

What, some might ask, is he doing in a remake of “Godzilla”?

“Basically, I just said, ‘He went thataway,’ ” Broderick tells a visitor to the set. “There are a lot of scenes like that.”

Here on a soundstage where Esther Williams once made her swimming pool musicals in the 1940s, a sci-fi-addicted German director is making a $100-something-million movie based on a character leased from Japan. How times have changed for the Axis powers.

The seriously regarded Broderick makes no apology for being in this monster spectacle for TriStar that was to have been directed by the “Speed” man, Jan De Bont, but instead is being made by the people who brought you the boffo alien invasion “Independence Day”--Emmerich and screenwriter-producer Dean Devlin.

“I can’t say that them having just done ‘Independence Day’ and it being such a huge hit had no influence,” says Broderick, who plays a scientist knowledgeable about lizards. “But if I had read it and thought it was a boring or trashy version of ‘Godzilla’ I wouldn’t be here. But it seems to me they want to make a good movie.

“I’m surprised at how embedded Godzilla is on everybody’s psyche. The odd person asks me if the monkey dies in the end, but it seems to me people really know about Godzilla. The guy who cuts my hair in New York--he’s Japanese--was incredibly excited. He said, ‘I like Godzilla because he’s a good man, and he’s a bad man.’

” I kind of know what he means. King Kong, you feel bad for, he’s sort of a saintly figure. But Godzilla is both: You feel bad when he gets hurt, but he’s a vicious monster too.”

In the original Japanese film, adapted for American audiences in 1956 as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters,” Godzilla was a giant mutation--caused by radioactive fallout--who rose from the ocean depths and stomped Tokyo until being subdued. Memories of Hiroshima and all that.

In this ‘90s remake, he (or is it a she?) visits various parts of the globe before terrorizing New York. The main battle is set in Manhattan and includes (attention Knicks fans) the lizard-induced collapse of Madison Square Garden, but other battles are waged in New England, Polynesia, Panama and Jamaica.

In 1956, Godzilla was played by a man in a rubber lizard suit. Today the creature will have the benefit of the sort of computer and special-effects technology that brought dinosaurs so vividly to life in “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World.”

But as a result, the title character has remained mostly a phantom presence during the three months of shooting in New York and Los Angeles--even to the actors. They must look at a set like this one, the magnificently imploded 23rd Street station, and let their imaginations take over.

“It’s weird,” Broderick says. “We see a big foot every now and then. They’ll bring a foot around on the back of a truck. I think there’s a head that will get used at some point. I’ve not seen him at all except sketches. They put an X on a board and say, ‘This is where he is.’

“You have to play along, relax and give in to it. Yeah, I can’t have actual chemistry with Godzilla, but I can think about the story and what my relationship to Godzilla is.”

Hank Azaria, who plays an intrepid TV cameraman partnered with an intrepid TV reporter played by Maria Pitillo, squishes his way through a patch of wet sawdust soaking up all the fake rain and reflects on the challenge of “reading to the X,” as he puts it. “I have to ask myself, ‘Am I afraid here?’ ‘How much am I winking at the camera?’ It’s driving me crazy actually. It’s a tone thing. I think it’s supposed to be somewhere between ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Poltergeist.’ ”

Dean Devlin, the American half of the primary creative team (he’s the producer as well as co-writer, with Emmerich), says the movie is no joking matter.

“Could we do it without doing a spoof?” Devlin says, sipping a hot cappuccino and keeping his voice down as the rain starts to fall again on Broderick and actor Jean Reno in the tunnel. “Could we do it without being cheesy?”

These were the questions he says he and Emmerich asked themselves three years ago when the studio first approached them with the Godzilla Redux idea.

“There will be some humor definitely, but we’re not making fun of the original.”

It should be noted that satirist Harry Shearer, the voice of a dozen characters on “The Simpsons” and host of KCRW-FM’s “Le Show,” has a role in the film as a pompous television anchorman. Says Shearer: “Dean and Roland both encouraged me to add what they thought was my sense of humor to the thing, but they’re definitely not making a campy movie where everybody’s kidding around.”

Comparing the tone to their last movie, Devlin says, “It’s like the difference between [the farcical] ‘Mars Attacks’ and ‘Independence Day,’ even though both were based loosely on the 1950s sci-fi classic ‘War of the Worlds.’ ”

Indeed, the filmmakers needed the approval of Toho Co. Ltd., owners of Godzilla, to go forward. Over the years Toho has made more than 20 Godzilla films, all with the man in the lizard suit and known mostly to cultists in this country. Devlin and Emmerich knew they would have to improve on that and flew to Japan with TriStar executives to unveil their model of a redesigned Godzilla for the ‘90s. When the Japanese saw the model, reportedly there followed a long, enigmatic pause, after which their spokesman said, in effect, “Let the international ticket sales begin.” The Hollywood team flew home to get started.

Drawings of the new Godzilla, supposedly smuggled out of the studio, have already been seen on the Internet, along with rumors of story details. TriStar has responded to what it claims is “disinformation” through postings on its own official “Godzilla” Web site.

The movie won’t open in theaters until May 20, but a trailer that shows a man trying to outrun a Godzilla-induced tidal wave and also the creature’s gigantic eye, tail and foot is now showing in theaters.)

“Godzilla does not get caught in a giant baseball mitt,” Devlin states for the record. “And Jennifer Aniston is not in the movie.”

Meanwhile, despite being a remake, film plot details remain closely guarded. “They’re all up and down on us not to talk about the plot,” Azaria says.

“There are a few shock moments that it would be a shame if everybody knew,” says Broderick.

“So much of it is obvious,” Devlin says. “Lizard comes, lizard kicks ass, we fight back.” But he adds, “Physically it’s totally different. When you look at our Godzilla, you won’t feel any nostalgia.”

Then he lets go of a small revelation. “We discovered that certain kinds of lizards can burrow, so we decided to give him that capability.”

And so it is, for the long-suffering subway riders of New York, first Bernard Goetz, then the Money Train and now this.

The classic Godzilla moved above ground with all the grace of, well, a man in an ill-fitting rubber suit; the new model apparently is more agile and can travel at speeds up to 400 mph.

“The hardest part of this picture is that we have a living, breathing animal so if the creature doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work,” says Volker Engel, the special-effects supervisor who won an Oscar for his work on “Independence Day.”

He’s one of a number of Germans who are members of Emmerich’s inner circle that also includes production designer Oliver Scholl and executive producer Ute Emmerich (the director’s sister). “On ‘Independence Day,’ ” Engel says, “a lot of the computerized shots were separate from the live action, but on this one about two-thirds of the movie is live action,” in which he has to integrate the special-effects presence of Godzilla. Tougher, he says.

Devlin, who is 35 but looks like maybe he just got his driver’s license, says, “What Roland and I have in common is that we both love genre movies.”

A former actor, Devlin grew up in the San Fernando Valley and thinks of himself as “a popcorn child of Hollywood” now allied with someone “with a strong European sensibility.” The two met nine years ago when Emmerich was visiting from Stuttgart, looking for American actors for a science-fiction film, “Moon 44.”

Their first major collaboration was in service to action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, writing and directing his exploding 1992 rival cyborg feature “Universal Soldier.”

But Emmerich, who is 41, by his own account was very much a popcorn kid, too, while growing up in Germany. Now, in the wee, wee hours of the night shoot, Emmerich, is seated in his trailer during a break, smoking a cigar and wearing a Nike baseball cap with the bill curled within an inch of its life.

“You know what it really is,” he says in his accented English, “as kids we saw a lot of these kind of ‘50s science-fiction and horror flicks and we’ve waited 20 years for the overall shift of the audience and film so that we’re remaking these ‘50s movies like A-movies with a lot of special effects--in a way they reach a bigger and wider age group than you do with any other kind of movie.

“But I think it started with Lucas and Spielberg simply doing the same thing. ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘Star Wars,’ those movies were like serials in the ‘30s and ‘40s. ‘Jaws’ was a typical kind of ‘50s monster flick, only done in a more high-class, slicker, modern way.”

Gosh, that’s not what the critics said at the time.

“There are probably things in these movies that remind you of when you were 12 or 13 and with your friends, standing in line, eating popcorn.”

Emmerich points out that the original “Godzilla” was a remake of a 1953 American movie, “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” itself suggested by a Ray Bradbury short story. To fully background himself in the character, he watched 14 or 15 of the Toho Godzilla movies on laserdisc. “Then I gave up. It’s just the same movie over and over again. They always had another monster in it, and I never get anything out of two monsters fighting.”

He says: “For reasons I can’t explain myself, kids all over the world kept watching these movies, in cassettes and at matinees. A lot of older people mix it up with ‘King Kong,’ but what you’re trying to do with any monster movie is that when you understand the monster, you sympathize with him. Frankenstein is like that, King Kong, Dracula. Dracula is like a tragic figure. And same thing with Godzilla.”

And by the way, what gender is Godzilla these days? Emmerich is briefly taken aback by the question. Then he smiles and says, “It’s a big secret. Really it is. It’s part of the story.”

Is it such a stretch to imagine Godzilla ’98 as another version of “Independence Day,” only with a monster instead of space aliens attacking Earth? Nein, says the director. “Monster movies have certain rules. You try to follow them and reinvent them as you go. ‘Independence Day’ was more like a disaster movie.

“It ticked us off, you know, when people said it’s only about the explosions. We truly believe if the people don’t like the characters, they won’t watch any explosions at all. They don’t even come. They can smell it. It all comes down to good or bad storytelling--independent, studio film, whatever.”

Devlin, his partner, had said earlier, “We’re not making these movies to get to make other films. These are the films we want to make.”

He wouldn’t reveal exactly how much TriStar is spending on “Godzilla,” except to say, “It’s more than ‘Independence Day’ and less than ‘Speed 2.’ ”

As he gazed up at the seven-story scaffolding bracketing the subway canyon set that took three months to construct and will possibly be onscreen for 90 seconds, Devlin said proudly, “We’re making high-budget movies with a low-budget attitude.”

Recalling his scenes in “Godzilla,” Shearer says the whole experience was nothing but fun, which itself sounds funny coming from him. “I’m amazed by Roland,” Shearer says. “There was incipient chaos on the set at every single moment, and he’s walking through it all having a good time. I’ve never seen a director have such a good time. He combines two words I never thought I would use in the same sentence: ‘German’ and ‘pixie.’ ”

“We killed like 5 billion people in ‘Independence Day,’ ” Emmerich says in the trailer before being summoned back to work. It is almost midnight. “I said to Dean while we were shooting the movie, ‘How do we get away with this?’ And he said, ‘Ah, they will get it that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.’ And he was right. People knew every minute of the movie that they’re watching a movie.

“But I can’t think too much about the audience. I’m trying to create something that I like. Even in New York, I tried to create angles you haven’t seen before. I’m not a big fan of seeing again and again the same car chase. On the other hand, I like car chases, so I hope I do one that is so different you get something out of it.”