Below is a transcript of an interview with Jonathan Bellés, the director of the Ishiro Honda documentary, Ishiro Honda: Memoirs of a Film Director!

Noah Percival:
I am really grateful to you for coming on and doing this interview!

Jonathan Bellés:
Thanks to you for your interest in the film.

Noah Percival:
He was a wonderful man and I was absolutely blown away! Just to set the stage a bit, I’ve been a Godzilla fan since 1998. So, I’ve been familiar with Honda’s films for years and years now. Obviously, they’ve been a huge influence on me in so many aspects, but what I’ve really appreciated about your documentary was how for the first time I felt like I got to really know so much more about Honda. Specifically, as a human being, as a person and about his life beyond making the films. I obviously really love the part where you explored his work with Godzilla, but I really appreciated how that wasn’t the focus of the documentary because everything else was just so new to me. Hearing about his friends, his family, his life experiences and that was just incredible to learn about. So yeah, I really love the work, thank you!

Jonathan Bellés:
You’re welcome! Thank you very much!

Noah Percival:
First off, I’d like to begin by getting to know more about you. Tell us about yourself. Can you tell us what inspired you to pursue filmmaking?

Jonathan Bellés:
I’ve always been drawing and painting, but when I was around 7-8 years old, I think, I started to be very interested in film. Specifically, watching dinosaur films or dinosaur documentaries. From there I was really impressed by things like 1,000,000 Years BC for example, with its special effects. Because that film was like a kind of combination of what I was liking a lot. Dinosaurs and special effects. It was so interesting with stop motion, but then there were the Japanese in this case, and they were doing these things with the puppets, the costumes, and the models. All these things were very, very interesting to me because when I was a kid I was doing my own miniatures. You know, with New York City or Tokyo City for example with materials like paper and such. I would also do my own streets and miniature visitors, things from real life that I could imitate with my own handiwork. I became fascinated with the entire process and how something like that could begin from within my heart and then be finished by my own hands.
Then when I was maybe 10-12 years old, I realized that there were actually some people working behind the camera, which got me thinking like, “Who did this film? Why did they make it and how did they make it?” So, I became so passionate about watching the documentaries about the making of these films, from which you could see how the crew from a film industry would work on the project. Beginning with the cameras and especially things like the makeups etcetera, I learned a lot about films in this manner. I think that was the key point for me and years later I studied Fine Arts. I was painting a lot, but cinema was the thing that most attracted me. So, when I was like 22 years old, I started with small companies and then bigger ones like the City Council of Valencia. I’m from Valencia in Spain, but now I’m living in Madrid making TV ads for clients in an agency. No, it’s not cinema, but it’s still a kind of cinema but we are doing cinema as publicity. We are still telling stories, which I think is the key. I think telling stories is the best thing you can do.
Documentaries are more interesting to me because I would say that it’s like a book. It’s something objective, you aim to tell a story based on real events and you try to tell the truth. So, I think it’s something very, very powerful for me, even more than in a film about fictional events. That’s why I love documentaries, they are like an academic book. I got my PhD in Kaiju Eiga years ago, so I love research, and I am very passionate about this topic.

Director Jonathan Bellés with Director Shinji Higuchi

Noah Percival:
Absolutely. Like yourself, I got into Godzilla as a young kid because you fall in love with dinosaurs and then you see Godzilla and he’s like the biggest and the greatest dinosaur of all time! And there are all these other monsters as well! So as a kid, I absolutely got into it for just the visual thrills of it, but being a Godzilla fan has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life, because there’s just so much to it beyond just the very great surface level. As an adult and getting into it like you were saying, by learning more about the film makers. I’ve also gotten to learn so much about world history, so much that I never would have learned about if I wasn’t a Godzilla fan. The atomic bombs is a big one but if I were to be more specific, I learned about and am very passionate about The Lucky Dragon #5. The ship that got hit with the radioactive fallout that directly inspired Godzilla. Additionally, as a Godzilla fan in America, you also get a whole new experience which is learning about a completely separate society and culture from mine. Godzilla has just absolutely been one of the most rewarding things I think you could be a fan of.
What specifically began your connection with Honda? What was your first experience exposure to him and his work? Was it Godzilla?

Jonathan Bellés:
The interesting thing is that the first Godzilla film I saw was not by Honda. The first one was Godzilla versus Mothra (1992) by Takao Okawara. So, in the beginning when I was a kid, I didn’t think about the filmmakers themself. You know, because what I wanted to see was monsters destroying cities or fighting against the army. Then years later, when I understood that, as you said previously, that this has a connection with the atomic bomb, as a metaphor for the war and The Lucky Dragon #5 and so on. Then I remember I would start to think “OK, OK, this is something serious. Not only monsters fighting us in other films. No, something else more interesting is happening here.” From then I started to read about this topic. Thanks to the internet, I started to read from many sources including Toho Kingdom, which was one of my references when I was a kid, because Toho Kingdom had been online for years. I think it was in 2001 when I saw for the first time Godzilla, the original one from 1954 and the film provoked a lot of feelings, especially the scenes at the end of the film when you see all the people who are dead or suffering the consequences of Godzilla’s attack. The movie reminds me a lot of a documentary. They made it look like a documentary in some ways, with the way Honda put the camera, the lighting, and everything made it look like footage from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I was like 12 years old when I saw this film for the first time and I still remember this deep feeling of “Oh, wow, it’s a very, very powerful film.”
What is interesting for me is to consider the point of view that Honda gave to the film because I don’t think another filmmaker at the time would have made the film in a similar manner. What if other filmmakers would have directed Godzilla (1954)? What would be the differences? Maybe it would have been more like the sequel, or a lighter film.

Noah Percival:
I think it would have been a very different film because, for example The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, when the beast is on the rampage through New York, it’s the big, epic, exciting part of the movie. The score becomes dramatic, the tension is rising, and the adrenaline is going. There’s a little bit of that when Godzilla initially attacks Tokyo, but after that very beginning the movie becomes unlike any other, I’ve seen because it stops being exciting and it becomes almost like a funeral dirge. To this day, even as much as I love Godzilla Minus One (2023) for example, it still shocks me the amount of people we see die in that original 1954 film. We see people incinerated by Godzilla’s breath for example. The amount of death and destruction in that film is surreal. Something that’s kind of popped into my mind throughout the years as I’ve thought about the film as to a reason why that film has such a heavy impact. Obviously, Godzilla himself is a fantastic creation, and the filmmakers had to imagine what a giant dinosaur looked like. However, they didn’t have to imagine what Tokyo in flames looked like. They didn’t have to imagine what mass death looked like. They just had to remember their own firsthand experiences of it. So, I definitely don’t think the film would be the same if it were made by anybody else, because this was a movie made by people who, minus the dinosaur, lived it and witnessed it for themselves.

Jonathan Bellés:
Yeah, I agree. It was only like 9 years after all the disasters in Japan.

Noah Percival:
And within a year of The Lucky Dragon #5 event which blows me away because, I remember when Cloverfield came out in 2008 in America and it had obvious imagery that was done in parallel to 911, that movie was seven years after the fact, and it got some controversy for that, but Godzilla (1954) begins literally with a recreation of The Lucky Dragon #5 incident and that was just months after that had happened, I mean that was breaking news at the time. So, the courage to explore such a relevant topic at the time still just takes my breath away.
For the next question, what was the origin for this documentary on Honda? Was there a specific event which inspired you to make this current documentary?

Jonathan Bellés:
Well, the first thing would be another documentary of mine, The Dawn of Kaijû Eiga (2019) which is about Godzilla. The resources and the funding for it were less than for the Honda film and I was younger. I was like 25 years old. I went to Japan alone and met with some friends there who helped me a lot through the making of this film. I remember the premiere of this film was in Tokyo during 2019. Once I finished this film, I said “OK. I think it’s gonna be the last thing I want to do about Godzilla because I need to move on.” But at the end of that same year, I had the idea of doing a documentary about Honda and I thought “Why not?”
I already met with Honda’s son Ryuji Honda, and I also have contact with Honda’s granddaughter Yuuko Honda-Yun. They gave me some images for The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga (2019) and then I thought, well, Godzilla has a lot of documentaries, a lot of things. Everybody knows about Godzilla, in and out of Japan, of course. People also know about Eiji Tsuburaya in many ways, because he was the man doing the special effects. However, Honda was always hidden in this shadow and then I said, “Why not a documentary about Honda?” and focused more about his life. His experiences in war and with Akira Kurosawa, which I think is a very interesting story.
So, the first thing I did was in October 2020, I wrote an email to Yuuko and Ryuji asking permission for the film, because in the end it’s a film about somebody and he has relatives and family, and I wanted to be respectful by asking his family if I can do this and if they support it. You know, I can get some support from them with images or whatever material related to Honda they have access to. And they absolutely told me yes and said to me, “Yes, of course you can. You can do the film, and we can support you in these ways.”
So, the second thing I did was ask for support from Steve Ryfle and Ed who as you know, wrote the book about Honda in 2017 (Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa), which took a lot of years to finish as well. I knew they had a lot of information and material, and they agreed to also help with the film as well as be interviewed in it. That was the beginning, and the project spent almost three years in preproduction before traveling to Japan in October 2023 for a two-week shoot. Alongside me, two other people were involved in the production and filming: cinematographers Ségolène Lacourte and Óscar Rivero, whose work was outstanding.
Also in July 2024, we went to Chicago to show the film first and then interview Linda Miller. Ed and Steve have ties to her, and I was invited to Chicago to interview them as well. So yeah, it was a long, long story, a long adventure, but that’s how it began. With the idea to tell the story of Ishiro Honda. In a way people can understand how he was as a person and as a professional.

Noah Percival:
Your instincts were right because that’s what I loved about the documentary! Because I got to learn about so much besides just Honda’s relationship with Godzilla. Learning about him and Akira Kurosawa, which I was a bit familiar with already. But I mean everything, particularly about his life experiences up to and during the war was just all new material to me, and I consumed every moment of it, loving it all!
With a project of this scope with so much detail, I wanted to ask how did you begin working on it? Specifically, was there an order to your creative process?

Jonathan Bellés:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you need to control all the production, of course, but you’re not a painter. You are not alone doing this, and you depend on other people. Not only your production crew, but also all the collaborators, all the people you’re going to interview. So, in the end you have a lot of people in this project with you. For example, because the production is a Spanish production, you know I’m from Spain, but also filmed in Japan and the US as well. So, there was a lot of talking with people via phone video calling, e-mail especially or physically when you travel to the countries, to organize with on the production in their end and language.
The language itself, because I don’t speak Japanese, is probably the most complex part you know, because at the end you need to hire interpreters which is very expensive, but you need the communication! Good communication is the basis of not just this production, but for every production!
This is especially the case for covering Honda. Understanding the country is essential, especially when you talk about Japan because for Asia, theirs is a country with a different culture and you need to know these countries and cultures, which means you need to trust your interpreter a lot!
In this case, the lead of the interpreters in this film is Daniel Aguilar, a Spanish man, writer, and an expert in Japanese science fiction films who is living in Japan for around 40 years now.
We have been friends for 10 years now and I trust him a lot in this because I know that he knows Japanese culture perfectly. He speaks Japanese as fluently as Spanish, perhaps even better now! So, I knew I could trust him while filming in Japan. For example, when interviewing Japanese people, he was able to translate the answers we received to our questions simultaneously, almost line by line! So I could add more emphasis on some points. So, in this way I could get a richer interview with more information which I think is very, very important!

Noah Percival:
That’s awesome! You could go in with a list of questions, but you never know if their response might open up a whole new question or possibility that you weren’t even aware of without his translations!

Jonathan Bellés:
I always prepare the questions, it changes from person to person of course, but I remember for the American side of production I prepared maybe 35 questions per person. It’s a lot, I have… I need to check again, but roughly 20 to 25 hours of interviews. That’s a lot to select from and this is really difficult when you have so many materials, all interesting and of course for the languages too, because at the end you need to be again with an interpreter like side by side working with you because you need to know precisely what moment you need to cut.

Noah Percival:
I had not even thought about that but absolutely, I mean that makes perfect sense. I could see what a huge challenge that was.

Jonathan Bellés:
And this is something else I want to say about the people who your production covers. Most of them are already dead or pass away during the production process of the film. That happened because I wanted to interview Akira Takarada, who I had a nice relationship with along with his son. I interviewed him for a film in 2020. I met him twice and I wanted to meet him again in Japan for this film, but he passed away before I was able to go to Japan because of the pandemic, which closed all the borders. It was a pity because Takarada was amazing, and I think I always had a very nice feeling with him. I’m sure he could have brought more information, antecedents, and stories for this documentary, the opportunity to include them now having disappeared.

Noah Percival:
Did you have a particular goal in mind when making this documentary? If there’s one take away you hope people come away from this documentary with, what is it?

Jonathan Bellés:
My goal was first of all, to understand Honda myself. To read through, learn as much as possible about Honda, and then tell through this documentary, his life and his story.
I remember when I made the documentary The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga (2019), I also did some interviews with actors from Honda’s films and when I would ask about Honda himself, most of them just said to me that he was a really nice person. So, I really wanted to know more about him. I then asked myself if it was possible to tell the stories (about Honda) through the camera and I found a lot of information and materials, enough for the film. And so yeah, I wanted to be sure people knew him, as a person, as a human being, and as a filmmaker. What were his goals as a filmmaker but also what was his way of seeing films, why he wanted to do films, and why he was doing Kaiju films. That was my goal and if people understand what kind of person Honda was from viewing my documentary, then I will be really happy with it!

Noah Percival:
Absolutely, and I do think you nailed that! I know I’ve said this repeatedly, but getting to learn so much about Honda as a human being in this documentary was incredible! Everything from his war experiences to Honda’s personal life. I really loved the parts where you focused on the relationship he had with his wife and how she was almost like his agent in a way and that was really cool to me. It reminded me of a lot of filmmakers in America who had similar relationships. The one that comes to my mind is John Carpenter and Deborah Carpenter, especially with the fact that Honda’s wife was the one that he would have read every script he was considering filming in order to get her feedback. Then she was also like the more business savvy of the two. That was just a really unique and cool relationship, and it was just neat to learn about because that’s another thing I had no idea about and that blew my mind!

Jonathan Bellés:
Yeah, it’s something we mentioned before, but it’s true, as you said, Kimi Honda was really important to him. You know, at the beginning they met at Toho where she was a script girl, so they both understood the film industry as well and I think they worked together very well. I think they were a very nice couple, and I think that after speaking with all those who talked about Honda with me for this documentary and hearing their stories.

Noah Percival:
I remember, you mentioned that his films would often have a focus on women leads in the films, particularly some of his pre-Godzilla material, and this just reminded me of how I’ve often felt that you can make an argument that the hero of the original Gojira is in many ways Emiko. If she hadn’t decided to do what she thought was best, which was break her promise to Dr. Serizawa, nothing would have changed. Gojira would have stayed alive. Her act of betrayal ends up saving the world, so I think she’s kind of an underrated character and caring about that focus of his earlier films on women leads really drove that point home to me.
For my last question I wanted to ask you, which Honda films do you personally recommend people go and see?

Jonathan Bellés:
I think The Human Vapour is the most beautiful film by Honda in my opinion! It’s science fiction but with a love story behind it and a very strong one as well. The special effects are second level as the focus is on the plot, screenplay, and dialog. That’s my recommendation for Honda as a filmmaker of science fiction films.
For Kaiju, my second recommendation is Rodan. I think it’s perfect in many, many ways. It’s like two films in one! The first half is almost like a whole separate film with the mines and the dark visuals are amazing. Then the second half is a whole other film with the Rodan monsters, and I strongly recommend it!

Noah Percival:
That’s a great call with Rodan! I believe that was his first color film, wasn’t it?

Jonathan Bellés:
Yes, yes, it is!

Director Jonathan Bellés at Toho

Noah Percival:
That film does have a kind of complete tonal shift halfway through, but they pull it off in a way that’s natural. It starts off being a claustrophobic, dark, and intense thriller with monsters in the dark and tight corridors, and then it just explodes into this almost global scale disaster film. Just when you think it can’t get worse than 12-foot-long centipedes, you end up with a giant Pteranodon, but not just a giant Pteranodon but two giant Pteranodons that are destroying the world all over! Even at the end, Honda still found a way to like, humanize the monsters. To make you kind of regret that their death had to happen. Because of the fact that one Rodan decided to stay with the other. I mean, I really did love that about Honda’s kaiju including Rodan and Godzilla. They’re monsters because they’re not in the human physical form, but in reality, they’re actually characters.

Jonathan Bellés:
We feel pity, you know? We feel pity for them, for the monsters, I mean. At the end of the film, I totally agree.

Noah Percival:
Well, this has been an absolute honor and pleasure! I loved your documentary and I’m going to encourage everyone reading this to watch it! Are there any plans for wide distribution, either on a physical format or for people to buy a digital copy?

Jonathan Bellés:
Not for now because we are still working a little bit on it. Adding new material where we can. I believe in January, maybe February I will have a new version. An extended version with a few more minutes and I think it will work well.
The film was screened at the Sitges Film Festival, just before Toho’s 4K screening of Godzilla (1954). It was an incredible experience. It was also shown at the Isla Calavera Film Festival in Tenerife (Spain), followed by two more recent screenings at Manga Barcelona and the Cineteca of Madrid. The Japan Foundation of Madrid and Cine Asia were a great help in making these screenings possible.
Step by step—the first phase is film festivals, and then we’ll see about distribution.

Noah Percival:
I’m going to do everything I can with Toho Kingdom to promote it and make sure as many people get to see it as possible, because if you’re reading this then odds are you’re a Godzilla fan and you owe it to yourself to see this documentary! It is truly incredible.
This has been an absolute pleasure Sir, and I want to thank you again for joining us!

Jonathan Bellés:
Thank you!

Teaser of the film (English): ISHIRO HONDA: MEMOIRS OF A FILM DIRECTOR | TEASER 2024

Instagram: @jonathan_belles / @daifilmsprods

Official website: www.ishirohondafilm.com

Screening Sites (Spanish): Talk session about the documentary film Ishiro Honda at the Sitges Film Festival (in Spanish)

Screening Salon Manga (Talk about the 70 anniversary of Godzilla) (Spanish): Jonathan Bellés e Ishiro Honda | Manga Barcelona 2024