A translation of a 4-minute video interview with screenwriter Kazuki Omori and special effects director Koichi Kawakita, from the special features of the 2002 DVD release Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992). It can also be found in the 2016 DVD re-release and 2019 Blu-ray release of the movie.

The video interview is divided into 3 segments, with Omori appearing in the 1st and 3rd, and Kawakita appearing in the 2nd. This interview headlines a “Making of Godzilla vs. Mothra” section of the special features, touching upon the history of events that led to the movie’s inception, and how the “bad” Mothra, Battra, came to be.

As usual, special thanks goes to Noah Oskow for the following translation! This article was made as something of a trial run, which can hopefully lead to more interesting discoveries from older video interviews like this down the road.

~ Joshua S.

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Screenplay Kazuki Omori

Screenplay Kazuki Omori

I think it was around when we finished up… Biollante, yeah? We were saying that for the next monster… Rather than making another “Godzilla VS” film, we’d revive Mothra, you know?

And then… What happened next is… We spoke of it being “Godzilla vs. Mothra” but doing Mothra first. And… But then President [Tomoyuki] Tanaka said that, actually, we have this other monster, Bagan. And we were like, “What is that?” And he said there’s this monster called Bagan that appears in all these old Chinese books, and the idea was to have them fight.

We felt like there we some aspects of Mothra and Godzilla’s world which didn’t sync up. So we tried to set up a solo outing for Mothra. And at that time… we were told to hold off for a bit. We were told that, for the moment, Mothra lacked to requisite popularity. That King Ghidorah was more popular. I wanted to be like, “Are you sure?”

That led to us doing Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. It also ended up in the form of a book. Then that was over. It felt a bit short, so, I felt like Godzilla vs. Mothra was going to leave us a bit exhausted, and since we had Mothra vs. Bagan just sitting there, so, if we just took Mothra vs. Bagan and changed Bagan to Godzilla, that would be the easiest method for getting the movie done quickly.

Once we considered that, it shaped up that way pretty quickly. I heard that we might have a “good” Mothra and a “bad” Mothra. And then… Well… In that case, we’ll have Bagan, well… turn into this bad Mothra.


Special Effects Director Koichi Kawakita

That’s the reality of Bagan, is that he had this sort of nuance to him. So this time around we were talking about these twin Mothras. Around that time, we decided that we’d have to include some environmental message, so we decided that those two eggs – when they’re born, y’know? One would be contaminated with pollution, you see, that would be the bad Mothra. And other one, the good Mothra. Well, we were talking about what we should do with it in the end.


Kazuki Omori (continued)

Kazuki Omori (continued)

If we changed Bagan to Battra, it would mean being able to use a fair amount of already available story. And adding Godzilla in to the mix, we felt it might actually work out pretty well, which means that, pretty much, well… I think we were able to get the screenplay together fairly quickly.

The thing is, at that point, we’d pretty much run out of reasons for Godzilla to appear. We were like, how are we going to have him show up year after year? So, sort of, we saw the possibility there for both Mothra and Battra in the contents there.