NEW-LOOK `GODZILLA' UNLEASHED IN REMAKE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

It's bigger, faster, costlier and way more hyped than your father's giant mutant lizard.

The new, 200-foot-tall ``Godzilla'' makes his debut Tuesday night and, by Wednesday, will be stomping across 7,363 North American movie screens, according to the film's distributor, Sony-owned TriStar Pictures. Should those numbers hold, they'll shatter the 6,190-screen record set by the last rampaging reptile movie, ``The Lost World,'' this time last year.

The high-tech monster mash will be hauling some 3,000 licensed products in its wake; and although some of the items have slipped onto store shelves here and there, the studio has tried to prevent any of those items from appearing before ``Godzilla'' opens, which will make their sales figures unusually dependent on the film's popularity.

Of course, Sony has spent a reported $50 million in advertising bucks to ensure that popularity. And you can at least see that money - plastered, it sometimes seems, on every open space on the continent with those green, ``It's as big as this . . .'' billboards - if not the jealousy guarded image of Godzilla himself yet.

Consequently, expectations are at World Trade Center heights for this state-of-the-art update of the 1954 Japanese, um, classic ``Godzilla, King of the Monsters'' and its 20-plus sequels - which are almost universally regarded as mighty cheesy.

If anyone is keeping a sane perspective on this humongous enterprise, it's director Roland Emmerich. The lanky German filmmaker may be prematurely gray, but his relaxed manner and easy laugh indicate that, if the mega-production has caused stress, he's somehow displaced it all onto his hair.

Of course, there are good reasons why Emmerich shouldn't be too worried. After all, he came to ``Godzilla'' from ``Independence Day,'' another complex, massive scale sci-fi entertainment that was one of the biggest box-office hits of all time.

The clout from that achievement enabled Emmerich, with his producer/partner Dean Devlin, to write exactly the kind of ``Godzilla'' project they wanted to make with minimal studio interference. And his well-organized production team brought it in for a reported $100 million to $120 million price tag - less than the estimated cost of ``Twister'' director Jan De Bont's aborted attempt to raise the titanic reptile four years ago.

Perhaps the real wellspring of Emmerich's preternatural calm, though, is his determination to remember that, when all is said and done, ``Godzilla'' is only a movie monster.

``I was never a big Godzilla fan,'' says Emmerich, 42, who grew up near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. ``They were just the weekend matinees you saw as a kid, like Hercules films and the really bad Italian westerns. You'd go with all your friends and just laugh.''

Remembering his contempt for the old, Toho studio's ``Godzillas'' - with their lumbering guys in rubber suits awkwardly knocking over cardboard cutouts of Tokyo skyscrapers - caused Emmerich to turn down Sony's overtures four times.

``They'd already closed down one production for budget reasons,'' Emmerich recalls, ``and they were constantly offering it to me, but I didn't know. It took Dean and I a couple of years to figure out that there could be a way. Actually, it was one of these things where it suddenly hit you that it could be cool. But only if you changed it totally.''

Mega-makeover

Executive producer Robert Fried, who bought ``Godzilla's'' remake rights from Toho 10 years ago, confirms that the hardest part of getting the production launched was finding a team that could effectively reimagine the monster.

``At the time, the thinking was to take a classic legend that was renowned for its campy effects and make it seriously, applying big-budget, American technology,'' Fried says. ``It seemed like a natural, but you'd be surprised how many writers and directors passed on the project initially. They just didn't realize the commercial potential. And many simply lacked an inspired idea for how to make it, an approach to the material that was unique.''

As they did with ``ID4'' and their previous, career-making sleeper hit ``Stargate,'' Emmerich and Devlin hit on a concept that seemed brilliant in its obviousness.

``It was simple,'' the director says. ``I asked Dean, `What is it about the ``Godzilla'' movies that we like best?' That it was a cool little movie about this monster created by atomic waste destroying Tokyo, a whole nature-strikes-back kind of thing.

``We just figured that if you did a movie like that today, you would make it more realistic. All you have to buy into is that he's created; after that, you take him really as what he is, an animal. From there, you just go with everything an animal would or would not do. Everything he does makes sense, has an animal logic reason. Then you have a totally different movie.''

Which required a totally different Godzilla. Emmerich's longtime production designer Patrick Tatopoulos whipped up a look, still top secret but reportedly inspired by actual reptiles found in the South Pacific islands near where France tested nuclear weapons a few years back - and the new Godzilla's spawning pool.

The filmmakers and Sony loved the new design, but they had to sell it to Toho. The Japanese film company has been making scads of money from merchandise based on that goofy rubber suit for decades, and its officers were not inclined to fix anything that, to them, wasn't broken.

``It took me two years to negotiate the Toho deal,'' Fried says, exasperation still evident in his voice. ``It was a painstaking process; they even sent me a four-page, single-spaced memo describing the physical requirements the Godzilla in our film had to have. They're very protective.''

But Toho executives approved the design Emmerich showed them overnight.

``It was because we went in there with something that was so outrageous, they could only say yes or no,'' the director reckons. ``If we had only made minor changes, I suspect they might have had more objections. It helped, also, that they were releasing `Independence Day' in Japan at the time, and everybody was very happy with that.''

No fish allowed

Things just seem to go smoothly for Roland Emmerich. Of course, some things about logistically gargantuan movies don't go smoothly for anybody.

Take the production's 32-day location shoot on the streets of New York City. Real-life components of Godzilla's rampage could only be filmed in the lightly trafficked hours between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., which meant tons of debris, dozens of vehicles in various stages of demolition and a small mountain of military material had to be deployed and evacuated most shooting days between dusk and dawn.

Then there was the marshaling, usually, hundreds of extras. In movie rain - not only does Manhattan get hit by a giant amphibian, he seems to have brought El Nino with him. There were also a lot of fish, bait for a trap the army sets for the hungry saurian, but New York authorities drew the cooperation line at that one, and the fish had to be added via computer graphics later.

And since he was using the most elaborate, mobile filmmaking equipment available, you'd think Emmerich would have been happy that he didn't have to deal with a full-sized, 20-odd story high creature as well. But surprisingly, he missed having the big guy (90 percent of whose appearances were computer generated) around all the time.

``The toughest part was to constantly shoot a movie without the main character in it,'' he says. ``I was always shooting down relatively empty streets, and there wasn't even much destruction, which got added later with computers and models. You could show people running and ducking for cover and such, but there was nothing there to really show you the action of this huge thing.

``You had to keep reminding yourself that this will work, and keep from panicking and thinking, `Oh my God, how will we get this all in?' ''

They did, with the help of nearly 400 CG effects shots and miniature models in 1/24 and a whopping 1/6 scale (see accompanying story). And they'll make their release date, with a few of the movie's secrets still more-or-less shrouded in mystery.

But even having accomplished all that, Emmerich would have to be some kind of reptile to not be concerned about how well ``Godzilla'' is going to be received.

``I'm extremely nervous whenever a movie comes out,'' he admits. ``But it's not so much about whether it's a bomb or it's successful, it's simply the whole fact that you've worked so hard for 1-1/2 years and it can go totally wrong, or it can work.

``It's never, ever safe. You're never really sure about it.''

CAPTION(S):

Drawing, 2 Photos

Drawing: (Cover--Color) CREATING A MONSTER

With its ultra-hype media campaign, `Godzilla' is out to crush its box-office competition

Jon Gerung/Daily News

Photo: (1--2--Color) Filmmaker Roland Emmerich - no stranger to massive, complex sci-fi entertainment - saw ``Godzilla'' as a whole new animal.