Yoshimitsu Banno

Yoshimitsu Banno studied at Toho under such directors as Hiromichi Horikawa, Mikio Naruse, Kengo Furusawa and Seiji Maruyama. By 1970 Toho was ready to promote him to full director, and the resulting project, Birth of the Japanese Islands (1970) played at Osaka's Expo 70, attracting record-breaking crowds. Gojira series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka signed him up to help revitalize the series. The result was the famous (or infamous) Gojira vs. Hedora (1971), a passionately avant-garde film which so horrified producer Tanaka that Banno's directorial privileges at Toho were temporarily suspended. He managed to restore his reputation by rewriting and directing second unit for Nosutodoramusu no Daiyogen (1974). He was approached to write and/or direct Gojira movies twice more in the 1970s, but his ideas continued to be too radical for the studio. Eventually he resigned as a director and became an executive in charge of project development, which in recent years has included the highly ambitious JAPAX Project, a 70mm. process meant to compete with the Imax process.