On a set that looks like a crushed pile of Hong Kong, actor Charlie Day stands beside a huge hole that looks suspiciously like a giant footprint, and seems far more frightened than he usually does in comedy fare like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He stares, terrified, for a few seconds, and then suddenly jumps backwards from an invisible danger that will presumably be added in post-production.
Ron Perlman walks into view, sporting gold teeth and a burgundy and gold carnival-barker suit that makes him look like a Las Vegas pit boss, whips out a butterfly knife, and makes a jabbing motion at something that’s not actually there. The two actors banter a bit more before hearing “Cut!” from a delighted-sounding Guillermo del Toro. Whatever Perlman was poking at is apparently dead, and everyone goes back to gleefully setting up another take.
Who knew apocalypse could be so fun?
It’s day 89 of the 103-day shoot for the upcoming sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim, a near-future tale about Earth’s invasion by giant monsters called kaiju, and the mecha-warriors that humanity builds to battle them. And the work is grinding on. Production on the movie has been fast-paced and intense, as the crew pushes to complete a shot every half-hour on most days. But despite the grind, director Guillermo del Toro, who meanders around the set in his trademark black with disheveled hair and a scruffy beard, looks ecstatic to be here — and back in the director’s chair.
“I love it. I think it was like, coming back on a huge production after prepping two huge productions, you know, this was the third prep period I had. It feels great. I’m both exhausted and not wanting it to end,” he tells reporters later in the day. “After two no-gos, it was a great position to be in. Oh, I’m going to have to hurry? I think I can live with that!”
“After two no-gos, it was a great position to be in. Oh, I’m going to have to hurry? I think I can live with that!” — Guillermo del Toro Those “two huge productions” were The Hobbit and his dream project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness — both films that never ultimately came to be. And while he’s done plenty of writing and producing, Pacific Rim will mark the first film in five years with the credit “directed by Guillermo del Toro.” And even 89 days in, there are moments when he seems almost giddy to be there.
In many ways, Pacific Rim is a film del Toro was made to direct. As a child in Mexico he would draw monsters and robots in notebook after notebook, detailing the organs in every monster and the houses where his robots lived. “Essentially, this is a very expensive version of that,” he jokes. Growing up, he was a massive fan of kaiju films and particularly the 1966 Toho monster film The War of the Gargantuas, which not coincidentally features the same sort of massive water battles that take place in Pacific Rim. In order to see Gargantuas the first time, he had to take three buses to get to the brick-and-flea cinema (“they handed you a brick for the rats and you got fleas,” he says) where the film was showing because his parents wouldn’t take him. He still remembers it vividly.
“I took a really good seat in the center and I’m watching the movie and somebody in the back of the theater throws a glass of pee and it lands on my head and I’m completely washed in this human pee,” del Toro says. “This is how much I liked the movie: I stayed.” In case you’re wondering, del Toro does a lot of this: telling heartfelt stories with bathroom humor. It’s part of the reason why his sets feel a bit like playgrounds. Well, that and the massive toys in every corner.
His personal love of kaiju has served him well on this film. When Pacific Rim first started its life, it was an outline by Clash of the Titans screenwriter Travis Beacham that del Toro was helping develop with Legendary and Warner Bros. From there he worked with the screenwriter on a couple of drafts of the script before getting it right—adding things like the dual-piloted Jaegers and working on background biographies for each character. So when he came on as a director—after Mountains of Madness collapsed—there was a whole new world for him to build.
Perlman, who worked with del Toro on his first feature, Cronos, and three movies after that, says that while some things have changed–notably, the amount of money involved–the creativity and detail that goes isn’t del Toro’s work remains the same. “When he was doing a movie for a million-two [$1.2 million], which was the first movie I ever did with him, the imagination was every bit as magnanimous as it is now. “The only thing that changes are the resources. But if he doesn’t have resources he still manages to make sumptuous images on the screen that are filled with textures and levels that most audience members are never going to see.” (Spoiler alert: Minor plot points from Pacific Rim follow.)
Image Courtesy Warner Bros
With a budget that reportedly tops $150 million, Pacific Rim certainly has the resources. And it isn’t just the largest production del Toro has ever brought to fruition–it’s also one of the biggest-budget movies hitting theaters this summer. The sci-fi action film could be summed up as “robots versus monsters,” but the details prove a bit more interest than the surface summary. After an invasion of kaiju, monsters that emerge from the sea and tower over skyscrapers, humanity responds by creating massive 25-story machines of war called Jaegers, which are co-piloted by two people connected via a “neural-bridge” (just go with it). The Top Guns in del Toro’s movie are Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), and Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). Day’s Dr. Geiszler is a kaiju expert trying to find a less robotic way to defeat the monsters, while Perlman’s Hannibal Chau is a war profiteer who deals in selling pieces of fallen kaiju on the black market. It’s intended to be a massively epic action movie for lovers of both kaiju and mechas.
“We speak the same fanboy vernacular. He has a level of enthusiasm for this sort of thing that I really haven’t seen in a lot of directors.” — Travis Beacham “I come to it as a fan of this stuff since I was a kid – I watched Voltron, I bought out all the old Godzilla movies at Blockbuster, so I found in Guillermo a kindred spirit,” say co-writer Beacham just a few weeks before Pacific Rim hits theaters. “We speak the same fanboy vernacular. He has a level of enthusiasm for this sort of thing that I really haven’t seen in a lot of directors.”
Del Toro’s partnership with Beacham has yielded not only a movie—and possibly a sequel—but a graphic novel as well. Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero was released earlier this month, a prequel tale that chronicles everything that happened from the first kaiju attack in San Francisco in 2013 until the timeframe of the film. (It helps when Legendary Pictures, the company co-producing your film, also happens to have its own comics imprint.) As with everything else on Pacific Rim, del Toro was hands-on. Beacham wrote the story and a team of five pencilers, four inkers and three colorists did the art, but the director approved everything from pencil sketches to the layouts to the choice of cover artist Alex Ross.
The graphic novel was announced at 2012’s New York Comic Con, where he showed the same teaser he had played at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, proclaiming that the studio didn’t want him to show it again but “the good news is I don’t give a fuck.” In both cities, anticipation for del Toro’s “robot porn” was already hitting fever pitch fanboys and fangirls generally lost their minds over the footage. (In at telling moment, the first fan to ask a question at the SDCC panel inquired about “iconic” mecha weapons like rocket punches. When del Toro confirmed Pac Rim would have them, the fan hoisted a katana in the air and jumped up and down for five seconds before bowing to the director and scurrying away.)
At the San Diego Comic-Con, earlier that year, del Toro went so far as to credit the process of making the film “essentially saving my life.” Asked whether the massive scope of the production makes things less personal, he quips, “forgive the analogy, but you cannot simulate a boner.” While it’s hard to believe that this level of enthusiasm can sustain itself for another 16 months, this is Guillermo del Toro: the guy who once lamented that his mind-blowing masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth “almost destroyed me, almost killed me and it took away 45 pounds of my body.” Making things with the precision and passion of an obsessed geek is his stock in trade.
Del Toro is at ILM’s headquarters in San Francisco. It’s April now—almost exactly three months before the release of Pacific Rim—and he’s here to go through the final VFX shots for the film with John Knoll, the man who will be named ILM’s chief creative officer in just over a month and who somewhat ironically met del Toro when they were working on the ill-fated At the Mountains of Madness. Because of the scope of the kaiju and Jaeger fights—and the film’s 3-D conversion—the effects house did about 1,700 VFX shots for Rim, slightly less than would be necessary for a Star Wars picture.
Since our last meeting, a lot more of Rim has started to trickle out into the world. A little bit of Charlie Day’s nerdy kaiju expert has shown up in the trailers and the massive Jaegers, which existed only as pieces on set, have now become full-fledged CGI behemoths in the trailer footage that’s been released. That other thing that’s become obvious: the visual effects for Pacific Rim look stunning. On set del Toro had said that when he first saw the test footage made by Industrial Light and Magic “I literally reverted back in time. I wanted to see it again, my knees were weak — they’re weak anyway because I weigh more than 300 pounds, but they were weaker.”
But now, del Toro is in the final stretch. He seems calm and relaxed, even a bit excited. He looks a little leaner. “I suffer the most during the shoot,” he says. “Post[-production] is my favorite part, because the other stuff is you make a great blueprint, then you cut it down, then half of bricks didn’t arrive, the windows got broken, the doors are bent. But then in post, you have what you have and you build a house. No more talking. No more blueprints,” he says. “Whatever could go wrong in my life already, this movie was a blessing.”
