Pacific Rim Interview With Guillermo Del Toro

[News anchor] That puts the epicenter

of the 7.1 earthquake right in the heart

of the San Francisco Bay.

[News anchor] This just in to News Australia.

Well, the idea was to create a world that

in which you could create a reality

where 25 story robots would be battling 25 story monsters.

What would happen to the real world if that was true?

And to create a grand adventure,

(monster roaring)

full of color and drama and opera.

And I think that I didn't go for a safe aesthetic,

like recruitment video, type of hit, steel blue,

long lens, slow-mo.

I went for a very operatic, very grand,

very platey type of imagery.

(sirens)

(jets flying)

(gun fire)

[News anchor] Chaos is spreading around the globe--

[News anchor] Creatures as tall as buildings are seen--

What we decided early on is that

obviously that practicality of making a 25 story robot move

or a 25 story monster move was impossible.

And we didn't wanna do a man in suit,

the same what that we didn't wanna do motion capture

for the robots.

We went with key animation.

We created a world physically

but with still have some physical gags.

We created streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong

that were rigged to vibrate with every step of the monster.

The walls, the pavement, the cars, the windows.

Everything shook when the monster was walking.

We did huge mechanic sets

that the cockpit of the robot is in the head of the robot.

The two pilots are here.

One pilot controls the right hemisphere.

one pilot controls the left hemisphere.

That alone is about four stories high.

And we created it about two and a half stories high

and mechanized to shake and move

as if it was in a real battle

with a very intuitive control.

We really spent a lot of time

creating a physical ways for the effects.

(dramatic music)

In the movies, I try to constantly show

that the monsters are less damaging than the people.

In Pacific Rim, we actually have a different formula

where the monsters are like a force of nature.

I think Pacific Rim has huge action set pieces,

huge emotion set pieces,

and scary set pieces.

All of them.

We have a lot of stuff that are unexpected.

Literally, there are two or three scenes in the movie

that I don't think that anyone can guess right now

we're gonna do.

But some of them are scary.

Some of them are funny.

A lot of them are dramatic.

A lot of them are large scale action.

Today we are cancelling the apocalypse.

(dramatic music)

I think there are dictators and dictators.

I think I'm a benign dictator.

I create an atmosphere of family

in the set.

Everybody at the end of the movie

feels like a family member.

The cast bonds together.

And yet everybody knows that at the end of the day

I gotta say what they gotta do.

You know many times in adventure movies

or in big action movies,

you lose the emotions.

You sacrifice it for spectacle.

And I really hope,

one of my goals in doing Pacific Rim

was to deliver a movie, at the same time,

incredible to watch in terms of scope and size and spectacle

but very moving and human

at the end of the day.