The Big Picture

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro recently participated in a Q&A session about his filmography and the making of Pacific Rim after an IMAX 3D screening to celebrate the movie’s 10-year anniversary. During the Q&A, del Toro shared behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Pacific Rim, including why Tom Cruise was nearly in the film and why del Toro did not direct the sequel. Del Toro also discussed his views on using drone shots, his experiences as an auteur director in the industry, the status of his upcoming Frankenstein movie, and recommended starting with “My Neighbor Totoro” for someone new to Studio Ghibli movies.

Last week, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro joined Collider’s Steve Weintraub for a very special IMAX 3D screening of Pacific Rim to celebrate the movie’s 10-year anniversary. Following the movie, del Toro hung out with a theater full of long-time fans to participate in a Q&A about his filmography and the journey to bringing his epic, heartfelt adventure sci-fi to the big screen.

After the screening ended, del Toro charmed the audience with plenty of behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Pacific Rim including how Tom Cruise was nearly in Pacific Rim and why he wasn’t, the real reason he didn’t direct the sequel, what it was like working with ILM on the Kaiju and Jaeger scenes, and how they figured out the after the credits scene with Ron Perlman. In addition, del Toro talked about why he will not use drone shots, what it’s like within the industry as an auteur director, why his Star Wars movie never panned out, the status of his upcoming Frankenstein movie, which Studio Ghibli movie someone should start with, and so many other things it would be impossible to list them all here.

Co-written with Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans), Pacific Rim is a fight for humanity when a rift opens in the depths of the ocean, unleashing monstrous Kaiju that threatens man’s existence. The only way to stop these creatures are with massive robots controlled by two individuals who share a link to their memories. The movie also stars Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, and Charlie Day.

You can either watch our exclusive one-hour conversation in the player above, or you can read the transcript below.

COLLIDER: Before we get into Pacific Rim, I have what we call some curveballs. Probably the most important question is right up front. If someone has never seen a Studio Ghibli movie, what is the one they should start with?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Wow. I don’t know. I saw the work of Isao Takahata when I was a kid. Then, many years later, when I saw the first Studio Ghibli movies, I said, “That’s like the movies I saw as a kid.” They have such a recognizable seal. But I think it’s always good to start with [My Neighbor] Totoro because the power of [Hayao] Miyazaki is that he shows you something that is impossibly beautiful and painfully beautiful. This is something that very few filmmakers do. When something is so absolutely staggeringly beautiful as a piece of art, you understand that you will never experience it in real life, you, at the same time, gain it and lose it, meaning you get a sense of almost melancholy and you’re moved to tears. When Totoro started, I started weeping and I never stopped during the film because it was, at the same time, a childhood I was gaining and a childhood that had never been. So I think that’s a great one to start with.

You have an amazing resume, but there’s gonna be people out there who have never seen anything you’ve done before.

DEL TORO: My mother.

[Laughs] So, if someone has never seen a Guillermo del Toro film, what is the one you’d like them to start with and why?

DEL TORO: Well, I don’t know. For example, the movie we saw today, I abso-fucking-lutely adore. Pacific Rim, I adore. It depends. To me, the thing is, my preoccupations and my images go from one genre that is gigantic to something that is very intimate. When you study filmmakers you admire, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, Hitchcock has a side of him that is pure melodrama. The best one of those is Notorious, in my opinion. Then he has intimate, really psychological and dark movies, the best one of which is Shadow of a Doubt. Then he has spectacle movies the best one of which are arguably either North by Northwest or The Birds. And so on and so forth.

So, it depends on what you wanna do. If you’re going for kick-ass, I would go Pacific Rim. If you’re going for beauty and weirdness, I would go to Crimson Peak. If you’re going for the more intimate movies I would go with Pan’s Labyrinth, Devil’s Backbone, or The Shape of Water. So, whatever. If you don’t like it, watch another, if you dont like it, watch another.

Which film in your resume changed the most in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect, and I guess I should caveat, without Mimic?

DEL TORO: Well, actually, Mimic in the editing room was pretty steady. That’s what is weird. All the crap came during the shoot. The editing was actually pretty steady because once they saw that it worked, that it did what it was meant to do, they increasingly left me alone.

I think what happens is you discover. This movie, for example, we had two editors. I needed a change of editor because when you go through a movie that takes this long or is this complex, you want to shake it. Once you go through four or five months of post, the editor and you have the same point of view, so you need to bring somebody else. This movie really benefited from that. We split the Hong Kong battle in two. We were able to split the flashback to Mako’s childhood. We did a lot of stuff that was very adventurous in this film.

Image via Miramax Films

I could be wrong, but I read that there was like an hour of footage that you took out, is that true or not true?

DEL TORO: That’s always the case. Every movie I’ve ever done is three hours in the first cut.

I read that there was a lot more stuff in the first act of the film that you ended up removing.

DEL TORO: Yeah, because it was shit. You’re not missing anything.

So, for fans, they’re not missing anything? There are no scenes?

DEL TORO: No. So, for example, Nightmare Alley has another hour that is fantastic. I would love to do a three-part miniseries with Nightmare Alley because a lot of those stories that Kim Morgan and I wrote were sort of intertwined in a beautiful way, and that I would love to go back to.

I have a specific question about that. I know that Hulu is doing this six-part version of Australia, the Hugh Jackman movie. Is there any chance with Hulu or Disney+ or one of these kinds of things, is there any possibility of doing that with Nightmare Alley?

DEL TORO: I would love to. I mean, I’m always game for more work. I really am a workaholic, so, you know, I don’t know what to do with free time.

Image via Searchlight Pictures

Well, I hope that happens. What do you think would surprise people to learn about being a filmmaker in Hollywood on your level, which is someone who gets to make personal films but big films? I want to pull the curtain back on what it’s like for you in Hollywood.

DEL TORO: It’s horrible. It’s not horrible always. It’s a great profession, and it’s great to be in Hollywood or in Spain, everywhere you are. But what is very funny is, when you look at a career from the outside, you’re looking at a career that seems to have some order, or you think it was planned, but it is what happened. I mean, I always say this statistic, but finally I counted the screenplays – I’ve written more than 40 screenplays. 40. I’ve made 12 movies. So there are more than 30 screenplays that never got made and that were written or co-written with somebody. That means between one movie and another…you see them now, and you say, “Oh, and then he did…” No, then there’s five years where I didn’t work. Five years where I didn’t direct. Cronos to Mimic is five years, Mimic to Devil’s Backbone, five years. Five years. Every time between movies, they think I’m joking when I say I’m unemployed, but you basically are, as a director. And every movie you go out with you should always consider because it could be your last movie. When people say, “When you get there…” what the fuck do you mean by that? Where is there? I’ve never been “there” because you never get “there” because there is no “there.” There’s “there” for five filmmakers in the world, if that.

One of my best friends in life, more than 30 years of friendship, is Jim Cameron. I have seen Jim, as a friend, every time, have so much to overcome in making the next movie. Not only technically and all that that everybody knows, but just pushing it through because he’s always trying things that haven’t been done. I don’t wanna say names, but if you wanna do something that is super safe, well, I don’t know. I’ve always done the movie that nobody else is doing, that sound crazy on paper. You pitch them and people validate your parking ticket and send you on your way. “Oh, I wanna do a Civil War fairy tale where the girl dies at the end.” “Oh, fantastic!” Nobody wants to do it. Pinocchio – almost 20 years to get Pinocchio made. And keep going!

I mean, this movie was great because Thomas Tull and John Jashni at Legendary wanted it. They gave me the 10-page treatment that Travis Beacham had written, and I said, “Oh, hold on a second…giant robots? You’re kidding, right? Because I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go do it.” And we went really fast. But even then, we have to do it for a number, and we have to put the scale of it with a number that is big—don’t get me wrong, if I get that money, I would be very happy. I would move to Brazil and they could not extradite me—but to make the movie, it was $50-60 million shorter than another movie of that size that year. It was tight, so we had to be very smart about our resources. But I always say, and this comes from being Mexican, you have to define as you direct. I always say, “Is this meatballs, or is it gravy?” You have to do big gestures.

For example, if you watch Shape of Water, it’s a movie that cost $19.3 million, but I knew I needed to open with a big gesture so people go, “Oh!” So I opened with the underwater apartment and her floating, and then I went to a bus, and I went to a big, big government facility, and then I went into a long corridor and a big lab, and you went, “Oh, it’s a big movie.” No, it isn’t. If you stay for the rest of the movie, we’re on the same three fucking sets the rest of the time. [Laughs] But you do that gesture, and then there’s always a sequence in the middle, and you say, “Okay, I’m shooting four pages a day, but for this sequence, I want seven days,” and you take that sequence, and you make it count. Then you do another gesture a little later, and those are meatballs. The rest, the gravy, you gotta do quick. What was the question?

I like the way you just flowed with your answer. I think I asked about making movies in Hollywood.

DEL TORO: Oh! There you go. That was a good answer. [Laughs] Go figure.

On Pacific Rim, it’s been 10 years. When look at it again, do you see shots that you wish you could go in and tweak, or do you accept that once the movie is done and you let it go and it’s been released that that’s the way it’s gonna be and it’s not really something to touch again? Can you let it go?

DEL TORO: Oh, fuck yeah. Absolutely. Because a movie is a capsule of where you are. For you guys, it’s a filmography, for me it’s a biography. I was a mediocre brother, a half-wit uncle, not a great, tremendous father. I failed in my personal life to make movies. You know, you cannot do both. You cannot be really great at what you do and really great at everything else. You gotta decide, “Look, this is what I wanna do.” So it’s a biography. This is when I missed the birthday, this is…You are absent for a lot of your personal life. So to then say I’m gonna go back and change what came out of it, no. No, you don’t do it. I don’t do it. I mean, I tried with two goddamn shots on Blade II that I hate, which is the fight in front of the lights, and it didn’t work. So God was saying, “Sit down, man.”

Christopher Nolan recently had tremendous success releasing Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm. It was an amazing experience when I witnessed it in that format. We’re in IMAX right now, and I love IMAX, it’s my favorite format. So my question is, have you thought about shooting an upcoming project using IMAX cameras for the whole thing? And with the success of Oppenheimer, do you think that’s opened the door for more film studios thinking about shooting in IMAX?

DEL TORO: Well, I haven’t talked to anyone at the studios because we were on a strike. I’m a hyphenate, so I had three reasons not to talk to anyone at the studio, so I made model kits on Sundays. So, what happened? I don’t know what happened in the studios, but I can tell you almost in every big movie, that’s the first thing you try. When I made the movies, I try to make them for half the budget to get twice the freedom, right? So that’s the first thing. Pacific Rim was gonna have a sequence in IMAX, and when they said, “You have to look for this number,” that’s the first thing you have to look at. So I don’t have that luxury. I’m very happy where I am because I’m only doing now what I call “bucket list movies.” I’m making only movies that I wanna do before I croak. If you see one I’m doing, it means it really matters to me. It really is more vital than ever. But it is the first thing they take out of the budget, when they say, “You have to do it,” and you go, “Well, that’s a lot of money I have to take out.” That’s the first luxury you have to sacrifice, unfortunately. But hopefully, if that changes, I’ll be delighted, man. IMAX is an amazing format.

Recently, you acknowledged that you were working on a Star Wars film a number of years ago, and I’m just curious, how close did you actually come to being in the director’s chair helming a Star Wars film?

DEL TORO: Well, I believe the movie is gonna happen when the Blu-ray comes out. That’s when I know it’s gonna happen. Always, in the last moment, things go away. I’ve had it happen many, many, many times. We had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so I was super happy. We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money, and then it’s one of those 30 screenplays that goes away. Sometimes I’m bitter, sometimes I’m not. I always turn to my team and say, “Good practice, guys. Good practice. We designed a great world. We designed great stuff. We learned.” You can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you, there’s something to be learned from it. So, you know, I trust the universe, I do. When something doesn’t happen, I go, “Why?” I try to have a dialogue with myself. “Why didn’t it happen?” And the more you swim upstream with the universe, the less you’re gonna realize where you’re going.

Mountains of Madness, though, that was really hard. It was tough. There are certain things, there are moments that I remember in my career where you feel the oxygen is leaving the room, and most of them are kept secret, you know? People don’t know what that means, or they never learned about it. Mountain of Madness was very tough. The release of this movie was very, very tough. The release of Crimson Peak, which was released as a horror movie and it wasn’t, and I kept saying, “It’s a Gothic romance, release it as such.” The crux of the thing is her passage through this mystery, and it was released straight out as a horror movie. So those are things where you feel the bumps, but when something doesn’t happen, you came up with a couple of good ideas, and you may use them later.

Image via Universal Studios.

Jumping into Pacific Rim. I have an awful lot of questions. When I asked people to submit if they wanted tickets to this, one way was to write me something. I had a lot of people who said that they were 11 or 12 or 13 years old when Pacific Rim was released and how much and how much it meant to them.

DEL TORO: I was 12. [Laughs]

There are people in here that it really meant a lot to them, and I didn’t realize, because I’m older, how much it meant to that generation. How much were you aware of this?

DEL TORO: Yeah. Well, not aware…I now know—I’m 58—I know that I will never be able to show everybody every facet of what I am creatively because there is not enough time, and those 30 movies that didn’t get made, I’m not gonna make them at 80. But you try to send into the world movies for you as an audience when you were 11. Pacific Rim is one of those. It is a movie that has the heart, the craftsmanship of somebody in his 40s, but the passion of somebody in his early teens, somebody that really gets high on his own supply, you know? And when I do that, I always say, “Whoever watches this movie at nine or 10 or 11, I envy that person.” It’s a love letter from me to that person. Every movie I do is that. You get to know me more by seeing the movies than by taking a road trip with me. So I always say, whoever liked Hellboy will one day discover Pan’s Labyrinth or The Shape of Water or this or that, and that’s my relationship with the audience that I cherish because it’s not about an audience being large, it’s an audience being deep.

I read that at one point, Tom Cruise might have been in Pacific Rim?

DEL TORO: Oh yeah. The two models for Pacific Rim, the two models for the screenplay, are Hoosiers with Gene Hackman and Top Gun. So, the part that Idris Elba plays, Tom Cruise was gonna do it, and I even have a karaoke scene. [Laughs] The deal couldn’t be made. He wanted to do it. We were developing stuff, and he couldn’t do it. I thought, “You know what? Let’s go with Idris Elba then. He’s a god.” Obviously, I had to rewrite it for that, but I thought it was gonna be an interesting analog to do that. It would have been a lot of fun.

I have developed three movies with Cruise, and none of the three times we have worked, but we have had quite a laugh, you know? I like it. My life is so weird. I’m like Forrest fucking Gump. All of a sudden, I’m in places that I don’t know how it happened, but I go, “Eh, I like it.” [Laughs] Honestly, I’m very grateful. There’s a saying in movies, and it’s a really great saying, they say, “Take the scout, don’t make the movie.” Because when you’re scouting, you are in basically a bus trip with a bunch of people eating in great places and having a great time. My favorite part of movies, like when I planned The Devil’s Backbone, I made an itinerary through Spain where they sold the best sausages, the best asparagus. [Laughs] We were in Scotland scouting for the next movie, I was mapping where there was a good macaroni and cheese pie.

Image via 20th Century Studios

It’s so funny because I’ve heard from other filmmakers and some of them dread the location scouting.

DEL TORO: No! I tell you, The Hobbit, I was there two years, and when we were scouting, they gave me a helicopter, and I was like, “Oh…” So I would say, “Let’s land on the top of that mountain and have lunch.” We were helicoptered by the glaciers. I saw glaciers that were made of fluorite green, bright green, and I saw glaciers that were blue. The whole two years. And then I got attacked by sandflies, which was a disaster. But other than that, it was amazing. Some of my best memories are preparing a movie, and you still have lunch with remarkable people. I just wanna be around great people because, ultimately, socially, I’m absolutely useless. I’m inept socially. So, the best companionship I have is co-workers, and I work with people I admire and people I wanna learn from. I wanna disclose one line in a design because whoever says this line and a 10-degree curve is the same thing, they’re not designers. Any single change changes the entirety of the design, so when we design a movie, 80% of my work is submerged; people just see it. But if you believe it, that means we designed it well.

A lot of people in this theater are hardcore Pacific Rim fans.

DEL TORO: I like that.

I think a lot of people in here are curious, and I’m not sure how much you’ve ever said, but how close did you come to actually directing the Pacific Rim sequel? How far along had you developed the script? Let’s talk a little bit about that.

DEL TORO: I didn’t see the final movie because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife. It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t wanna know. So, I didn’t see it. I did read the final script, and it was very different. Some of the elements were the same but very different. The main character for me, in many ways, was Mako Mori. We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do. Then what happened is—I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right?—they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5pm or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So, I said, “Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,” and five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, “Well, we can shoot it in China.” And I go, “What do you mean we?” [Laughs] “I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water.”

Image Via Searchlight Pictures

Because this film was so successful in China, do you think there was an element at the studio—and this is hypothetical—that they wanted it shot in China?

DEL TORO: It didn’t matter to me what it was. What I did is I wrote a phenomenal part for Donnie Yen. I wanted Donnie Yen. I wanted to have Donnie Yen star in a damn movie, a mainstream movie. I was all for it. And we did scout in China again, and we scouted this and that, and we were gonna do location shooting, but for the stages, I wanted to be in Toronto for sure. There’s a thing in stages where you’re challenged, meaning you have the first hold, and then you get challenged, and if you don’t put the deposit, you lose them. So, we lost them, and then I got a couple of the smaller stages for Shape of Water.

You love Toronto. You’re up there all the time shooting. What is it about that city?

DEL TORO: Well, first of all, the crew is fantastic. The crew is fantastic in Toronto. I know the city really well. The first movie I shot there in 1996 was Mimic, so I know it quite well. There’s a cultural life that I like. There’s two things I need in life: great bookstores and good restaurants, in that order, I guess, and it has both. So, you know, I enjoy it quite a bit.

I love Toronto.

DEL TORO: Me too. At TIFF, I do masterclasses in the Cinematheque, four or five classes in a row about Alfred Hitchcock or Gothic romance, and we watch movies, and then I discuss them with the audience. Sort of day by day, we put together a little bit of a particular part of cinema, and I love that. Or I go to other people’s masterclasses, or I interview people on stage. There’s a very active cinema life in Toronto.

There are a lot of diehard fans in here. What do you think would surprise hardcore fans of Pacific Rim to learn about the making of Pacific Rim?

DEL TORO: Oh my god, nothing. I don’t know. Why would it surprise them? There was a lot of work…We created a lot of language that I now see in other movies. We created a lot of the language of bright colored neon fights, and the rain, and the night. I was calling the style of it Gothech, which is a mixture of Gothic and tech. So I said, “Let’s do a movie that is Gothec that has what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, which is the beauty of the imperfect and impermanent. What does it mean that George Lucas uses wabi-sabi on Star Wars? It means everything that you see is not new, is dented, patched, rusting, corroded, and that has a beauty and a reality. You think of science fiction, the biggest leap it took, other than [Stanley] Kubrick, the biggest leap it took was George coming in with wabi-sabi and making that universe rusty, used, sweat. It has all the reality of the real world.

I didn’t want a movie that was triumphant. I said, “I’m not gonna make a movie about one country winning the war.” I refuse to do that. I wanna make a movie about humanity winning the war and not having the tools. It’s not gonna be about everything being shiny and cool, it’s gonna be everything about being rusty and old and cool because I think old is cool. I am an animist. I talk to my car. I get in my car every day, it’s a car I’ve had for 13 years, I love my car, I call him El Guapo, and I get into my car, and I say, “Come on, let’s go to work, man.” I talk to it. I talk to things in my house. That’s how lonely I am. [Laughs] No, but I believe, like the Japanese, that every object has a soul. So I wanted to make the robots soulful and have a personality, not just look cool or shiny. Shiny, to me, is horrible. Beauty is not perfection, it is imperfection, and every single thing in Pacific Rim is rusty, dark, covered with water. I’ve seen some of those gestures appear in other films, and I like that.

I watched all the Kaiju movies carefully to see what was done that worked and what was never done that I wanted to try. We went through enormous lengths to do the accumulation of rain in the corners. I said, “Imagine that is a cathedral fighting.” In a cathedral, if you go to the corners there’s an accumulation of water that trickles. And I said, “Imagine the robot taking the punch has many points of view where that water is trickling.” And we tracked every one of them. I think the only thing that may surprise an audience is that we use actual models. Everybody thinks it is all CG. There are a couple of scenes where we actually did miniatures and destroyed them very, very pointedly. The scene where the fist goes into the office, that’s a giant maxiture of the office. We had real desks with little papers, little staplers, little coffee cups.

Image via Warner Bros. 

ILM tweeted some photos I put on Twitter if anyone had any questions, and they responded with four behind-the-scenes photos.

DEL TORO: By the way, go to Bluesky. Goddamn.

Because you’re making this obviously on a budget, and you know that these VFX shots are going to cost a lot of money, in the writing phase, are you thinking about, “Okay, we’re probably going to have the money to do three set pieces or four set pieces, whatever that number is we need?” How are you figuring out where you want to spend the money in a movie like this, and is it in the writing phase?

DEL TORO: When you’re writing, if you’re bored writing it, they’re gonna be bored watching it. It’s extremely simple. If you’re writing and you go, “Oh, I don’t want to be here,” then you shouldn’t be there. Most of the time, when a scene needs a score, you should cut it out. It may benefit from a score, that’s different. But if a scene needs score, it’s a bad scene. You should say, “I should consider cutting it.” The same is true of the screenplay. You have to pace yourself and stay interested. When Kim Morgan, my wife and I, co-wrote Nightmare Alley, that’s how we paced it. If she was bored reading what I wrote or I was bored with reading what she wrote, we would say, “This is not working.”

I think you don’t worry about the budget until it’s time to do that. I don’t think you wanna be like that. I have it in the back of my mind because I was raised in the Mexican cinema industry, and I’m very fiscally responsible, but it shouldn’t stop you. When we were doing Hellboy 1, they said, “You have to cut $10 million.” I said, “Then I’ll put an extra set piece. I will. But you’re not gonna make it smaller.” And I added the piece with the pendulum where he escapes the pendulum.

With Pacific Rim, what I did with ILM– I had a company that did special effects. We did opticals, we did animation, we did stop-motion, we did makeup effects, we did storyboards, we did everything. I’m an okay painter, I’m an okay sculptor, I’m an okay miniature maker, I know how to animate, so I have a multidiscipline background that allows me to be very, very fluid when I trade. What they call horse-trading in VFX means, “I’m gonna give you 30 shots of added blinks for the fish man, and in exchange, you don’t have to do the fish man swimming underwater.” You trade your things. So with ILM, what we did, which was unprecedented back then, and I don’t know if they’ve done it again, is we came in and said, “Let’s make a sandbox because this movie is not as big as other movies. We’re gonna do X number of AAA road shots, we’re gonna do X extensions,” and we did an inventory. Then we traded, and it worked. We finished the movie under. So, other than with COVID or the Weinsteins, I’ve never gone over. And those two were plagues, so I have an excuse. They were pandemics.

I read that you filmed the movie in 103 days and you had a splinter unit that you directed, and basically you were working like 17/18 hour days, seven days a week.

DEL TORO: I shoot six days a week, and on Sundays, I edit.

So on Sunday, it wasn’t, like, you on set all day.

DEL TORO: No, and I edit during lunch, and I give instructions to the editor before. But the result is normally 12 weeks after I shoot I have a cut. Like Devil’s Backbone, I completed entirely in 12 weeks after shooting, completely mixed, color corrected, everything because I needed to go and do Blade II. I needed to hurry up because I made them wait for me. I said, “No, I’m gonna do the Spanish movie first. I don’t care.” And they waited.

Image via WB and Legendary Pictures

Was the title always gonna be Pacific Rim? Did you ever think about changing it to something else?

DEL TORO: Well, it was a double program with Jack Reacher, so it was not a fortunate program. [Laughs] It was always Pacific Rim from the moment Travis Beacham came up with the 10 pages, and then fleshed out this thing together and I liked it. I like how it sounded.

What do you think of drift compatible becoming a common shorthand trope across fandom and for creators in general since it’s still such a unique concept 10 years later?

DEL TORO: That was one of the ideas that I loved in the in Travis’ thing, and I came up with the term “drift compatible.” I like slang that sounds casual, like “You’re a jockey. How long since you jockeyed?” It’s the way you patois of the profession, and I like it. I think that it is what the movie is about. The movie is about two things for me: it’s about leaving fear behind and trusting someone. That’s it. It’s two people that don’t trust anyone learning to trust each other. That’s it. The reason I made the movie was because of Mako Mori, because inside a giant robot, there is a woman, and inside that woman, there is a little girl, and the fear that that robot is gonna enact is linked to that little girl, which is the way we behave every day in our life. We all are jockeyed by a little child that is afraid, that was damaged when we were five or six or seven. That’s the way we behave every day in life when we’re hurt, in a relationship, when we feel inadequate. That’s the six-year-old inside you piloting this considerable body, and that’s what the movie is about for me. It’s about a bunch of losers getting together and doing the best they can for each other. So drift compatible is key to that.

So you obviously worked with ILM on these visual effects, nd I’m curious, what was your reaction in that first meeting when you said, “Okay, so I want to do this, this, that’s already going to be hard, but now we’re going to add rain, we’re going have a sequence that’s in the water, oh, wait, actually let’s go underwater?” What’s their reaction? And how much harder is it exponentially when you start introducing those kinds of elements?

DEL TORO: Well, the hard thing, if you can understand this, it may sound weird, the one thing is not to betray the mass of the things. So the fights have to be slow…so, when John Knoll, who’s a genius at ILM, he did charts of displacement of water and air pressure when a Jaeger walks between two buildings. He said the displacement of mass would create this and that. For example, one thing we did, I said, “I don’t want any fucking impossible camera moves.” I hate cameras that go whoo. By the way, any time I’m watching a movie, and there’s a shot of a fucking drone looking down, I change the channel. Please don’t do it, please don’t do it. Except No One Will Save You. Now, that’s a great shot because there you see the circles of those ships landing. But that is the shot where you go, “Ohh…” Don’t do it.

Anyway, I said, “I don’t want any shot that is shot out of scale.” If that shot is on a little barge in the water, then the camera needs to be bobbing with it. If it’s from a helicopter, I want it moving at the speed of a real helicopter. I don’t any whooshing shots or impossible shots. So we said, “Let’s be fanciful, but rooted in reality.” So that is what made it hard. When we went underwater, John said the first color to disappear once you get that deep is this one, this one, this one, and then when you go to the bottom basically the colors are gone. So we had to look at the reef maps and say, “This is where the reef would be, etcetera, etcetera.” We scouted Hong Kong thoroughly…

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

How was the food?

DEL TORO: [Laughs] Amazing. You know, in China, when you visit, they try to give you food that is shocking, like the guest has to eat the eye of the fish. I’m Mexican, I ate everything. I ate the eye of the fish, the everything! Poor fish. But we were in a barge, and a ship went by full of cargo, and I said, “What if the Jaeger uses that as a baseball bat?” So when you’re scouting, you get all this feedback. So we mapped Hong Kong, and then we got this piece of news. They said in Hong Kong, if you want to destroy a building that is real, you have to get a permit from the designer, the engineer, the owner, and all the tenants. And they said if it’s a public building, it’s impossible for it to be destroyed because nothing in Hong Kong would fall no matter what. So they said, “You can go off over the bridge, Stonecutters bridge, but you cannot destroy it because it would never come down.” I go, “Alright, I get it.” So we started to remap the fight and we didn’t destroy any building that is real.

If everything is outlandish and whimsical and great, nothing is real. You have to have a layer of reality, whether you’re doing the physics, the geography, something has to be rooted. So with ILM, they were all for the challenge and listen, they loved it. They were gonna work with Jaegers and the Kaiju for months and months in a row. We are all people that grew up with that. Hal Hickel and I would use our free time, and we would go to hobby shops in Chinatown and buy robots and monsters, and I love painting models. I love collecting vinyl figures.

You collect?

DEL TORO: I do.

That is shocking.

DEL TORO: Although I must say, I’m showing great maturity. I told Kim this morning, I said, “I’m not gonna be on the Phantom of the Paradise suit because I have enough stuff. I decided I have enough stuff.” Although, if something comes out on 4K HD, I will buy it.

I have so many follow-ups, but I am curious, I know when you’re making a movie, you like to make double of props, or whatever it may be, so you can keep stuff. From Pacific Rim, what is in your collection?

DEL TORO: I wanted Mako’s blue suit and her red shoes and I wanted Hannibal Chau’s shoe, one of the organs, the spinal container, one of the bugs, and the escape pod. So I have all of that and the maquettes that were made for the movie to pitch it to Warners and Legendary, which are absolutely magnificent. Gipsy Danger, in those maquettes, is white. It was not those colors, it was white. It was really interesting. Then we realized that you lost a lot of detail if you photograph white because white eats the detail. Same with red; red eats all the detail. These are two colors that are very voracious. It’s hard to get nuance.

You have an after-credit scene with Ron Perlman. How did you decide on that scene and was it ever gonna be something else?

DEL TORO: Yeah, there was no post-credit scene, but we all loved Ron. And then Thomas Tull, who’s one of the greatest studio heads that I’ve ever met, because he was a fan…

Yeah, he really was a huge fan.

DEL TORO: He said, “If I gave you money, what would you shoot for post-credits?” I said, “Hannibal Chau saying, ‘Where is my goddamn shoe?’” [Laughs] So, we did it. And Ron was super happy to do it again.

The goo on him…

DEL TORO: Oh, there was goo on him.

When you tell him something like that, is he like, “Bring it on,” or is he like, “Really? Do you really need me to have goo?”

DEL TORO: It depends. Depends on the weekend he’s planning. Sometimes he wants to go home earlier. No, but Ron and I have gone through everything. You may know or not know anecdote, but Idris Elba, before we strapped him for the final battle, he said, “I just don’t want to get wet.” And I said to him, “Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry.” Then we strapped him, and you screw the control to the suit, he cannot movie in that. I said, “Open the water!” [Laughs] And I will disclose this without saying the name of the actor – one of the actors got diarrhea, and we couldn’t remove him in time, so there was drift compatibility of a different kind for a moment. We all went, “Ahh, cut to lunch.” [Laughs]

One of my favorite shots in the film, and you mentioned it earlier, is the child’s perspective of the attack. I love the way it’s shot, and it’s just so well done. Can you talk about showing the perspective of the child in that sequence?

DEL TORO: There was one decision I made really, really early when I said, “I don’t want any of the masses running away from the monster. I want them all to be in a refuge so that you don’t have to cut from below to above,” because the battle should be between two things destroying the city, right? And I said, “The only times when we cut down is gonna be when they’re getting in the refuge, and in the memory of Mako.” She must have felt she was entirely alone in that city, so she’s walking with her shoe in her hand, and no one else is there. So those were significant, so I said, “Those two moments, we will go to the ground.”

Other than that, I didn’t wanna do the usual with the people walking, with the dining table, you know. I wanted to stay above. So planning it, what I wanted was a very beautiful transition on camera without effects, which is Raleigh’s talking to her and the camera starts going around, and theatrically we lower the lights and ash starts coming down, and she takes one step and she’s on the pavement. I wanted it to be a transition that felt almost theatrical, operatic. Then she is that kid. The problem is you need an actress to play that kid that is that great. Because, I don’t know if you this either, but we built that street, and we rigged it with giant hydraulics, so that every time the monster takes a step, whole street jumped about a couple of inches and everything jumped, everything, the halls had moved. We did a lot of things physically in this movie that were very challenging…When they were fighting, these things moved from one side of the station to the other because I wanted the physicality of it.

Image Via Warner Bros.

I was fortunate enough to do a set visit on Pacific Rim, and the thing that I remember most is I couldn’t believe how much destruction you had put on that sound stage in Toronto. It was just a very impressive set.

DEL TORO: It was. And what we do is all the Hong Kong streets that were shot, what I do is I plan the sets sort of like an eight-figure because you can shoot one way and it’s that street, and you can turn around and it’s a completely different street. So ultimately, all the streets in Hong Kong, all of them were shot in that single figure eight, and we would leave for two weeks, and they would change the signs. Another thing we did that I’m very proud of is every American movie that takes place in Hong Kong writes bad Chinese. We made sure that every single sign was written properly on every traffic sign, every urban markings on the street, everything was accurate. It was not just a whimsy, where, “Oh, it looks okay.” We tried to capture the flavor of Hong Kong in the future, in the 2020s, which here we are, nothing happened.

This is gonna be a nerdy question. Did you ever like scientifically figure out how they were able to communicate through the breach or were you like, “F it, it’s a movie?”

DEL TORO: Oh yeah, it’s a movie. No, absolutely. But, I mean, we figured out a bunch of stuff. Certainly, John Knoll, who is very, very logical, said, “Well, the first line of defense would never be a giant robot,” and I go, “No, it wouldn’t.” [Laughs] “Next question.” So there are certain things or there would be no movie. But we talked about the other alternatives. We did. We said, “Okay, what would you use?” You would use things like bunker busters, meaning there’s missiles that could penetrate the Kaiju, blah, blah, and they would explode inside. But if the target moves and they have no heat signature because their life form is based on silicon, not carbon, and their temperature is not…We came up with a decent my-dog-ate-my-homework explanation for why they came up with giant robots.

Is Pacific Rim: The Black, the animated series on Netflix, is that official canon or is that just a fun show?

DEL TORO: What we did is, the first couple of comic books that came out, we were very, very involved. And I think there was a moment where I just said, “Look, I’m doing other stuff.” So I have no idea what happens in that series, man. I hear the people like it. I like that, but I have only limited time in this life. I was doing Trollhunters [Tales of Arcadia], man.

Image via Netflix

This seems like it could be a really cool big video game world. Has there ever been discussion about making a Triple A title or something more than what’s on the Xbox, like digital thing?

DEL TORO: Look, I really, really, really was so involved in the creation of the toys. I wanted all the toys that I could get and the video games we didn’t discuss back then. I would love that, but I am the Albatross of video games. Every time I get involved, they get canceled, or somebody fires Kojima. So, I better not get involved.

Have you, as a director, seen any cool new technology or any cool new cameras that you are excited to be able to use as a filmmaker?

DEL TORO: Obviously, when you have a big format and you can do experiences…and you can make the audience participate and be part of it, I’m more interested in that for short rides. I think movies are you on a screen, and I think that’s what I’m interested in. I’m 58. I’m really happy I’ve been there. I don’t wanna last beyond reasonable. I don’t wanna be always on the cutting edge. I do what I do, and I’ll do it while they let me, and that’s it. I would love to have been involved in park rides because I’m a big fan of that design.

I’ve seen you at Disneyland, and you love Disneyland.

DEL TORO: 100%, man. I love what goes into that, and I know it quite well, and I know very well the tricks of that trade. So, I had ideas. One of the ideas that I wanted to do for Pacific Rim, and the tragedy of the release of the movie was that Warner Brothers and Legendary divorced during the launching of this movie. So, the movie was not launched properly; was actually sort of counter-launched…It was not to the benefit of the movie the way it was launched. We managed to do $415 million blah, blah, blah, and ancillary market did so well, blah, blah, blah…But one of the things I wanted to do, which I’ll tell you because it would have been super cool, this is when laser projection was early– Have you guys been to Comic-Con in San Diego? Next to the Convention Center, there’s a very large hotel and what I said is, “At night, as soon as it’s dark, we found the Gipsy horn, and we project on the entire facade of the building Gipsy breaking the building and coming out and shooting the light into the crowd, and we put a light in one room, and Gipsy turns to the front of the building and shines the light, and they didn’t wanna do it. But that’s the type of thing that I would like to explore.

But at the same time, I like very much to stay promoting the love of film as it is. Size of screen, yes. The difference is, at home, the screen obeys us. It’s like, “Sit, sit, beg. Good boy.” That’s television. Cinema overwhelms us and demands a ceremonial servitude from us. A certain humility is good for the soul. Humility is extremely good. Every time you submit to a force larger than yourself, namely Scorsese, it is good for your soul. So, I like that the art form should exist in that way and not just be hooked on technology. I think IMAX size of screens and quality of sound, those are great things. The sound system of IMAX is fantastic. Those things are phenomena. They last forever.

Can you tease anything about what you are directing next?

DEL TORO: I’m doing Frankenstein. We’re working on it. We started in February, and it’s a movie I have been wanting to do for 50 years since I saw the first Frankenstein. I had an epiphany, and it’s basically a movie that required a lot of growth and a lot of tools that I couldn’t have done 10 years ago. Now I’m brave or crazy enough and, and, and we’re gonna tackle it. It’s Oscar Isaac, Andrew Garfield, Christoph Waltz, and Mia Goth, and we’re working on it.

Can I say something? Thank you for coming, guys. This is a movie I love, and this is as close as I can go to having cookies and milk with you guys. This is as close as we can do it. I like it to be an intimate setting. This is the way I saw it, on the IMAX screen, the first time I saw it finally on 3D. We took hundreds of days to do this 3D. We didn’t do a quick job. Jim Cameron said, “You either do it for this number of days or I’ll be very angry with you.” And you don’t want Jim Cameron to be angry at all. And to me, what I experienced back then, it was seeing the movie, and I made it, seeing a movie for the first time. So I hope it was like that for you and thank you for coming back. Thank you.