'Pacific Rim': Guillermo del Toro Is 'Romantically Embracing' His Film
Front-loaded with massive monsters and building-sized robots assembled to battle them, "Pacific Rim" promises the kind of spectacle that you absolutely cannot miss. But director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro told MTV News that he deliberately constructed much of the action with the opposite intent -- to obscure the action and capture it off-center. He wanted to give it a real-world believability in spite of its fantastical foundations.
"I think that the amount of construction we put in the visuals of the movie and the sensibility that guides the special effects is quite unique," del Toro explained. "We not only create a world that feels dented and injured and sort of oxidized and rusty and all that, but we also create a unique approach to effects. There are no super special shots going around the building through the eye of the Kaiju."
Del Toro's previous work includes both "Hellboy" movies, "Blade II," and the acclaimed Spanish film "Pan's Labyrinth." Working on his biggest canvas to date, the filmmaker explained that he and his creative team deliberately tried to shoot the robot-on-monster action as if it were actually happening in front of a cameraman who was hanging on for dear life trying to capture it all.
"We shot with ILM [company Industrial Light & Magic] saying, 'OK, where is the camera? Is it in a boat? Is it on a helicopter?' " he revealed. "We often cut back to the same angle, so you get a sense that this fight was shot for real. We splash the camera with water, scratch the lens, frost the lens, operate the camera wrong in the virtual, loose part of the Kaiju."
That said, del Toro admitted that he really wants audiences to be swept up in the events of the film. "It's perhaps my youngest movie, my lightest movie in the sense that it's aiming to create a new generation of Kaiju lovers," he said. "And to look at a genre like that without irony, without nostalgia, without post-modern sensibility but whole heartedly almost romantically embracing [it]."
"Pacific Rim" opens in theaters nationwide July 12.
