Pacific Rim: at the edge of our patience, at the end of our waiting

“I wanted to explore how some of the characters would not get along in real life, actually hate each other, but they’re good at something. You
know like, I was never a great dancer obviously, but as a kid ,as you saw couples that fought all the time, but they danced beautifully together and I thought this would be great to have two characters that hated each other, but when the time comes they can pilot, they’re good at that. They can black out all the differences and come together. The movie is not an individual thing, coming together is what saves us. The Kaijus are completely individualistic, sheer force, and the pilots need to join together. Most of the characters in the movie don’t get together and then they come together and it works. Which I think is what it means to be human.”

“And we come from the point of view that we are vanquished. We are the resistance. We are coming at the moment when you must keep calm and carry on. You know, rationing. People are
hungry, people are working for food. Humanity is not triumphant. We are trying to build a wall that is 300 miles around the coastline, it’s an uninhabited force all across the pacific. Food is the coin of the realm. We are at the lowest and at the lowest we take the approach that we are not going with white teeth, blonde hair, super Aryan heroes coming to save humanity. We’re going with a Japanese girl, an Australian team, Charlie Day, Idris Elba, we have a Peruvian-Chinese that is played by Clifton Collins Jr..”

“I carefully avoided the car commercial aesthetics or the army recruitment video aesthetics. I avoided
making a movie about an army with ranks. I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world. I was very careful how I built the movie.
One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character. One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people…

I have been offered movies that have huge budgets that have war at its centre and I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ I have two daughters and I wanted to make this movie for kids. It’s my lightest movie and yet it’s one of the most precise, adult exercises in world design I’ve ever made. It has the craft of a 48-year-old (del Toro’s age) and the heart of a 12-year-old.

What I wanted was for kids to see a movie where they don’t need to aspire to be in an army to aspire for an adventure. And I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers…it has the language of an adventure movie. I want kids to come out of the movie and say, I want to be a Jaeger pilot! I really think that would be my dream come true.”