Meanwhile, "Pacific Rim" was waiting in the wings, and the idea of a modern-day kaiju movie -- a new, large-scale take on the classic Japanese monster films of the '50s, '60s and '70s -- was irresistible to del Toro with his love of monsters and all genres of sci-fi, horror and fantasy. Working with screenwriter Travis Beacham, del Toro has fashioned a future Earth where human civilization is on the brink of extinction as a result of an invasion of gigantic, destructive creatures from a rift in the Mariana Trench, with giant robots called Jaegers -- and the pilots who mentally control them -- the last, faltering line of defense.

We (along with Coming Soon's Edward Douglas) spoke with del Toro twice during the course of our day on set. This is an edited version of those talks.

MSN Movies: What time did your day start this morning?

Guillermo del Toro: It starts at 6.

You start at 6 every morning?

No, normally 4, 4:30. I'm putting in 16 to 18 hours minimum. Seven days a week.

What is it like for you after five years to call action for the first time?

It was fantastic. You immediately fall into it, you know. And the fact is that aside from everything else during those four years I prepped three movies. I prepped my version of "The Hobbit" and I prepped "Mountains of Madness." So I scouted, came up with technical solutions -- they were really great sort of good boot camps for this. And then in a way they were both huge productions, which they were like almost a training exercise to grow into the size of this production. So I wouldn't say that that time was misspent. I was very happy I had the time to do them.

You always develop your own ideas and your own versions of different things. This script came from someone else.

Not really. We started developing it from scratch -- not scratch. Travis came up with the pitch and I came in right at that point. At inception. I started developing it at the same time Legendary and Warner started. So I was able to a) have ideas from inception and b) do several drafts myself. The moment I heard the pitch, I immediately saw the movie, but I was doing "Mountains," so I originally said to (producers) Jon Jashni and Thomas (Tull), "I'll come in as producer, and if you guys can wait, I will direct it." But we started developing the visual bible right away. We started developing the screenplay (and) storyline. ... The more involved I got into "Pacific Rim," the more I really loved the visuals and characters and the words that we were creating and the world. And when "Mountains" didn't happen -- the plug got pulled on a Friday. Monday I was fully on board on "Pacific Rim." Literally over the weekend -- Thomas lives very close by me, and we had the final meetings over the weekend, and on Monday we were on.

You've explored so many different kinds of monsters in your films. What is it about the kaiju genre that's personal to you and made you want to do this?

What I loved about the kaiju when I was a kid is that the monster can be a relatively open symbol. You can have the monster as a victim, like Frankenstein, or the monster as an expression of the id, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But for me, what was fascinating -- I grew up on the kaiju genre in Mexico. For whatever reason my earliest memories of cinema are Hammer films, Kaiju, Universal and Mexican horror movies. Those are my inception things. And I remember the kaiju representing for me raw power. They were like forces of nature. They were not morally bound by social standards. They were just like a hurricane or an earthquake or an atomic explosion. They were simply sheer brute force. And that always gave me a sense of scale that lifted the stories into -- it lifts them beyond any social concern and they become adventure movies. They become like when I was a kid and you used to see explorers in space or you used to see explorers in the Himalayas, or you know, "The Man Who Would Be King," where people were facing insurmountable odds. I thought the kaiju were very much representative of that.

Robots are definitely new territory for you. You've done a lot of monsters and magic things. Robots are more technological, real world-based type things.

Well, to me what is attractive is when the technology is tactile. When you can really see the machine, you know. I'm very much a machine guy. I love clockwork, I love pistons and robots and the robots in "Hellboy II" are clockwork. But these are not that at all. These guys are absolutely modern technology, but they are still made of pistons and they are made of relays and motors and engines. So there's a lot of mecha-fetishism for me. I am very much a machine fetishist.

I really was instantly attracted to (this). I just felt drawn into it because of how easily I saw sort of a group of pilots that were not -- I relate it to World War II and the heroism in World War II. There's a lot of the language of those types of machines that go into the interior of the robots. A lot of the language of the battles is very violent and very palpable, like when you see a tank battle in a World War II movie where you see the guys going through the terrain, getting hit. There's a lot of language that I took from submarine movies. So I wanted to make it, not a movie about super high tech that is remote and polished, but about battle machines that are huge -- but ultimately concentrate on the guys inside.

What tone are you going for? When I think of kaiju films, I think of the first "Godzilla" or the first "Rodan" or "War of the Gargantuas," which are dark movies. But the later ones are more kid-oriented.

I wanted to take humanity at its lowest point and at its strongest. I treated the characters and the melodrama of the characters to feel very much emotionally relatable. And the battles are very visceral. Both the kaiju and the robots get damaged in a way that is not just acrobatics. It really becomes intense and you're there. ... I make it a very immediate experience. Hopefully a very immersive experience. And one of the decisions I took early on is, with the exception of a few set pieces, I wanted to have the cities evacuated during the fights. So that the scale of the fights would always be kaiju versus robot and not have you saying, "What's going to happen to the people running on the ground?" That was one of the early, early decisions, and that allows you to concentrate on the creature and the pilots.

How hard have you worked to integrate the human stories and the battles, and determine the right time to spend with each?

Oh, there's huge care put into having the right balance. Because, to me, what is interesting on a movie like this is I need to care about the people and I need to care about the story and I need to care about the world before anything else. So part of that was knowing that I could cast the way I could cast. I didn't want to be hampered by having to rewrite for a star or two stars or three stars. I was able to concentrate and give everybody equal screen time and make sure that I got actors that were a) serious and solid about their craft and b) could cater to character. I was not just hiring bodies, you know. So we wrote the characters with enough of a depth and biography and melodrama that they would have something to play.

Which brings us to, did you think of Ron (Perlman, "Hellboy" star and del Toro regular) for the part of Hannibal right away?

Yeah, from the start I really saw him as Hannibal Chau, you know. I really saw him immediately in writing it. I knew that he was a guy from Brooklyn but just had created this persona, you know. So I immediately saw him.

People love the old Japanese kaiju movies because the monsters had such personality. Can you talk about bringing emotion to the kaiju when they're done through CG, as opposed to having them created by actors in motion-capture suits?

I was not in favor of motion capture for the kaijus or the robots, because I think that with the kaijus I wanted the anatomy to not be human. We kept a lot of the ideas of the bipedal kaiju, but I wanted the legs to be proportionate to the monster. One of the things I like very much is that the first part of the personality is the way that the kaiju looks. It tells you what it does. The embodiment of the personality of the kaiju is his exterior, first of all. If a kaiju is meant to be a knife, he should look like a knife or should look like an ax or should look like a battering ram.

So that was the first part. And then the idea is to, through the action, give them intelligence or give them brute force. There are kaijus in the movie that are pure, sheer -- like a battering ram. And there are others that are incredibly astute and smart and cunning. I think ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), through the years, have always been able to bring characters to life more than about anything else. They've been responsible for so many great characters that are CG, you know.

The scale of the movie is unbelievable.

The whole point of the movie is scale. It's how little things can defeat huge ones.

Everybody that we've sat down with today talks about what a great process it is to collaborate with you -- that you have this energy and passion that's infectious and that you're also a great leader. Where did you learn this?

I think (from) being part of the crew. I mean, I was a crew member for about 10 movies, 12 movies, before directing the first one. I was a crew member in a TV series. And if you want to learn to sort of lead, you need to learn to follow, you know. And when you are there, you identify when a director is not working hard, or when the director is unfocused or when he comes in later than everyone else. ... As a crew member, that's a disappointment, you know. So you try not to do what you learned is wrong.
 

Our introduction to the world of "Pacific Rim" is gradual. It starts in an anonymous conference room, with two chairs pulled up to a large hi-def screen. It is here that we are shown a "sizzle reel" -- a collection of footage used to "sell" the movie -- of images used as "proof-of-concept" material for "Pacific Rim." In other words, this is test footage created to show that a movie about giant robots battling massive monsters in the streets of modern-day cities can be made more believable -- far more believable, in fact -- than the old Japanese monster films that inspired it.

Even though the reel is a mix of animated storyboards, artwork and some finished footage, one thing is clear from the start: Del Toro is going big in this film, bigger than anything he's ever done before, including his last movie, 2008's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army." The director has a lot riding on "Pacific Rim": It's his first directorial outing since "Hellboy II," after years of development on other projects that he ended up having to abandon, and it's a wholly original idea without a huge star or some sort of existing brand or franchise to back it up.

Well, not completely original: As we mentioned, "Pacific Rim" is a 21st-century version of what the Japanese called kaiju movies, films about giant monsters like Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah and many more, all of whom would emerge from the sea or space and invariably stomp a Japanese city or two into dust, often while battling each other. Early kaiju movies like "Godzilla" were serious in tone and portrayed the creatures as metaphors for nuclear destruction, while latter entries became cartoonish and geared more toward children -- many of whom, by the way, grew up to be today's filmmakers. Even Brad Pitt said in an interview that the first movie he ever saw was a Japanese kaiju film called "War of the Gargantuas."

Del Toro counts that one as a favorite. "Nobody would take me to the cinema where it was playing in my hometown," recalls the Mexican-born director when we talk later. "So I took two or three buses to (see it). It was playing at a 10 a.m. matinee; I took three buses, got to that cinema which was very far away. I came in, I sat down and somebody from the balcony threw a glass of pee and it landed on my head. In testament to my love of the kaiju, I didn't leave. I stayed until the movie was over. I love Gamera. I love Baragon. I love Godzilla. I love all of them."

The beasts in del Toro's movie are called kaiju, but del Toro -- who voraciously consumes all manner of genre entertainment and literature -- tells us later that that's as far as his tribute to those original monsters goes. "What I did do as an exercise on this movie was not to watch the kaiju movies again. I have watched them as a kid and I didn't want to be influenced by something particular. Normally I watch the stuff, but I said I've got to go and try to create something new. I don't want to do a homage to those movies. I want to make my own riff on that."
Del Toro's "riff" (written with Beacham) begins in 2013 but mostly takes place in 2025, years after a breach at the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the deepest part of the Earth's oceans) has opened a gateway to another dimension, letting hordes of kaiju out to lay waste onto Earth. In order to preserve humanity, the nations of the world have banded together to create the Jaegers, 25-story-tall robot defenders that are helmed by two pilots nestled in a pod in the robot's head. The pilots are connected mentally to the robot and to each other by a neural bridge, allowing them to seamlessly control the Jaeger's movements as it battles the kaiju.

But even the Jaegers have been on the losing end recently, meaning that Earth's last line of defense may soon be gone. Two oddly matched pilots, played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi, may be the final hope as they are tasked with steering a legendary but battle-worn Jaeger into action. The rest of the cast includes Charlie Day, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, Robert Kazinsky and others. "I think it's not what this movie is," says producer Mary Parent about the movie's lack of a "huge" star. "Certainly the structure of this movie is more of an ensemble, and I think it works really well how the stories of these different characters are interwoven together." 

 

 

 

 

Seven years later, something called "World War Z" has reached the screen, but it is related to Brooks' book only in two ways: its title and the central concept of a worldwide plague of the undead. Admittedly, Brooks' book was a difficult one to adapt, since it has no central character(s) and is not a traditional narrative. But after several drafts of the script and a troubled production that required the scripting of an entirely new third act and seven weeks of reshoots (plus an eight-month delay in release), "World War Z" has emerged as a kind of hybrid of zombie horror and action thriller, its more disturbing and grisly elements watered down for a PG-13 rating.

Does the movie work on its own? Not really. It takes place during the actual zombie outbreak, with Pitt playing a former U.N. worker drafted to locate the source of the epidemic. The star is appealing and resolute, but is barely characterized beyond his desire to get back to his family once the job is done. Other characters barely get even one dimension, let alone two. The movie is bloodless and the zombies mostly rendered through CG, making their visceral impact minimal. There are a few gripping set pieces -- the best is set aboard an overrun plane -- but director Marc Forster's ("Quantum of Solace") inability to shoot action coherently lessens their impact.

What's left is an odd and empty spectacle, good for a few jump scares and some intense action (when you can see it), but with only glimmers and traces of Brooks' haunting novel. And in an era where "The Walking Dead" splatters blood and guts across TV screens on a weekly basis, the utterly bloodless "World War Z" seems strangely neutered. It's not a "bad" movie, nor an unwatchable one -- just a forgettable corporate exercise that could have been a lot more.

Meanwhile, you can still read Brooks' excellent book, which got us thinking: What other sci-fi or horror novels didn't survive their transition to the big screen in somewhat recognizable form? Sometimes massive changes work better for the screen; sometimes they lose the essence of the book completely. Check out this list below:

"The War of the Worlds": H.G. Wells' 1898 sci-fi classic was set in Victorian England and had the Martians invading in their famous walking tripods. The 1953 film produced by George Pal was relocated to contemporary California, the tripods replaced by flat discs with long necks, and the main characters are all scientists and military personnel -- although individual scenes from Wells' book remain. Steven Spielberg's 2005 remake, while also modern, was far more faithful.

"The Omega Man": Richard Matheson's classic 1954 novel "I Am Legend" has been filmed three times, most faithfully in 1964 as "The Last Man on Earth" and less so in 2007 with Will Smith as the star. But the adaptation that veered the most wildly off the track was 1971's "The Omega Man" with Charlton Heston. In that version, the vampires left behind by a worldwide viral epidemic weren't even vampires anymore: They were insane albino mutants.

"Planet of the Apes": Pierre Boulle's original novel was a much more satirical look at contemporary society: His ape civilization (which was actually on a different planet, not a future Earth as in the movie) was modern, with cars, airplanes, big cities, etc. It was a far cry from the semi-medieval ape culture of the Charlton Heston film.

"Soylent Green": The shocking secret at the heart of this overpopulation epic -- "Soylent Green is people!" -- didn't even exist in Harry Harrison's novel "Make Room! Make Room!" While the film followed star Charlton Heston (again!) as he slowly discovered what miracle food Soylent Green was really made of, the novel is a much more loosely plotted series of vignettes starring several characters in an overpacked and collapsing New York.

"The Thing From Another World": The 1951 film had one vast, crucial difference from John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" In the story, the alien being that invades an Antarctic research station can assume the shape of any living thing it absorbs. In the movie, the creature is a vampiric humanoid (played by James Arness in a jumpsuit), thus negating the entire undertone of paranoia that made Campbell's tale so memorable. John Carpenter's 1982 remake restored this aspect of the story with now-legendary results.

"Logan's Run": The differences are many between the 1976 movie and the 1967 novel written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. In the book, everyone in the future (there has been no apocalyptic war and no one lives under domes) is legislated to die at 21; in the movie it's 30. In the book you simply report to a "Sleepshop" and get put down; in the movie you are offered a false chance for "Renewal" in a ritual called Carousel. Spoilers here: In the book Logan does find Sanctuary; in the movie it's a myth. We could use that long-awaited remake of this one.

"Starship Troopers": Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel was controversial for its seeming endorsement of a semi-fascist society and permanent militarization of a culture, and was also structured around a series of monologues and debates. Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film broadly satirized the political aspects of the novel while incorporating much more alien battle action into the story -- probably the better way to go for a film, but wildly divergent from the book.

The works of Philip K. Dick: "Blade Runner," "Payback," "Next," "Minority Report," "Total Recall" ... those are worth an entire article on their own.