Pacific Rim Director's Commentary by Guillermo del Toro
<图片来源见水印>
圣诞节的时候花了三天时间把导演音轨听写了下来,本想作为圣诞献礼做出个导演音轨的中文字幕,但是效率太低了直到今天也不过是刚把英文整理出来,于是再接再厉做新年献礼吧【。
GdT的导评音轨很值得一听,重点主要在对日本特摄片、大怪兽和机甲类的安利科普w,制作环太时的镜头语言和色彩语言(如何塑造和呼应人物和情节)、CG渲染和3D转制等等技术方面的心得,以及对环太人物和情节关系的剖析上。
卤煮能力有限,一些词汇和人名听不出来都做了标识。总之本意只在对GdT和环太的情意啦,祝大家新年快乐❤❤❤。
卤煮查资料的时候看到几篇关于环太VFX的采访颇有意思,值得一看(如果有机会能翻译出来就好了)链接:
PACIFIC RIM: Lindy DeQuattro – VFX Supervisor – ILM:http://www.artofvfx.com/?p=4722
Executive Producer Callum Greene Talks Changes During Production, the Massive Visual Effects, Release Date Shuffles, Easter Eggs, on the Set of PACIFIC RIM:http://collider.com/callum-greene-pacific-rim-interview/
Pacific Rim Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel On The Secrets Of The Kaiju, Jaegers And Guillermo Del Toro’s Spirit Of Collaboration:http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/11/12/pacific-rim-animation-supervisor-hal-hickel-on-the-secrets-of-the-kaiju-jaegers-and-guillermo-del-toros-spirit-of-collaboration/
然后还有一篇关于导评的23个信息点的简单总结:http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/23-things-we-learned-from-guillermo-del-toros-pacific-rim-commentary.php
哦对导评音轨可以在Pacific.Rim.2013.1080p.BluRay.DTS.x264-PublicHD(度盘链接: http://pan.baidu.com/s/1c01jvWk 密码: 1nfy)或者任何带导评音轨的压制中找到,我不确定是不是有人把音轨扒下来分享过了——当然还是要说请大家支持正版,另外在家里的大电视上看蓝光必定和下载的蓝光压制不一样。
Hello this is Guillermo del Toro, and welcome to the audio commentary for Pacific Rim. I want to thank you for being here. And this movie is made out of love and it’s great to be able to share some of the love with you today.
This movie couldn’t have been done without the enthusiasm and support of Legendary Pictures and Warner Brothers . But Legendary was fundamental. And creating this film, Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni supporting the vision of a movie that wants to be not an anthology piece of filmography of geek filmography but a movie that ejects new life and new passion to two genres that have been vital for me growing up in Mexico in the 1960s.
The Tokusatsu and the Kaiju genre, which are the science fiction and giant monster movies, are 【】 in Japan. And the Mecha genre, which I will talk about a little more.
I want to have the movie start right away, not have a pause, and give it non-stop rhythm if possible. I started with images that very well put together, designed and executed by ILM and myself, which is this first attack on the Golden Gate Bridge. And they are really really deliberately designed to give you the majesty of a Kaiju attack. Then right after this few images we finished with a very majestic shot of a Kaiju right there.
Then we are going to a quick sort of glossary. The movie has developed this glossary of terms of what you are about to see. This sort of prequel, quick couple of minutes of a prequel of the film. I was not interested in either chronicling the first attack of the Kaiju or the moment of we were triumphant and winning. I want to talk about the struggle, the epic struggle of the resistance when we were losing. So we need this whole area of the movie, the prolog or prequel-prolog, to have a different flavor than the rest of the movie. To have sort of a found footage flavor.
I am good at this and good at that but I am not good at found footage. So I recruited the help of the company Mirada (Mirada Studios) which is a company that Javier Jimenez, Guillermo Navarro, Mathew Cullen, and I co-founded a few years ago. And Mathew is a really talented director. He was kind enough to collaborate with me and putting together all this. We assembled first footage of sort of found footage from…and then I storyboarded things like this shot, and few others. We put together the storyboard of found footage from archives and organized it with the voiceover of Charlie Hunnam into coherent narrative. And then Mathew went and shot all found footage almost everywhere of the world. He did a fantastic job because it needed to feel sort of different from the movie.
The film has a very very deliberately designed quality to it. We need a more urgent, “you are there” feel for this footage. I must say I am very very proud of this visual effect shot that Mirada delivered. And I am very very proud of Mathew and grateful for his help. So we developed this glossary of terms we give you an idea of the world and right away then we start the movie and the last battle of the time we were winning, quote unquote.
I was started with the youth. The period of the youth of Raleigh and his brother. I want this to be totally different from the rest of the movie, too. Because we are still sort of triumphant and the ecstatic on this part of the preparation is the ecstatic of the winners. You know, Raleigh is still young, super charged, and full of enthusiasm and the character Charlie and his brother, basically every pilot in the movie, this character, must be delineated very quickly.
You are dealing with types, dealing with characters that exist in this genre, Kaiju and Mecha; they have to be delineated quickly. So I tried to do it by accumulating details by the way they interact with things. Here we start texturing the world. You cannot do world creation without filling it with texture and details.
I want you to see the circuitry suits. I want you to see how they were put together and do this very very manual launching. I remember Paul Schrader talking about American Gigolo and saying, if you do a sequence once and really really well, people will know that that is the way things happen over and over again. You do not have to see the Jaeger being launched many times. You see it once, you see the preparation of the suit once and if you do it very carefully and you accumulate reality. You can see how bit by bit we start feeling with details of this launching. I call it jokingly the Thunderbirds’ launching. Because it was very much inspired by how complex Gerry Anderson did all launchings of the ships in the Thunderbirds. And Thunderbirds was sort of laterally connected to Tokusatsu genre in Japan. Because they were quite an inspiration for Eiji Tsuburaya , and his TV series, Ultra Seven, Ultraman and all that.
And I want it very much to show you a world that felt detailed. We designed everything in this movie and patches in the shirt and uniforms. We designed the banners, badges, all the advisory and doors. We designed the Jaegers to the minimum details. You know, we designed the Jaegers so that if you zoom in into the controls, you would see electrical discharge warnings. You would see ladders; you would see places where you would connect. Engineering this amount of detail mechanically, the amount of detail in design is staggering. We spent about a year texturing this world. And the accumulation of that Mosaique of details design-wide gives you the sense of a real world.
People think that world creation, movie, for example, is big gestures. But it is not. It is all these small details. Look at the markings; look at the vehicles that open the doors; look at the banners and this marking, the crawlers that move the robots. Everything is full of detail. We design these. Look at the bomber art on the chest. Gipsy Danger, this robot is designed to resemble a war plane from WWII.
So we have big riveting; we have the majestic lines of article building in New York. We gave the gait of a gunslinger of western fighter. Each of the robots has a personality and Gipsy has that strong personality of gunslinger out of a duel, sort of John Wayne gait.
It is very important for me to not just design for (the purpose of) design, not to create eye candy but to create eye protein. Because I think that 50 per cent of the narrative of a film is submerged in the audiovisual details. And you are not doing this for doing this just because it looks cool. You are actually doing it for a narrative reason.
It is important, for example, to see the two brothers are in white. And we are going to stain this white with a color that I am very careful to use in my design, sparingly, which is red. Red is very fundamental in this film to be used carefully as I will explain it later. It becomes vital for the story of another character. And basically it is going to symbolizing the way of life.
Se we stain the white suit of the pilot with red. It is fundamental, it is very dramatic moment. We will come to it.
Everything is textured to be damaged a little, a little dented. You see it feels used. I believe, as I was saying, that image design or storytelling affects content through the audiovisual form, the content of the film.
And we are right away going to a world that feels textured that is not Triumphlied, that is not a normal movie where everything is super shiny, illuminated by fluorescent light that feels like a half of car commercial of half the recruitment media for the army. We are going to, I call it, Gothic-dec or Gothic-tech, which is to go right away to a world that is rusting, in decay, where you have the concrete is chipped, the paint is chipping off, and the armor of the robot is dented, sort of pitted. They feel like knights, the ancient knights.
We start to accumulating, for example, atmosphere. I want the movie to be very romantic, but not romantic in the heart-lit novel or the romance novel sense of the word. I want it to be romantic in its epicness. You know, I want it to feel like opera. I want it to feel dramatic. So instead doing this in a well-lit street of New York, I want this first fight to happen in almost in the middle of romantic painting of Casper David Friedrich. He was a romantic painter I adore. And I very much want it to happen in the middle of a tempest and ocean where the waves are crashing into them.
And with the water, throughout the movie, water becomes an incredibly complex expressive element. I had a chat with ILM with the simulation department through John Knoll who is a genius and great collaborator and a friend, about how we would approach the waves and the water. And the water becomes a narrative element, almost like a music element. They did these waves; we would call them the Hokusai waves, because they were inspired by the engraving of Hokusai, a Japanese wave.
Everything is telling you the story. They are not just aesthetic choices, they are narrative choices. For example, look at this sequence, and you realize that it is not lit like a normal movie sequence where everything has fill light and key light. It is mostly lit with the light of the Jaeger lighting the Kaiju. Listen to the sound track, there is no music. Look at the way we are, just when the light of the Jaeger hit the Kaiju, you see the Kaiju. But if you don’t, you are almost in the darkness. We break the line of the water. We stain the lens with water. We deliberately put “mistake” into shots that are very expensive and very elaborate. Why? Because it is (not only) an aesthetic choice, but also a narrative choice.
I don’t want to make the narrative, regular narrative CG movie that every shot looks super cool. I want to get in the way. I want to give you reality. Stain the lens with water, have error on the operation of the camera, make the images obscured by water, by fog, by… later in the movie, obscured by the compensation in the lens.
We made this scene very tense, so far without music. Now music is taking over, and we are going into it. In the fight, if you rewind it, if you see it again, you will see, for example, we make the decision of using master shot over and over, a close-up, and it is told as if there is a real camera there. As if the camera is really being operated, with errors of operation and so forth. But also, repeating angles. Think about it for a second. Normally a director goes for what makes the shot cooler. But I want to give you the sense that this things were really happening. So I repeated the language. I show you the shot. We have master shot from the speed boat, or a helicopter. Repeat it over and over and so forth.
I want it to be full of drama. We are just opening the movie and I want you to be in the middle of a battle and to feel what to feel in a battle with this creature. The movie wants to evoke the sense of awe and scale that I felt when I was a kid sitting down in a theatre seeing these movies. I want the drama; I want to show you the Jaeger losing. But I want you to feel you were right there. Again I was very inspired by WWII movies and adventure movies where you could be inside of a tank in the middle of a desert or thunder.
I want you to feel this. For that reason we created the cockpit that the pilots are in, physically. This movie has a lot of CG, Of course. Directing the CG for me is as elaborate as directing a live action shot. I direct the actors; I direct the angle, the size of the lens. I direct the composition. I direct the storyboarding, the acting, and the cinematography and so forth. And it is very elaborate, but I want the movie to have a lot of real elements. Here again, we build those cockpit. You can see the supplements and see how much this movie was actually built for real.
Now we are going to sort of 【】, a moment of reality, of a different scale. I got this small robot rotting in the beach because constantly in the film we have to oppose the gigantic with the small. We just oppose a huge battle with little detail like nail or cradle, or a little toy like this. Or a little shoe, a little red shoe. Constantly giving you a sense of scale of awe, of majesty. I want you to know for real, a 25-story Jaeger fighting a 25-story monster or falling onto the beach.
This shot coming up. Look at this, we got from the big, the gigantic, and within a single shot we are going to go from the biggest, the widest, to the little bug of a pilot, crawling out of the helmet. Isolate Raleigh. We isolate Raleigh. I am telling you the story. Look at the marking on his suit, the burn mark on his skin; those are going to be scars he is going to carry for the rest of the movie. I am telling you it is when we start losing. This was the price for arrogance. This was the price for youth.
We stain the white with red. I am trying to build the character, not by the work of the actor, but by the story telling with audiovisual elements. Then I want to show you finally how small Raleigh is against, with the position with the robot with this shot. We go again to talk about scale.
Why it is important to talk about scale in this movie is in the end of the day, the human story, the emotions have to be constructed through these type of coding because we are dealing with types. We have the young pilot, the female pilot, the officer, and the scientists. We are working with given characters of this genre. Each of these characters is to be textured very carefully with very little gestures, very few lines. For example, Raleigh and Mako, these two of the main characters, have the least amount of lines in the film.
I want it very much to have the story of two characters that do not trust almost anyone, that they are incapable of giving (trust) to somebody else, and for them to find their vulnerability, to accept their vulnerability and trust each other in spite of it. I think it is very important when you directing a genre movie to do things efficiently. Or else you end up with a movie that, a genre movie that now (lasts) two hours and 50 minutes or three hours. And your barometer is on red alert after an hour and 45 minutes, and you really want it over. I want this movie to have very little fat. When people ask me what is the complicated thing about this movie, I say it is to keep it simple.
For example, this scene is very efficient. We talk about how the politicians are useless, which is something I completely related to in real life. They are just guys interested not in building bridges or solutions but in building walls. I want it very much to use that symbolically. This group of guys responding to pause, to build a wall as a solution, which is the easiest solution for a politician. Again, look at this very small detail in the middle of the movie about proportions. Just one pill starts to tell you who Pentecost is, what his predicament is. We do it, I hope, rather efficiently.
We then show you this again, to make the world real. You feel the details with damages of these billboards. I did the graffiti where people say the wall would NEVER be completed. You know, we are going to see “work for ration”. It starts telling you that this guy fell from grace, Raleigh was a superstar, a rock star, and now he is working for food. We created this world that we are all in uniforms which evoke WWII Rosie the Riveter, the overall that everything evokes a factory in WWII. Texturally we are going into aesthetic of a type of movie. And later on we even design a anti-Kaiju refuge basically based on an anti-aerial bump refuge in London in the 40s.
Once again here I show you the magnitude of the wall work. I isolate Raleigh in the same way I isolate him before in the beach. I showed you he is alone and for a moment he gazes at the horizon and the sea where he loses his brother. But he is basically alone in the world. He has no one. He does not have to trust anyone and he is not willing to engage, really.
Here comes a very curious thing. People think that in order to make this movie I saw a lot of action movies but you know, what I was watching was actually sports movies because I want Raleigh to be the rookie that comes back to a team after years of retirement. You know sort of 40 year old rookie coming back.
One of the things I want to do was to not make a movie about one hero but a bunch of heroes, about a composite of humanity to show that this movie is in global scale. Here for example, we introduce the hot shot, you know, the guys are superstars, the pilot of Australian Jaeger that comes in and bing bang, he takes care thing really quick. He is sort of the sport superstar. We continue with the sports movie analogy. They take care of business very (x3) quick. It is a global movie, happening in everywhere of the world, unlike the movies where the aliens seem to get a single map of the world. You only has New York and Washington in the map*chuckles*.
I want the movie to be about worldwide crises, to be a movie not about a hero but a composite of heroes saving the world, the world saving the world. Every race, every sex, every recruit, every color of skin are coming together to do this. Now Raleigh is one of them. It is a movie about togetherness, about connecting, about TRUST, about trusting each other because we are all inside the same robot. It is a very metaphorically, very very easy to show you that two pilots are inside the head and the right hand side is the dominant one but they still have to move the robot together. The neural load of moving a machine that size is not something one person can handle. So these two pilots need connect through memories and they will see the worst of each other and the best of each other. They have to trust each other. Then every character in the film needs to learn to trust the other again. Pentecost here, and Raleigh needs to learn to trust each other. They need to find their common ground. And the two scientists need to trust each other even they hated each other. And the father needs to trust the son; father needs to trust the daughter and so on and so forth. That theme is repeated throughout the movie.
And it is about colors coming together. Look at this, Raleigh is all introduced in this warm color of golden color. He is all coded in warm and green, earth tones. The light that is bathing him is always golden. It is about that color coming together with Mako’s dominant color, and Pentecost, in this case, is connected to Mako, which are blues. So this we come to the scene they meet for the first time. I have color coded in this scene and entirely those two colors, blue and the ambers. You know the bright ambers and the blue, the sort of cyan blue.
This is Mako meeting Raleigh. So this entire thing needed to be color-coded like that. And that Mako is blue is because I am linking her origin to the Kaiju. The Kaiju blue. The blood of a Kaiju. But also, you will see in a minute, a memory, a memory that is all color-coded in blue and splashes of red in her past as a child. And that blue has stained her hair. Even her hair has these strands of blue. She cannot get rid of that memory. She carries it in her in a way the little Mako, the afraid little Mako is inside the heart of the grown up Mako, in a way that Mako is going to recite inside the giant robot. It is sort of Chinese box or Russian dolls, sort of drama, you know. At the core of the giant robot, there is a scared little girl and a young pilot like Raleigh, trying to get by. You see that, there is the color staining her hair.
And each of these characters, each these stained characters, is going to bring the best of them in order to save the world. I do not like movies where we are only responding to a vast of ideals, of military superiority, and ballistic superiority. And we only win with the quality with our weapons. I do not like that. So I try to transmit in the film that we are going to win by all of us doing the best we can. We are going to need the scientists, the imagination, the ingenuity, we are going to need self-sacrifice, we are going to need valor, we are going to need all the characteristics of these characters, all of these types again. I am not pretending that, this is The Cherry Orchard with the giant monsters. But these are types, and these types have to be innovative and feel fresh. For example, the scientists, instead of being the guy in a white lab coat and this and that, I want to have it combusted into two different sides, the sort of comic geek, the super fan, which is Newt, the sort of comic book geek, who thinks himself as a superstar, a punk, rock star, with tattoos and the buddy holly glasses, you know, full of attitude; the other one, which is Gottlieb, which is a more conservative scientist, I will talk about him a little more.
With all these guys coming together, again, if this is a sports movie, the analogy is now this guy, this fallen from grace, 40 years old rookie, you know whatever, Raleigh is much younger than that, of course. This is him coming to the sports arena. The big night. And look at the design of the technology here, we are continuing the Gothic-tech, motive, and designed the Shatterdome to be half a launching pads and half a cathedral. You know we design it to be real and textured and used. We referenced a lot of photography from launching pads. We research NASA, we research large shipyard where they assemble ships and so forth.
And we start introducing this old technology, technology that feels used. And we have a few gestures to introduce each of the pilot teams. Every gesture counts with the robot and the pilot because we have so many. We color-coded, for example, we have the Chinese robot, we color-code it red and gold and its pattern like medieval armor, and you know it needs to feel Chinese in essence. And it responds to martial arts movements. The musical theme is very strong. And we introduce the three pilots, the three identical triplets that connect one with another. The way show they connect, the easiest way, the effortless way, was the basketball scene just to show they play together very well.
And here again there is a Jaeger, a robot we design a Mech to resemble the T-series Russian tank. Color-coded like that, like a cooling tower from a nuclear reactor on top. And this couple, with very small gestures I want to show that they love each other, they trust each other. The female is the dominant one, is on the right side of the robot which is the dominant pilot. And father and son team, the Australian team. The father here is the dominant pilot, but in their relationship the son is overwhelming. I talks to Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky, two amazing actors, about their relationship. I said to Max, you are the father of a star child, you are the father of a very gifted child musician, a singer, and he is a brat, and you don’t get along, but inside the robot you have to trust each other. And we introduce Striker Eureka, the Australian Jaeger, which we design a little bit like all-terrain vehicle, and color-coded with the all black camouflage colors, and it is the most masculine of the robots, of the Jaegers, of the Mech. And it is very much destroyer-driven.
It is very important to do these gestures very quickly and to introduce these characters efficiently, so we can then expanse a lot of logistics in the film to try to do it invisible, lines that allow you to expanse hundreds and hundreds of notions and plot of science of this and that, hopefully in an entertaining way.
And I want it very much to have Raleigh to feel unwelcome. Again, the sports movie analogy. The coach that recruited him is really indifferent to him; the star basketball player, or the baseball player, whatever you want, looks at him with great suspicion and they are not going to like each other, of course. But it is important that those two enemies eventually through the movie they will connect. They will connect. The same way these two scientists, one of them is old fashioned, all about numbers and believes in numbers and precision; the other is intuitive, sort of messy biological scientist, they are going to come together to trust each other. But right now that they are in separate teams, they do not like each other. They have the same lab but the lab is divided by a little yellow line in the center, you can see there. One scientist has one side of the lab. The other one has the other one…and they hated each other.
It is important for me to deal with these notions. We are going to deal with so many new notions in the film, like drifting, and drifting through memories, drifting with a Kaiju, these crazy ideas that I have never seen in a film or in a genre like connecting with a brain of monster in order to understand what is going on. So each of the characters brings the best to explain the world, yes, but (also) to explain the sides of humanity. At the end of the film, if I did my job right, all these characters will have a moment, a great hero moment, all of them, the female pilot, the Australian pilot, everybody will get a moment to shine. You know, and they are really one single character. Humanity against enormous adversity. The consumerism, non-stop consumerism that propelled the Kaijus like living weapons to come to a world that about to be terraformed and get rid of the vermin.
The Kaiju is very much close to my heart because in a way they are related to the wrestling movies in Mexico. All these movies are about soul and suffer and soul on soul. You did not need to root for the good Kaiju or the bad Kaiju, you rooted for the Kaiju you fell the most love for, even if it was a bad guy. Like in a wrestling match, sometimes the audiences root for the bad wrestler. The Kaiju genre is such a blessing that it exists. It exists like a mere coincident like everything great. There was a producer, Tanaka san, Tomoyuki Tanaka, that found himself in Toho productions with a budget, with a crew, this lot to make a movie. But he had no movie, his movie has fallen through. And he decided, why do not we make a giant monster movie, great movie like King Kong, or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which at that moment being a huge box offices success, a Ray Harryhausen movie. And in a way, the stop-motion animation monsters give birth the entire genre of Kiaju by collateral factoring this. Both Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya were huge fans of King Kong and they loved King Kong. Obviously everybody loves Ray Harryhausen. They wanted to make a giant monster movie. And they were very infamous by an accident that has happened in the Bikini Atoll, the nuclear fallout. And they have damaged a Japanese fishing vessel, a vessel called the Lucky Dragon. They started to think how to tell this story about this monster.
At the start it was called the Project G and it was about a giant octopus attacking Japan. But little by little they started to talk about that we could not use stop-motion, so Tsuburaya decided use a man in a suit. So they started designing the suit that eventually would become Gojira, Godzilla. And Akira Watanabe started to design it based on an illustration, a famous dinosaur illustrations that were published on American magazines, beautiful oil paintings. That was the first time dinosaurs exploded in the collective minds with these gorgeous paintings full of lush detail. And he combined the spike of Stegosaurus with the shape of a T-Rex, essentially. And Gojira was born, Godzilla was born. Its name is meant to evoke spectacle. Its name in Japanese was the quintessence of the giant beast.
Curiously enough, little by little because Ishirō Honda was a director that has a soul of the humantary director, and little by little the details of the reality textured that first Gojira movie, Godzilla movie, the Japanese version I am talking about, not the one with Raymond Burr. They textured the movie with reality. I am not saying 【】 but reality, and there were moments in the movie that were very dark, very moving, and very dramatic. It was a really master piece of, not only the Kaiju genre, a birth of a Kaiju genre; it was a really strong piece. And because Ishirō Honda was documentary directing at heart, and because Eiji Tsuburaya was a magician of special effects, a guy that had recreated an aerial attack to such a degree before doing these movies he was a guy so obsessed with perfection, with technical perfection, the footage of that attack was thought to be real by allied troops, they thought the Japanese had filmed an aerial attack for real. Eiji Tsuburaya was so obsessed. This combination of these guys, of these talents, gave birth to an exceptional movie.
Thinking about the factors combining this film, you have Akira Ifukube, creating an amazing score, one spells the world Godzilla was in, in his music that gives themes. Ramin Djawadi and I myself want it to evoke adventure, and so forth.
Oh this is important. This is the big dining room scene in sports movie. Again, all the teams are looking at him with a little suspicion, this and that. And here is the star player and they do not like each other.
But I was saying Akira Ifukube was a very very important guy. Haruo Nakajima was the greatest suit performer that the Kaiju genre has ever known. This guy was a one man Ray Harryhausen in a way. He played not only the Gojira, he played many many of the key Kaijus in film and in Tokusatsu on TV for Ultaman, Ultra Seven. I think he played some of the most charismatic Kaiju you met as a kid back then. And in Godzilla he was inside that 200 pound suit in unventilated stages. I met Dan Moroboshi when I was in Tokyo, Ultra Seven himself, and we were talking about the days when they were shooting Tokusatsu, and he said to me what he remembered very vividly was the heat. This intense heat because this were unventilated stages at the peak of the summer, everybody sweating profusely. Imagine Nakajima inside the suit, absolutely at the mercy of the latex and heat and trying to survive this experience. Nobody came close to him and withstanding the suit. And therefore in designing the Kaiju in Pacific Rim, we create what we called a Nakajima factor, which is to bring in the proportion of a man in a suit. And if we were making this movie in 1960s we could still make those monsters with a guy in a suit.
This is a very important scene for me again with the【】 of the genre. I shoot the scene very carefully over a few days to give it a lot of style, to make it not a fight but a courtship. Not only a courtship, but a moment that these two pilots who do not like anyone else come to respect each other. This the first time these two start to really connect. We saw her being curious about him, we saw him being curious about her, but they do not like each other that much. And I want to shoot this fight like a dance. I want to shoot this fight like a courtship, like a moment of connection. And eventually I was hoping that we shot enough courage, enough ways that I could graduate the degree of the chemistry between them and end the movie with Mako and Raleigh finding each other.
Well we talked about the color red, here it becomes very important. We have these characters fighting in an arena that is color-coded very warm, we have a lot of red, reddish direction here. We color-coded this arena with black and reds. The sticks, the woods, the machines, the color of the light hitting the machine, the symbol on the wall, everything is permeated with red. Again, I want red to symbolize sort of heart. And Mako is going to find her heart, and Raleigh is going to find his heart or life by connecting with Mako. We saw him bleeding… the last time we saw red with any importance other than the Chinese robot, was when he was bleeding in the beach. This is the part of the submerged story telling. Look at the rusting on the machines; everything is down to the color-coded scene, red and black.
And it was shot like a dance; it was shot very much like choreography of a dance. If this is a 19 century movie they would be dancing the Waltz with each other. And they both start to respect each other. I love the little smile that Charlie Hunnam does with Mako. Rinko Kikuchi and Charlie Hunnam, they were a pleasure to work with. They knew that their characters need to be done with very few lines of dialogs, they knew they needed to have effortless, I call it effortless heroism. This is very hard. Most actors like the part to be extremely complex, to get all the lines, and they sort of dedicate their life to find that kind of part. But when I met with Charlie, much to his credit, I say, look, I want a movie I would have seen when I was 11, I do not want a war movie or an action movie, per se. I want an adventure movie. I want the simplicity, the terse heroism that almost feels like a throwback to adventure movie, a kind of movie I saw growing up. You know, I remember one of my favorite movies, the Jungle book, a movie with very saturated colors, incredible color palette, which I would like to evoke in this film.
And I also love about all these movies about scope and heroism. As a kid I wanted to be a cowboy, spaceman or a scuba diver that there was a sense of adventure. And I really feel that most of the actions in big movies these days for the kids are very militaristic, pro-militaristic. And I did not want to make a militaristic movie, I want a humanistic movie. A movie, in which we understand that, in spite of, or precisely because of the flaws, we triumph. We are vulnerable, we are human. That is what makes us conquer today.
Again, red coming in and linking these three characters. These three characters are the heart of the movie. And blood, fatality and mortality are what make us human. And Pentecost, Raleigh, and Mako are the heart of the film. Especially Mako’s scene. And now Pentecost. It was such a privilege to work with Idris Elba. Idris was an actor I loved in the Wire. And I thought OMG what a great American actor. And when I saw Luther, when I met Neil Cross in New Zealand, I asked him who is this American actor who has done such great London accent. And Neil explained to me that Idris was british in fact. And I was blown away by that and want to very much work with him from that moment on. And I want to give the leader of this movie; I did not want it to be a waspish, military guy. I want a guy that feels so human, so burdened by responsibility and so forth. That was really really able to say we are cancelling the apocalypse and you will believe him. And there may be four actors in the world that could pull off this line, and Idris is one of them and THE one that could do it.
The entire cast, Burn Gorman, an amazing actor I have been admiring since the BBC days; Charlie Day, who gives Newt the spark, the juice, the joy that he brings to everything he does. He is not only a great comedian; he is a great actor as he will prove it in a few minutes in a scene where he needs to deliver huge information with drama.
And here we see what he sees. We see the world of the Kaiju being put together, being breed like an army. He gets all these scenes. I cannot put text in this so I can only show you these quick cut images and allow him to explain it like a guy just came back from a traumatic experience.
Charlie Hunnam does an amazing job. When we did that scene that was coming up, we will talk a little more about it. Charlie did it over 20 takes and he literally was in tears and shaking at the end of all those because I kept demanding more and more emotions from him.
And this is what I wanted them in Pacific Rim. I think when you are dealing with types, you may not have a character instruction that is psychologically complex, but you can bring great emotion. I want the movie to have a human heart and emotion. And this is the heart of the movie. This little red shoe is the very heart of the movie. We will get to it in a few minutes.
Just as the Kaiju genre was generated by the Castle Bravo fallout, and Bikini Atoll, you know, the bear of the Mecha genre is very important. When I was a kid in the 60s, 1963, I remembered the birth of the giant robot genre with the Tetsujin 28-go. This is a character created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama who created this giant robot basically controlled by a kid. But the different between a robot and a Mecha is that a robot has some autonomy, he has the autonomy of decision, he has a personally of its own; and the Mecha depends on the pilot. The pilot that is controlling the Mecha is basically putting on this gigantic suit of armor.
And it is very important for the Mecha genre to get birth by Go Nagai when he was, legend has it, in a traffic jam in his car he dreamt what if I was in a giant robot that I could stride over the traffic and get home. And he dreamt of a Mazinger Z, one of the greatest Mecha of all times, vital for my generation and younger generations. The birth of Mazinger is important because now we are dealing with the characters inside the robot, inside the Mecha. The pilots are as important as the suit itself.
The Japanese culture loves the monsters but it also loves the technology. And this is very important for the creation of the Mecha genre. They do not have the ambivalence that we have in the west where the technology is bad, is the Frankenstein, it will turn against us, it is going to destroy us. The Japanese has an unabashed love for technology and it allows them to dare dream about the mythical terms. It is the same way they integrated the monsters into their daily lives through an animist belief that everything has its spirit, Yōkai, the demon and ghosts of their daily lore are integrated into their costumes and their daily life.
Kaiju has come to symbolize Japan. And Godzilla, the Kaiju genre became a way to deal with the spiritual issues, and a way to heal the wound of WWII and so forth. While the Mecha genre allows the Japanese to dream of the technology in a guilt-free way. Think about this suit, the robot, this giant creations are as mythical heroes. They can think about them in mythical terms. They can imagine this gigantic warriors and they inbuilt them with personality and honor and code. Even in the Mazinger Z the war itself is a fusion that brings the spiritual components to it, sort of gigantic, demonic, heroic quality to it. And the Mecha in Pacific Rim is meant to be like that, knights in shining armor, in a way, the most gigantic one.
And this is the scene where Charlie Day delivered that beautiful super complicated monolog and within 20 takes I made him cry and cry and cry, really really beyond the edge. And played against him is a very stern, silent Pentecost.
And again, in these movies, you have to have these characters by opposition, by contrast, or by harmony. And I want Pentecost to be a huge contrast with Newt, in a same way in a few minutes Newt is going to be in contact with Hannibal Chau, Ron Perlman’s character. They are going to be the most outlandish thing in the film that allows me to do a tonal change. We will talk about it in a few minutes.
Hannibal Chau and the comedy that comes from Newt meeting him was necessary for me to go to a crazier, thermal, visual realm, to bring a more saturated color, to go a little crazier in the Hong Kong fight, I call it the battle of Hong Kong, which is a gigantic action-set piece that lasts over twenty minutes. In a technical term, the scene I am most proud of. And without Hannibal Chau and Newt that would be totally impossible to get to. That would be too heightened. If you remember the last Kaiju scene we saw was sort of realistic, quote unquote, with no music, with repeated cuts, with very strict lighting codes and so forth.
And here we go into my favorite scene of the film. It is very important for me that the mistake came from Raleigh. Raleigh is the one that has the first mistake, which triggers Mako. Because then after this scene they will need to reveal each other’s heart and trust each other. And it can only happen when Raleigh had a mistake and then she makes a mistake and everything goes wrong. And this transition is theatrical. It is not digital, it is not huge effect. I want it to go simplicity. And it is a theatrical simplicity. She starts walking on live, on camera. We faded out the light, we brought in the snow, and she was in the best. It was a very simple theatrical trick. I did not want everything in this movie to be super complicated digital effect; I wanted to bring some express and artistic effects.
And here we go, she is holding the shoe. She is holding her past. And this is the scene that color-coded with splashes of red and the rest is mostly blue. So it is a blue scene with splashes of red. This blue will stay in Mako and stain her heart and her hair. And this is basically the way I can reconnect people with the fear of the giant monster, a little bit. It is very hard for adult, the specific audience to connect with that. But they can do it through the eyes of a child. This is the only time I can actually bring… rest of the movie is fun, really fun, wild and exuberant, full of simple pleasures and terse heroism, effortless heroism in a way and so forth. But this scene, then again, the transition is very theatrical.
Originally we were talking about making Raleigh translucent, she goes through him and he is sort of liquid, but we are going to spend huge amount of money into achieving this effect and this and that. And I said no, we will just have him standing there and he is already there. This giant scene you are seeing is rigged if you look at the puddles. The whole set is rigged. The whole street is rigged, the cars, the walls, the puddles, the pavements, and the street with hydraulic jumpers so every step the Kaiju took the entire set shook. And that helped the actress, the little girl, to feel that fear, that something gigantic is really coming, coming close, closer and closer to her.
This is the root. This is the key moment. We are coming to literally the heart of the film. And we show, again following that sports analogy, this is the big game, this is the first game for the rookies. They come in and they have to lose the game. Why? Because by losing the game everything will be against them. Following the sports analogy that is when they finally score their first homerun or slam-dunk whatever you want to call it. And this again it is about proportion and the only way we can evoke the fear of a Kaiju is through the eyes of Mako. And I wanted to code the scene differently than the scenes in the rest of the movie. We follow one point of view. We are seeing everything from her point of view. We do not see the fight. We only see it in the background. Then again these audiovisual decisions are for this content. I am not showing you the spectacle of the robot fighting the Kaiju. You know we can do it, you know we have done it; you know we are going to do it again. But here constrain the point of view only to her side of the story. Why was it important? Because in storytelling we need to feel what she feels. It is almost like a fairy tale moment. I want this to have magic, the memory of her as a child to be terrible but also to be moving, and to see this little girl like a princess that has been saved from a dragon by a knight in shining armor. We will get to that when we complete the memory.
And now we are literally bringing the crazy colors into the film. I want to color-code this movie, bring it as close as possible to a living anime or a living incarnation of a magazine that was very important for me growing up, which is Heavy Metal. With Angus McKie, Richard Corben, and Chris Foss, all these guys I was working with, super primary colors and I want to bring that kind of situation of colors to this. And for that I need Hannibal Chau to meet Newt in Hong Kong. And again it is a gigantic set. It is not a CG set. We built entire two-story-high blocks of Hong Kong, Hong Kong in the future to create a real sense of place. And then we demolish those set.
These whole sets are all gigantic. This is a movie that has over a hundred sets and we built it entirely within Pinewood Studios in Toronto and spilt to a couple more studios. Just for example, the size of the Hannibal Chau’s set that we are revealing here is gigantic and a very very complex set. And this allows me to start bringing the crazy colors into the movie; it allows me to go more outlandish. And Ron Perlman becomes instantly the strangest creature on this screen. You know this allows me to go into a crazy territory with the battle for Hong Kong with the Kaiju.
I love Ron, I love every actor in this film. And I want to introduce Santiago Segura, my friend. But Ron Perlman, to introduce him into this most outlandish details of him, which are the shoes, and to bring him, he is sort of a mixture of pimp and Teddy Boy. And you know, in designing his wardrobe, Kate(Kate Hawley) and I spoke about his color, his textures. She shows very carefully what we did to him. We talked about his shoes and we spent months to design and fabricate it especially for him. He instantly is a character that is a self-made man of the strangest nature. I talked to him about his character. Each of these actors got a little biography of their characters. With Ron I said that Hannibal Chau is a guy that is a swindler, a black marketeer, but a guy that is necessary to save this world. Even the dishonesty or sort of shamelessness of Hannibal Chau is necessary to save this world. Every color of the humanity is necessary for us to stand together.
And we are coming to the real heart of the conflict, pun sort of intended, in which we are going to see all these characters distrust each other. You know all the characters dislike each other. And all the characters put an end to their sort of calmness and why they are together in here. Everybody starts falling apart before coming together one last time. In following the sports analogy, this could be, you may say, the locker room fight. You know the locker room fight after the big game. It is very important to show that… however Raleigh is a very controlled fighter. I want to get a sense that Chuck is a very instinctive, very angry, very wild and Raleigh remains very cool and collected that he can be a great fighter, that he can be effortlessly a great fighter right before the fight in Hong Kong. If Mako and he trust each other, they may succeed.
In this idea of a world saving a world, lately, I mean after the movie is released, it starts to gain supports from the most unlikely quarter like William Gibson, Kanye West, Howard Stern, Katsuhiro Otomo, Hideo Kojima, Takashi Miike. Everybody, as bright as they are, everybody reached out one way or another, celebrated the movie, celebrated the effort of Andrew Neskoromny, Carol Spier, Guillermo Navarro, my trusted friend and compadre, cinematographer, and that all we put together into creating a film that was a movie that was at the same time very complex and very simple. And I was so happy to hear these people admire and enjoy the movie.
I think no one put it better than William Gibson, who said to love the movie you have to love it in its own terms; this is not a science fiction film that is there to create a dystopian, sort of substantial cynical view world, this is a movie that is very much a poem, a love poem to monsters and Mecha, a movie that wants to be in awe of the world it portraying and it is perfectly itself. He said it very beautifully: anybody who does not like it does not like it for it not being what they want it to be. And they need to like it for what it is. And I really feel so blessed by this description that Gibson did, not only because I admire him but because he said it exactly the way I would say it.
And there is a very delicate, I mean the movie has so much craft from every quarter, you know Guillermo Navarro doing some of his best lighting, Carol and Andrew designing beautifully, Callum Greene and Mary Parent joining me in producing the film, Ramin Djawadi doing beautiful musical score that, again, evokes heroism and the same time sort of evokes rock ‘n’ roll spirit and the grandeurs feels of an adventure movie and so forth, and Travis Beacham and I co-writing this screenplay. And this all leads to moments like this one that I adore, a moment, which you discover a fairy tale princess seeing a knight in shining armor, at the end of the street backlit by the sun, again she discovers this warm colors. In these blue flashbacks she discovers the warmth in these crepuscular beautiful sunset warm colors, and a knight comes out of this Jaeger.
I wanted you to feel what she felt for Pentecost. I want you to realize why Mako is loyal to Pentecost. To me she is a very strong character and a strong character does not need to fall in love with Raleigh and has a great kiss at the end, to be romantically drawn to Raleigh. I want her to be a pilot to stand on her own, to be a very strong feminine character but, again, with the tracery of her story, join to Pentecost and Raleigh.
It is a mistake to evaluate these characters by themselves. You can only evaluate them in a choral way that we are writing them. We are not writing them as separate characters. We are writing them as a single character, humanity. And these three form one character. And the more you see through the movie and the more we talk about them you would see these three destinies become woven onto the other, and how Pentecost not want to be close to Raleigh, he wants Mako to be away from danger and how these three characters will come in harmony, to accept the possibility of death, the possibility of failure and that is when they will succeed. And I think that is the only way you can read the character construction in this film and as such I really think Mako is a strong character for me. At least I built from a point of view of a quiet strength and determination. And in this Rinko is fundamental. Rinko is an actress that understands, like Charlie understands, that quiet power is still power. And they have this moment right now, coming up, which, not settlely, but certainly symbolically, they will realize what went wrong and they will realize that they have to trust each other and that they are linked and the only way they are going to survive is that they do trust each other.
And in the background Gipsy Danger, the giant robot, reveals her heart to them. It reveals the pulsing glowing heart of the robot. The shell is removed and we can see the heart for the first time. That is why she says “her heart, how long has it been since you last saw it”. They are both finally coming out of their shell; they are both finally revealing their heart to each other and allowing each other to be vulnerable. This idea does not just exist in this movie singularly but in all my movies.
And here we go to the reds. The red, which is life coming in, you will see pay it off all at the end with Mako and Raleigh submerging in the light of reds in the final moment of the film. It is always life coming back. The Kaijus are now going to engage, and the biggest set piece of the film.
And we again have to going to the sort of visual heroics and reestablish quickly the Chinese team and the Russian team and remind you that these guys are undefeated. Again following the sports analogy the two best players the coach has are going to the field and going to try to fight against the strongest team assembled. And these guys go out; it is a very triumphant launch; everybody is ready, everybody is not cocky but sure of the battle, because these are the guys that have gone undefeated defending the bay.
The Russians for example, the Russian Jaeger has no escape pods. You know the Russians are so hard-core that they go down with their ship, that they never abandon it. The Australians, the Striker Eureka, are ready for the fight, everything looks cool. I show you how cool they look; I show you how cool it is to launch them. That is one of the Thunderbird sort of launching, giving you all the details what it feels to be launched and dropped in the water and so forth.
We built it like this is the winning team. And very important in the sports analogy the two best players are going to be taken down and taken out of paly real quick. Brutally so. And now the score is against us, and of course the only one on the bench is the rookie team. And we are going to send.
Here is a little detail I always want to deal with what would happen to a Kaiju if a Kaiju fell. And if you watch carefully the storyboarding, in the assembling of the Mirada piece, I also want to deal with the Kaiju excrements. And Hannibal Chau is going to talk about it. Everybody knew and everybody saw that video on Youtube of a whale blown up in a beach. If whale was a Kaiju fingernail, so difficult to get rid of, I thought well what would happen when a Kaiju fell. Travis Beacham and I, in creating this world, we ended up generating a 300-page bible of what would happen in real life. And we said well if a Kaiju falls and it is so massive and the Kaiju blue effect is so toxic that all that real estate will become super cheap. And then people can move in because that land is for free and I think it is created, called bone slum, which is the slum where people built the buildings around the bones of the fallen Kaiju. And all the sort of illegal types of businesses and markets flourish in the bone slum. They are sort of the outlaw area of an adventure movie, the outskirts of the town.
And there is also a section where people who would worship the Kaiju, you see they were burning a refuge in the beginning and now we see they carved a temple out of the skull of a Kaiju and there are some people there praying to the Kaiju to be delivered from evil because they think that the Kaiju was sent from heaven.
Now in the battle of Hong Kong it is extremely important now I want the first fight to be original, something you completely haven’t seen in a Kaiju movie in a way, or a Mecha movie. And the flashback of Mako is very much one point of view, the battle of Hong Kong is my chance to do sort of key Kaiju moment, classical Kaiju moment. I want it to show the fight, the thunder and the rain and really show you the great little battle moment to show you what each of the Jaegers can do and why they were undefeated, and to go into…I want to talk about two different schools of Kaiju designs.
You have the Akira Watanabe sort of school, the more hardcore Kaiju that are based on real species, the reptilian Kaiju, the insectoid Kaiju, the crustacean Kaiju. And this is the school we started circling in the beginning, with the Nakajima factor, with the man-in-a-suit factor. There is also a crazier school of the Kaiju design that is Toru Narita (Tohl Narita). Narita Toru was the main designer on the Tokusatsu series of Eiji Tsuburaya. And Narita was a lot more outlandish. He ended up bringing Kaiju that was so funny, so vulnerable, and so great in all the Ultra series for Tsuburaya that you actually found sympathy and love. One of my favorite is called Pigmon that is a little Kaiju that is adorable. And then another one is Metron Seijin, which is sort of locust like Kaiju. From Narita we take these outlandish things like puking acid, the idea that Kaiju can have very colorful component. I brought in the idea of bioluminescent markings. Because these Kaijus are fabricated by a race and this race needs to have the markings…
Look at this, my favorite shot in the film, probably.*chuckles evilly(no)* And one with great use of water. I will talk about the helicopter in a minute but you have to rewind to this scene.
As I was saying, the marking indicates that the Kaijus are artificial, are being built like machines. In this scene we are going to see things that Kaijus do for the first time: use an EMP pulse and a little later, fly. We will talk about it in a second.
But here comes a really key moment I really want to show, the vanquishing of the Russian team, in a very dramatic way to show the sheer power of the Leatherback, submitting the Russian Jaeger and destroying it really quick, brutally so, very painfully so.
And what we got here is Striker Eureka. We go to a classic classic Kaiju moment that was called Kaiju-over-the-head-lift. It is almost like a wrestling move, very very common in Kaiju movies. And this lifting Kaiju above…particularly Tsuburaya moment.
And again we break the water line, obscure the image and so forth. But this is definitely a hero moment. Same with this, rocket launcher, classical Mecha moment. And in a way I want to evoke the toy at the beginning in the beach. Those toys I had as a kid with robot chest opened and something was there. It was so simple, so beautiful and so childlike and I want it to evoke it here.
And when we start designing this battle we try to convey what the heroism of the movie is, which is to be unafraid in a basic way, to have the fear being conquered, and Raleigh and Mako who have just failed to come in and say we can do it, to go for real, not knowing if they are going to succeed or not.
And here we do what I used to call [Nutella’s] shot, evoking the joules burn, Nurella’s lights under the water. A moment with Otachi. Otachi this monster was designed to be, because he was the one on the screen the longest, I need to fold in to him, to it, well to her; we are going to find out it is a her. In need to fold three or four Kaijus into one. What do I mean by this? One key rule in monster design is you need to be able to have the monster change if it will be on the screen many time. You need to have little details every time it is on screen. And when I was a kid watching Gill-man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, you have the suit, you have it under the water, which does great, but there is the moment when it is above water and you see it breathing and the gills are moving on the sides of the mask. That is great because it is real and you go WOW. With Otachi you see it, you see it under water and you see it on land. And it moves very differently, becomes almost a different monster. And its face…
oh! Again, another key Kaiju moment, people running down the street, Kaiju at the end of the street, destroying buildings. And an ironic moment to not only the key Kaiju moment, a classical Kaiju moment, but a moment to Newt, who said “don’t call me a doctor and I want to see a Kaiju up close”; he contradicts himself right here saying “I am a doctor! I am a doctor!” And at the same time at the end of this scene and the next with the baby (Kaiju) he will not want to be close to a Kaiju again.
But as I was saying, it is important for the Kaiju to keep changing. So Otachi then has the face, which splits open that is another change; it engorges with the acid sack on the neck that spills acid that is almost a separate monster again in itself and so on and so forth.
Now look, I love this moment with the Kaiju because Hal animated a beautiful (x3) character moment. Hal Hickel and John Knoll became real partners. Look at this. The Kaiju is curious. And this is pure pantomime. This is directing an actor to be able to collaborate with Hal and the animators. People have this horrible misnomer, computer animation. Nothing is done by the computers. Computers process data, which is all they do. This is animation made by animators, by humans.
This little detail coming up, look at the skin of the Kaiju, look at the skin parasite on the Kaiju which later will come into play. In some shots in the movie we want to put the skin parasite crawling on the Kaiju. Hal really does a great job on bringing the character. We would direct the pantomime together; his team delivers some of the most beautiful character animation in the last ten years for me.
It is also a good moment to see the way we textured the Kaiju. We talked about the Mecha and how we do little details. If you rewind to the scene and look at the close-ups of the Leatherback you realize that when you get close, you go from the textures on the big silhouette to a lot of little details that give scale and volume.
This scene, this fight right here is lit from a helicopter. Helicopters became very important shooting this movie. I am lighting it like a boxing match with the light coming from above, almost evoking a boxing fight from an American realism painting.
And in the digital moment of animation, John Knoll becomes our cinematographer. And we start coding again, to form this content. How did we give you scale, look at this fight scene. There are two levels of light. One is the above light, which is cool; and at the bottom, the constant light, which is warm, sort of acid yellow light. And that gives you scale. You have the greens with fluorescent sort of cool light and that allows you to see this Kaiju exists in a different height, a story-height. Look, the bottom is going to be warm; and the top is going to be cool or in the greens.
And then we use helicopters constantly to light them. They become out little gaffers. And if you see, if you rewind to the scene with the Russians, you see how beautifully the helicopter illuminates like a cocoons of light around the creatures. It hits the water and it illuminates the water, which is obscuring the figures and almost creates a cocoon of light to illuminate them. That is beautiful. And then we do that with smoke a little later.
And now look! Watch carefully what comes out of the containers. We constantly… when we hit with the containers there are little motorcycles, little mopeds, and furniture coming out. You know, to give scale again. I want you to know that container has a refrigerator, a TV, a sofa or a moped and whatever comes out of a container. Like a seconds ago we saw a container full of Vespas or mopeds coming out, spilling out. And that keeps telling you the scale of the film.
Again in Hong Kong I want it to feel different from any other fight. So we are keeping everything about scale…we hit a very important scale moment now when they go through the bridge, dislodging a lot of cars right here. But I want to use humor in this fight so this is a very greasily moment of humor when the arm gets dislodged and then this moment comes to a stop, very very much and we go to a very very small detail with a little seagull. Puff, they hit it and the seagull flies away. That way I am not only reminding you the scale but I am now totally bringing humor.
Now remember the first two fights have anything but humor. We are trying to separate each of the fights in its own emotional and visual coding. Now we are FULL on colors. Very different. If you could go back from this fight to the fight at the beginning, my god, now we are on a saturated-color lens, we are making jokes. We are not only making jokes in the screenplay, we are also making visual puns. This is very important. The humor is not only in the script, in the script of lines and characters, but we are also bringing humor in the visual… bringing visual humor into the film.
And this is only possible because now Newt and Hannibal Chau exist in this movie. That is the point of inflection that allows us to go to this crazier place. And in a few seconds we have a lot of fun again, Otachi revealing its tongue. Again that is a different side of a monster. And also I try to do a visual pun if you watch it carefully when the collapsed roof and the street come in, into the place here. I try to create sort of a face of a Kaiju with two lights and an open mouth with the ramp.
And it is all about scale. I construct this moment to go big boom and silence with little squeak *squeaks* of the light and cracking, sort of the quiet moment before the HUGE shock. And all these are orchestrated audio-visually to contrast quiet with big, giant with small. And you always try to keep this evolving in a way…here is the mouth and two eyes I was talking about. And now we are bringing humor into the fights.
We are about to hit one of my favorite humor notes that came from a scouting in Hong Kong, which is, we scouted Hong Kong for about eight days or so. We scouted by air, on land and by sea and I lay out the map, which I will talk about it in a few seconds, I was going through the bay and I saw this giant old tanker and I said that wouldn’t it be funny if Gipsy is carrying that tanker like a baseball bat into a fight, really like thuggish with the walk of a gunslinger, you know, the walk of a gunslinger at the end of the street coming into the fight with the bad guy. And now we are fully in crazy territory and fully in humor territory.
This is very important to notice because this is where I say the audiovisual language is content. It is bringing now audiovisual humor into the film. Now we are playing the alarms in the cars. We are tossing cars like pebble in the street. We start gaining the proportion of going into almost model territory. That is where we want to just pose very real shot like the one coming up that gives you a real sense of scale. This one.
And you are supposing there is miniature moment that evokes the best of a great Kaiju movie. Moments that make you almost feel…this is a very real moment full of saturated colors but in a few seconds later we are going to a miniature moment that gives you a sense that you are watching a classical miniature film moment.
Look at the shaking of the glass. NONE of these happened by accident, every little particle flying here, every little gesture, the shaking of the glass, shaking of the camera, all is done, directed and put there for a reason.
And here comes a visual pun. And this is a model. We utilized real maquettes in the film. We are not only using cutting edge digital--everybody thinks everything is digital--no, we actually constructed miniature models in order to bring sort of old fashion feel to the film. And this was extremely important for John Knoll and I. John is a guy that, you can see, comes alive around a miniature and I myself felt that way. I think you need to combine all techniques. I think that if people use digital effect in a lazy way then the movie shows you that everything is digital. But if you keep combining seamlessly a real set, a miniature with digital effect and they all have the same color language; it all comes together. It is very important that you calibrate the color language and the visuals for these things to cut between each other and be in the same sort of color spectra, the same arena. You cannot have one visual philosophy in the cockpit and one outside.
Here is… we have two great moments, two WOW moment. This one and the one coming up. And then again, directing the swirls of smoke and dust under the wings I want it to evoke one of the best moments in animation, the unfolding of the wings of Chernobog in Fantasia. We wanted to create the majesty and spectacle of the final reveal of Otachi. We were talking about Otachi being several monsters in one and this is the final Otachi monster and you go “OMG this thing FLYS!” And so far we have never seen a Kaiju fly that is why Jaegers are not equipped to fly.
And now we come to my favorite WOW moment in this movie that given to Mako, the deploying of the sword. And it is so good for her. Normally you would give this to the male character, to the boy, the hero of the film. And it is so important that Thomas Tull kept insisting that, no matter how the screenplay fell, Thomas was saying it is very important that we give this to Mako. It is so beautiful to be talking to the head of the Studio that is supporting the female character that we were all in the same page that we need to go and give this to Mako, to have her save it for her family, but not the family she lost in that memory. I made the cautious decision not to show the family destroyed in the memory because all the family she is for now is the Russians that died, the Chinese that died, is the family, the human family that we have seen slaughtered so far in the movie. Every single time a Kaiju appears was a losing moment. And this is a huge victory.
And this is a beautiful moment with the helicopter, look. The way we designed with cast of light, the dust and the smoke and created a cocoon of light with this beautiful purplish light around Gipsy. And this is the moment of great beauty for me. These are moments, in which this movie comes as close as it ever comes for me to a painting with film. This film is the most controlled joyful exercise in image creation I ever had in my life. And I create hero moment like this with an amazing team, Guillermo Navarro and his team of Grips and Gaffers, particularly David Lee and Rick Stribling. You know, they came in and what we did in lighting the sets was to create a big counsel situation where we had the cabin, the control room for the pilots, we created it…we can control every nuance of the color on a big board. That is what allows me to have the full control of the colors almost like a painterly way.
This is a great moment for Newt. Newt is going to have a couple of moments, hero moments. You can start seeing the balance shift. From now on all the characters are going to get their moment quote unquote. Newt starts getting his moment. This is the moment where the guys that were against him acquiesce and say “look my son would never admit it but he is grateful”. You know, this is the reverse moment that everybody starts to come together. And everybody is going to have their moment. Mako just had the sword moment. Pentecost is about to have a beautiful speech and which he cancels the apocalypse a few minutes from now. We are starting the reversal moment of the film. They are now coming together and face the biggest odds in the film.
I talk about it with a little pride because when you are scripting a genre movie the rules are somewhat different. You are delivering a summer entertainment, you are making dessert. You are not making a vichyssoise; you are not making soup; you are not making a main course. You are making a beautiful dessert; you are making a confection. And you do not bring the same rules. If film is a banquet the rules as a filmmaker that you apply a movie like this are different rules than what you apply to a confection that is a different flavor.
And in making a script like this you are working with three layers, three or four layers, one of which is huge, is information. You know you have to know people need to know the science, the reasons why this is happening. The parasites we established; we established that there is a harvesting; we established that they have to pump oxygen into the Kaiju belly like a laparoscopy surgery and blah blah blah. You are dispensing science and you are dispensing information hopefully effortlessly.
Secondly there is plotting and then you are dealing with character and you are dealing with the character in a very efficient way. And those rules you have to apply generically. You cannot, if you do not do it carefully the tone of the movie becomes out of control. If we are too serious or too funny, either way, we are losing a little bit control. And then if you have Hannibal and Newt then you can do these crazy moments like this. You can go inside of the belly of a Kaiju with the suits. And visually those suits are very outlandish. They are self-eliminating; they have markings on them; they are made of latex dental dam. But now we are on full, sort of surreal territory.
And it is very important to do so, why? Because we are about to have one of the most outlandish moments in the film, one of the first thing I pitched. When I met with Travis and Legendary at the beginning of the process we had only a few pages of the pitch that Travis had. I immediately pitched the idea of the neural bridge between pilots; and the second thing I pitched is this moment where like a Mexican Telenovela that the camera pushes us into Newt and the music crescendo and he says “it is pregnant”. You know it is very much like a Mexican melodrama. And then we give birth to a baby Kaiju. And this is it.
And then again we are talking about layers, the plot. It gives Newt the brain he needs and now he can drift with a Kaiju. Secondarily it is a huge moment of crazy humor. Now look at the rigging. We rigged the street, the cars and everything to shake and we actually overturned the cars, overturned the debris. We were actually creating explosions around Newt. All these were done in a real street with real physical elements to land the Kaiju on the frame. All of this is real. We built all this set. We built blocks and blocks of destroyed Hong Kong. These are not just digital extensions. This is the combination of digital extensions on a massive massive set that took entire stage.
But it is very important here to notice one of the things I do with the animation. Obviously when an animation is really really bad things feel that they do not have a weight. Hal Hickel and his team and John Knoll, we were discussing giving weight to these things. And it is very important to give you the physical things that could anchor the monster in the plate that it really is a car being turned and that there is real debris flying around and that the creature are not just digitally rendered but there are real elements to allow it to exist.
And then you will notice something I do with the fact, which is I root them in an atmospheric element. I can put a Jaeger with snow drifting around it and the snow the way the Jaeger disturbs the snow shows that the Jaeger is walking through the air and the space. I can do it with ashes in the flashback of Mako, those floating little particles, it disturbing that shows that it is physically there. Or I can do this with embers in here. But it is very important for me to have…or we can do it with compensation in the air. But it is extremely important that the digital model is anchored in the plate with obviously a very shadow path with gravity this and that but also with elements floating around that this digital model moves and moves through so that it feels integrated into the plate.
This is sort of invisible coding, audiovisual coding, but it gives audience a sense of reality. In the same way we talked about giving a sense of world construction by details. These are the details that make the model seem like a real thing moving in a real space. Why? Because anytime you do a fact you are basically lying. You are lying audio-visually. And lies are more believable the more you fill them with little strange real details.
When you say I am late because I could not find a parking space. That is a lie. But is you say I took so-and-so street and I was about to find a parking space this beetle car pulled up and took my space and I argued with the guy driving the car and I couldn’t find any change. You embellish the lie with all these little textural details that give a sense of a reality, then that audio-visual lie succeeds. When you feel those little details on the plate, in the design or on the color-coding it allows the audience to relax and say I suppose this is real.
And now we come to the moment again that these two scientists have a bounding. These guys have disliked each other. I frankly am very moved by this moment, one of my favorite moments in the film. And directing these actors here is a pleasure for them to be arguing (x3) and then Gottlieb says we are going to do this together. And there is a very awkward and very touching moment, in which Newt says “you will do this for me, with me?” I remember directing this moment and asking them to be awkward about it, to have Burn do the “By Jove, we will own this thing for sure” and this awkward little gesture. We were all laughing on the set but it was honestly a touching moment for me, a very human moment for me.
I think it is important to deliver a summer entertainment to kids because me at age 11, me at age 12 watching this movie, it is not only great to have great monsters and great Mecha but to actually have humanity and the values of humanity tossed into the mix. It is not just about being cool, being cold or sort of hip or sort of distant, but bringing un-ironic heroism. And this is a such moment. And I think first of all no one carries that suit like Idris Elba. We made a completely ernst moment of heroism. And then I defuse it with a joke, which is a fat man’s joke, “I did not remember this was this tight”and so forth.
This is something I have done with my entire life and my entire career, all my movies. I have always taken the most outlandish premises. Think about it for a second. Demon child brought by Nazi ritual in WWII that becomes a paranormal detective for the government is not an easy premises, I can assure you. An anti-fascism fairy tale, in which the fairy tale imagery is as scary and as uncomfortable as the fascism surrounding it in Spanish civil war. Not an easy premises, I assure you. And so forth. And same with this one.
But I believe in the things I am telling and faith is such an important moment. Delivering this speech, Idris was uncomfortable until I instructed him here not to turn. I told Idris, try it again, I will not print until the crew claps, until the crew applauds your speech and try to not turn in the beginning, try to give your back to the camera, it is a very powerful gesture and slowly get into the speech. And this is the take where the crew applauded.
I wanted him to believe in it. Ishirō Honda, when he started Gojira, he said to his crew, he gathered everybody in the kitchen of his home and he said, listen guys, if anyone here does not believe that we are doing a great movie, that we are making a great movie with giant monster, please leave. And I said to the man and myself, my crew and my cast the same thing: we have to be un-ironic, we have to never be postmodern about this thing we do. What you see is on exercising phase, an exercising law. I delivered myself completely to every movie I do without a single thread of irony. I want my cast to feel that way. Because you can feel when people do not believe what they are doing. You can sense when people do not believe in that. And I think you can make a great movie, a great movie with giant monster and giant robot. I do believe it. I believe you can make a movie where kids watching it today and talk about it ten years later from now and say I love the moment I saw this movie.
You do not think about it as a business, you do not think about from a careerist point of view, you do not think about any of that. You think about these goodbyes, these moments, the moment where (not only) the son says goodbye to the father but everybody, by cutting to Mako, cutting to Pentecost in a few seconds, everybody is saying goodbye to everybody. And you realize that no matter how many times you drift with someone you still have to say I love you at the right moment. This is the scene where everybody is saying goodbye to everyone by the montage, by the assembly, by the other thing.
And it is a moment that was important for me because the family, the notion of family is important in all my films. I am sort of obsessed with that. Family being the root of all joy and all horror in our lives and you can see all those movies. And this moment which I improvised on the set. I said to Max, say “hey this is my son you got there”. Because it is so important to remember that whoever dies or lives in this film is somebody else’s brother, sister, son, and father. And this is the moment they all find life and this is where Raleigh says “look”, regretfully, “I never thought about a future until now” and now we may die. And they fall. And they have fought.
To me this sort of almost throwback classic moment of heroism are important in the film that can have a huge complex technical wrapping. We are doing cutting edge technology; we are using state of art computers and we are using great animations blah blah blah. But at the end of it, at the heart of it there is this great beautiful human emotion.
And here we show the infancy of Newt and the infancy of Gottlieb and this and that and we are going to more information. The code is being written into the DNA of the Kaiju. And you see these sort of typing machine fingers…and you see the portal opening blah blah blah. And the scientists will have to explain emotionally what they have understood from that drift.
The drift is very important but they were designed to be black and white sort of in a cyan light if you see on the DVD or on the Blu-ray, in one of the supplements, we show you how to shot it. We shot them and we went through great pain to actually shoot the drift in black and white, people were dressed like black and white, made up like black and white and so forth.
And we come to the final fight. Again, water is part of the language of this film. The waters give majesty. The waters give this and that but we do it in daylight. And now we are going to a place where no Kaiju and no Mecha movie have gone before, which is the bottom of the ocean.
The process of the 3D in this movie was very long and convoluted. But it brought me great joy because I do think we made one of the best 3D conversion movies ever. Originally we were going to shoot the movie in 3D and that is why we adopted the cameras, the EPIC-REDs. But then we realized that the schedule would not allow us to shoot it in native 3D and we abandoned that. But I still shoot it very much in a 3D-friendly way. You can watch all my movies I always have four grand elements and I always use wide lenses this and that.
We have made the decision to shoot this movie in very wide lenses because we needed to encompass huge things, these Jaegers and these Kaijus. And you cannot have one level of language in telling the story of these giant things and another level of language audio-visually when telling the human story. So if you watch this film carefully there are very few close-ups. A two-shot is a close-up; a medium shot is a close-up. Rarely, I do go to the close-up here and there but I am keeping the language consistent, because you cannot have one language with the monsters and robots and another language audio-visually with the human characters.
So we keep the lenses sort of wide and shooting with wide lenses makes it very friendly for the foreground to assist a 3D movie and I am constantly putting objects in the foreground moving around. But the key with 3D is not to throw things at you like a lot of people do; it is just to give you a sense of depth. And the best way to give a sense of depth is having things in the background or in the foreground move along the depth of the frame. And that is perfect for underwater. Again following the philosophy that you need to anchor the Kaiju or the Mecha in the plate, what do we do on the bottom of ocean? We have particles of silt floating around in the water. And when you see this film in 3D you see these particles floating in the foreground in the water and that gives a lot depth. In a normal shooting you see a two-shot, a wide shot but we rarely go to a close-up in the film. You keep it wide open. And that is important.
And look at the silt, the little silt, little bubble, these things that floated in the foreground are giving you the depth. And finally we came to the moment in which the studio said would you consider converting this movie into 3D. Now normally a conversion comes with a stigma because one of the few movies converted into 3D brought a lot of bad rep to conversion. But I wholeheartedly embrace the 3D conversion and I asked Warner and Legendary three conditions: one is to give it sufficient time to do the conversion. I asked for about three times of the normal time, the amount of the time they give to a convert.
I talked to James Cameron of great depth on how he converted the Titanic. Jim is a good friend for the last twenty something years we have been in each other’s editing room every time. Right before I went to shoot the reshoot of this movie I showed him the movie. He gave me his comments. He was very nice to give me time and his comments. And he was super nice to give me all his comments on 3D conversion before we shot this film.
Then again when we were preparing to convert he said you need at least 40-something weeks and you need to watch this and that. I really felt comfortable after talking to him that I could convert properly. Every single thing that was converted in this film was supervised by me.
Again, normally, sometimes the conversion happens with the director meeting it all in two or three sessions in total or seeing the result in the end commenting one or two times and that is it. We were actually meeting the 3D conversion house at the beginning two or three times a week and at the end of the process meeting them seven times a week, Monday to Monday. And every single piece of Roto (Rotoscoping), every single piece of technical layering the 3D shot was supervised and proved by me.
I come from a special effect background and my using the language of the composite is extremely useful in talking to the 3D conversion house to keep all those elements together. And thanks to my chat with Jim and thanks to the preparation we have and the time we have I was able to also ask a third condition, which is the effect house needed to show me that they could convert the hardest pieces of this film, which are, these pieces are here! Inside the cockpit, where there is water, steam, foreground steam, sparks all these things that are actively in the play make to the end of the plate and they could convert them properly without making them look funky. And I think, then I proceeded to torture the company StereoD for months and months and months about 40-something weeks and to do this properly. But again I am the proudest of this conversion. And if you saw it in big screen in 3D I do hope that you enjoyed it and I am telling you that was blood, sweat, and tears.
In shooting the film we then came to this final moment these three characters Mako, Raleigh, and Pentecost, which I based in a blue amber world, starts to come to a red space. It is the first time we use this red space properly in this film other than the Chinese robot. We have been very careful not coding anything in red but now at the end of the adventure, everybody is coming alive. And at the end of their life, Mako, Raleigh and everybody is going to find this life, this red.
And now I can talk to you about the way I sort of organized three fights for Raleigh. I want one fight with a Kaiju where he loses someone. He loses his brother at the beginning. That is where he bleeds red. Then the second fight in Hong Kong is where he gains a partner. He loses a partner in the first fight he gains a partner in the second fight. And in this final fight he saves that partner. So it is a full circle. I show him in the construction area in the beginning sitting in a sort of throne of concrete; did you remember when he meets Pentecost? With an incomplete circle. And here he complete that circle.
This is a great moment because I have never seen an atomic explosion under the water and I wanted to create this vacuum of air. So now there is air in the middle of the ocean and fishes are falling and flopping on the ground. And then that air starts to come back together. And the bubble closes. And it is a very difficult moment in animation; a very difficult moment to transmit in the course of making it.
I wanted very much that explosion to be unique that you have never seen this on screen before. We storyboarded it and we did animatics you could not get it. We previewed this film in Burbank a couple of times and it was like a rock concert the audience loved it. This movie connects very strongly with the audience. We got great cinema score, great connection. It is a challenging movie to mark in America but those who saw it in the theater connected very strongly. And this is the one satisfying moment. The last time we preview the movie we previewed the final, well close to final effect of that explosion and there was this big great gasp in the audience. It was great it with the audience and I was very very proud of that moment.
And then again we were talking about this final battle for Raleigh. And this the final battle where he decides I am going to save Mako. You know. I am going to save Mako because this is not going to happen to me again. I am not going to lose a partner again. And we are now fully immersed in this red, with them, with life in this battle. And he says to her. Travis Beacham wrote these lines that I love, which is “all I need is fall, I can do this alone, everyone can fall”. And I found it so beautiful and incredibly moving and that is one of my favorite moments.
And now we go to another world. We use the electronic microscope photography to sort of illustrate the look of the throat, the communication between the two worlds. I want it to be very much like microphotography, like electronic microphotography, like a glow world. And John Knoll came up with this idea of distortions in the lens. He tried it and he found one he liked. Then again my partnership with ILM has been a revelation in my life. I come to enjoy so much the collaboration that I think I am spoiled for life because these are real creative partners, real great artists, and great animators imprinting their personality into the animation. Not computers, people bring the personality.
That is why we refuse to do motion capture in this film. I wanted free animation because through free animation you bring personality to these characters. You bring the personality of the animator to the Kaiju or to the Robot or the Mecha. And if you do the motion capture you have the personality of only one actor. As great as that actor can be it is very hard to transmit what it is to be 25 stories high. I think Andy Serkis is amazing doing King Kong or Gollum and stuff like that but these are not the size of a skyscraper. And I thought the animation really really needs to transmit the weight and how the shock absorbers compact, this and that.
And now we go to the other side, in which we see the consumers, the guys that consume worlds, the Precursors, these colonists. And they are depleted, they have depleted this world so I want the Precursors a really dying world with dying light. The way we directed it is by creating a horizon that a sun looks like at the same time a tunnel and an eclipse and it is hollow, it looks like a sunset but it is like a dying light, a dying sunlight. You get the sense that this world is about to die. They need to go to a new world in order to survive.
And this is the reversal of the moment. Now they know what it feels to have a giant thing coming to your world and kicking your butt. I want it now the Precursors to see the jaeger coming in and show them what it feels to have a giant monster in truth, in daily life.
And we finally got to this sort of most symbolic religious moment where Gipsy becomes lights and raise its arms out of gravity and then comes this cleansing and gigantic explosion. And this is a very different explosion than the one we saw before under the water. It is almost like a purging light.
We are coming to the closing of the film and it was important for me to find a good moment of drama for Mako and Raleigh. And then again, you are going to see the names of people I thank, Jim for the 3D and a couple of 3D he gave for me to do. I had three days of reshoot, which I directed in Toronto again. And before doing those three days reshoots, I showed the film to a few friends, Rian Johnson, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Alejandro helped me remove seven minutes of the film and a few ideas, this and that.
For this final moment Rian Johnson gave me a couple of ideas for a scene or a dialog. He was so helpful and so great and I will thank him forever for that. And Alfonso came in and also came up with some ideas. He came up with the final phrase for Raleigh which I shot in those three days reshoots in Toronto. He says “you are squeezing me too tight”. It was such a great moment of release of humor to not make it ponderous and great, you know.
After all this drama we need a release and Alfonso suggested that line and it worked beautifully. Alfonso and Alejandro and I have a very close friendship. I give ideas to them in the editor room of Gravity or Birdman. And they come to my editing room and suggest things.
This was the first time in my life when I had the luxury because I finished this movie way under budget that I was able to pay from that budget that was left for three days where I could fine-tune the characters, fine-tune the action and I wanted to maximize those three days. And still we finished the movie way under budget; still we gave change to Warner and Legendary but I have never had the luxury being able to come in and shoot for three days. It is fantastic and something could easily get used to and I enjoy it.
And this is the closing moment and I really shot several versions of this ending to graduate it and decided that we need to see everybody come together, that everybody coming together as equals, to see Herc alone and remembering his son and remembering that lost. But Mako and Raleigh, basically finding each other but not in a romantic way, but in a way that almost like glad to be alive, to embrace, and to have this simple joy of “we made it”, you know. And that is basically what it takes for all people coming together to make it.
And to finish with this sweeping shot we again look at the sky and realize the smallest element in this film was the humans in scale, but spiritually it was the most important element. It was the humans that saved the day, not the machines, not the firepower, the ballistic power, but the humanity.
And it is extremely important to do that at the end.
You will see two things after this beautiful credit sequence by Imaginary Forces which is amazing with the great score by Ramin Djawadi. Ramin has been a pleasure to work with and every time I hear this theme I cannot help but shake my head and get into the rhythm. I love this theme.
But after this we will come to a little moment of symmetry. I construct The Devil’s Backbone or Hellboy and this and that through symmetry. I want it…I am very feticious for some reasons about shoes and my movies and I want it to close with Hannibal Chau coming out of the Kaiju saying “where is my god-damn shoe”. I want Hannibal alive because we love him too much. After we killed him Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni and I got together and said we got to get him back. Mako get basically her shoe and her story complete and I want Hannibal to come out and say where is mine.
And also in the thank you credit you will see David Cronenberg’s name. David is a friend for many years and he helped me through how to crew the movie in Toronto and the synchronses. I must say the reason that I am doing two movies, maybe even three movies in Toronto next is because I had the best time in my life. Not only is Toronto a great city to live in with one of the greatest cinematex, huge cultural life, amazing restaurant and great bookstores, but also a city with the best depth of the crew and cast in the world. You can make any movie in here and enjoy it. I am now preparing right now next couple of films in Toronto and I love doing it here. I love living here and I love working here. And I thank David for that.
And finally as we come to the closing credit, you have stayed with us that long, you will see this movie is dedicated to the memory of Ray Harryhausen and Ishirō Honda. The masters of monsters. You cannot have two more worthy people to dedicate a movie about giant creatures than them. The animation of Harryhausen of Talos and Jason and the Argonauts was fundamental in animating any giant robot or any giant Mecha. It was fundamental. It was the first time when I was watching a movie as a kid and I got a shiver through my spine seeing the scale. So the movie is dedicated to them with great love and respect.
And I leave you with this, this final song track. It is the song composed by Ramin, RZA, and Blake Perlman who is Ron Perlman’s daughter. I met Blake when she was a small small child and she has blossomed to be this great artist, this great girl. The song that she composted and performed for the film as the final song expresses very much what I feel humanity and about the movie.
And you can see here my conceptual team. Everybody is a master. Francisco Ruiz Valasco, Guy Davis, Oscar Chichoni. Everybody. Go back and look at them. We developed this movie with a very small team of conceptual artist. And we developed it over the course about a YEAR with this group of artists. I do not like having a huge amount of artists for a long period of time. I like having a very small family where we can get to know each other and we can design the film properly.
I want to thank 【Rays Raymond】(卤煮非常沮丧地没有找到这是谁,听上去像是Reiz Ramo什么的,在credit里没有找到类似的名字,卤煮很绝望地求解答QAQ) my VFX producer and his team for a great experience. And making this film honestly has been the best experience I ever had in making a movie, ever. I enjoyed every minute of it. At the end of the shoot we are all separating. People were crying. Nobody wanted to leave. I wanted to keep going. I do hope the love, with which this movie was done; the simplicity and purity and heart, with which this movie was done; the joy that we had making it, somewhat reaches you, somewhat, whatever age you are, you can believe in giant monsters and you can believe in giant Mecha again, and for a moment become a child, a 11-year-old child like I became throughout the process of this film. I found myself smiling involuntary many times a week.
And I do thank you for watching this film with me today and listening to my ramblings. And spread the words, spread the love, and thank you.
All we do in life, all my living life is for monsters. Let’s keep them alive together.
[end]我就是想感叹下豆瓣日记的字数限制真是良心wwwww
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