Guillermo Del Toro on the Direction ‘Pacific Rim 2′ Will Take
Is there a man with more on his to-do list than Guillermo Del Toro? The Pan’s Labyrinth director currently has several projects in development including the much anticipated sequel to last year’s Pacific Rim, new TV series The Strain, not to mention that Del Toro is still confident that the long awaited H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, At The Mountain Of Madness, will be off the ground in the near future. Recently he stepped down from the helm of the live-action retelling of fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, which had been linked to star Emma Watson. But Del Toro just goes with the flow in whatever direction it will take him, telling The Wall Street Journal, “… I’ve understood that you don’t plan your career, it just happens.”
On the Pacific Rim 2 front, the director has been sitting down with screenwriters Zak Penn and Travis Beacham and toying with a number of ideas back and forth, waiting for the right concept for the sequel to come to fruition. He believes they now have something interesting with a different tone from last summer’s robot/monster mash:
“… we came up with a really, really interesting idea. I don’t want to spoil it, but I think at the end of the second movie, people will find out that the two movies stand on their own. They’re very different from each other, although hopefully bringing the same joyful giant spectacle. But the tenor of the two movies will be quite different.
As well as including and expanding the multicultural cast list from the first outing, he also hopes to create an interconnected universe across the films, graphic novel, comic books and a future animated series:
“We’re formulating ideas that are, again, interesting and not the usual route, but the series tackles the stories that happened to pilots working in the Shatterdome, but also cadets learning how to become pilots. All of this happens prior to the first movie, and it gives you a little more depth into the background of certain characters that will appear in the second movie. So it’s really expanding the material.
I was incredibly happy with the comic book series that came about from a graphic novel called “Tales From Year Zero,” and we are continuing the tales for the next three years. So by the time the second movie comes out, you will have probably one year of the animation airing, and you will have three years of the comic book series ongoing, so we are trying for all these things to be canon, to be in the same universe, to not wing anything, so that if anyone … a lot of kids, for example, have discovered “Pacific Rim” through the toys. They come in through the toys, and then they watch the movie, and then they learn this, they learn that through the movie or the comic book series, so we’re trying to make it canon so we can expand the universe. And by the time we come into the second movie, you have a good feel for the world, and we can dedicate ourselves to character and ideas and spectacle.”
And while we’re on the topic of Kaiju, Del Toro also commented on Gareth Edwards’ recent monster hit Godzilla, stating that while the concept was similar there was little connecting the two pictures due to the differing style and tone of Pacific‘s comic adventure and on the more metaphorical Godzilla‘s “shock and awe.”
In “Godzilla,” what was great is that you had this Spielbergian sense of scope and adventure, and a much darker tone. So, they don’t intersect tonally at all.
Pacific Rim is due to hit theaters on April 7, 2017.
