Pacific Rim: Maelstrom has been making a lot of headlines lately due to various news outlets questioning director Guillermo del Toro about the troubled sequel while he is promoting his latest movie, the gothic romance movie Crimson Peak. Speaking with Empire on the sites podcast, the Mexican director talked at great length about his new movie and fellow director George Miller before briefly talking about the financial struggles needed to be overcome to get Pacific Rims sequel off the launch pad and into production...
Empire: And what about Pacific Rim 2?
Del Toro:"The reality is that Pacific Rim 2 needs to be tackled with very, very tight budgeting. It needs to be really big but done for a number that makes sense and fits the $411m that the first one made. They want to match the ambition with very careful pre-planning, so hopefully it’ll happen. We’ve finished the screenplay, and we did a new budget that took us on several scouts to different countries until we found exactly what we needed to build this or that. Then the people that are way above my pay grade decide if they’ll do the movie or not. It’s not my decision. It’s the same with Hellboy 3. I would do Hellboy 3 in a second. I actually think the studios should see that there is an audience for it. But I don’t run a studio. If I did I’d probably take a billionaire studio and make it a millionaire studio in three easy moves."
Empire: We had Ron Perlman on the podcast about a month ago and he was talking about Hellboy 3…
Del Toro:"Of course he was! The last time I had any discussion about Hellboy 3 in Hollywood, was with Ron Perlman on Ventura Boulevard in a Coffee Bean shop. He was having a latte and I was having a glass of water. I think it should be done. I don’t know how these decisions get made, honestly. I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and how movies happen still eludes me. I guess if you make something that makes a billion dollars you get some leeway."
Empire: That’s the interesting thing about Pacific Rim, which is on that threshold of sequel-or-not-sequel.
Del Toro: "It was huge in terms of it not being a property. It didn’t come from comic books, toys, pre-existing material. We created it all. So if you compare it with many of the first of a trilogy, the Wolverines or even the first Batman of the new series, we did really good. But the key was, can we do it for less but make it the same size and scope? And the answer, after trial and error and learning, is that we can go at it in a way that’s more fiscally conservative and still deliver. Living inside the business is different than looking at it even remotely as an entity that has one line of operation. It really is like a billiards shot. There’s not one single factor, not even dollars, that determines things. It’s like an existential billiard ball. You have an actor that wants to do it, and that actor is or isn’t hot, and that determines another vector. The Hellboy films did X number at the box office, but they did huge numbers on Blu-ray and DVD. Hellboy 2 didn’t happen because an executive said, “I like Hellboy 1!” It made sense financially. There are so many vectors, and some of them are so random that you would shudder. After 20 years I’m still puzzled."
Del Toro briefly reiterated his hope that Pacific Rim Maelstrom will get greenlit by studio Legendary Pictures while talking to Mary Sue...
TMS: I don’t know how much you can speak to this, but at The Mary Sue, we’re huge fans of Pacific Rim, so obviously we’re excited for the possibility of a sequel. I was wondering what keeps you so dedicated to that story. What’s driving you back to telling it again?
Del Toro: "Well you know, right now, I hope it gets made. We are budgeting and it’s up to the studio to greenlight it, but the characters, I absolutely love the characters. Pacific Rim was designed to have a narrative that I called, jokingly, ‘complex simplicity,’ which is, you know, it needs to play completely like a genre piece but underneath there was so much stuff that I loved, and was personal about the characters. I adore with a passion everybody. Newt, Mako, Charlie [Raleigh]. I mean, I just love them all. And there are new characters and old characters, a mixture in the new one, but I love returning to that world. I love the fantasy and the empowerment of the giant robot myth, I think it’s very essential to the 20th century on a very basic primal level, and I love the idea that it’s not a Transhumanist belief in technology, but a humanist belief in each other. That’s what attracts me to that universe. I don’t love machines. I love the fact that machines have always been connected with adventure, from Jules Verne to our time, so that is the type of humanistic sci-fi that I love."
