You co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Guillermo Del Toro, but did you enjoy the chance to write the graphic novel on your own, or would you have preferred his input there as well? He seems like a fun guy to work with.
Oh yeah, he’s a really fun guy to work with, and he did have input on the graphic novel. It’s just that the way our working relationship goes, it’s more of a bounce-back-and-forth kind of thing than it is writing at the same time. I’ll give him a script, and he’ll do tweaks on it. I had a head start on Pacific Rim in that I had the idea in 2007 or something. So, way before the movie got rolling, I just sat on it and let the world come together and percolate for a while before it was in a shape where I was comfortable talking to people about it or anything like that without sounding insane. I think Guillermo is comfortable letting me handle certain things about the world. I’m obviously always eager and grateful for his input when he has time, and he has a great attention to detail and gave a lot of notes. He got pages of the comic at the same time I was getting pages on it. We’d both put suggestions in, we’d both give notes. At the same time, he was working on the movie and splitting his time between this and that. So I can only hope to do right by him if his attention is divided.
So who’s doing the art on the graphic novel, and how is it working with them?
I think we have five pencillers on it – it’s naturally divided up into episodes. Sean Chen, Yvel Guichet, Pericles Junior, Chris Batista and Geoff Shaw, I think are the pencillers that we have. I didn’t have a lot of back and forth between them because there were so many. A lot of that was mediated by the editor, but there was a lot of back and forth between them and between me and Guillermo. It was a very, very busy process. We were getting in pages every day. It was great, I really looked foward to getting that dump of files every afternoon and seeing the new things that they were coming up with. At the same time, it was an extremely busy process, interacting with a lot of people.
The question that must be asked, what with Legendary Pictures doing a new Godzilla film as well, about the crossover potential between Pacific Rim and Godzilla – and as a bonus, given Guillermo’s relationship with Peter Jackson, might we even get King Kong in the mix? Given how difficult that would be to get a film going with all of that, would you be interested in writing a comic book crossover?
(Laughs) That would be a fantastic crossover. I would love to be involved in that. A lot of that would have to do with the story and how that shapes up. I would definitely hope that Pacific Rim proves its mettle to that extent. I think before any of that, I would love to see Pacific Rim get up on its own two feet and nest itself in its own world, but somewhere down the line, I can’t rule anything out. I would think that was just cool and be as excited for that as anyone.
Given the relationship you described going back and forth with Del Toro, I imagine you might have some say in the production process as well –
I wouldn’t say ‘say,’ necessarily.
‘Input,’ at least?
Yeah. He’s definitely the captain of it, but yeah, I’ve been more in the loop on it than I’ve been with anything, and I’ve been extremely grateful for that.
Have there been any significant changes from your original script?
There have been, yeah. Substantial changes, but all for the better, I think, and they’re all coming with Guillermo from a very earnest place with being a fan of the medium and a fan of the story. Your script is always going to get changed, the first draft is always going to get changed, and the worst way it can go down is that it’s changed in such a way that you don’t recognize the soul of what you started with, and it feels like a different movie. I’m lucky to say that when I see Pacific Rim now, despite all the changes that have come along with doing the production stuff and getting everything worked out, it still feels like the idea that I originally had. The soul of it and the heart of it still feels very familiar to me, and that’s just miraculous. I love that that’s been the case. It’s no great loss for any of the ideas that have been jettisoned with previous drafts because the world is big enough that anything we like that we couldn’t necessarily find time for in the movie could find its way into some other iteration of the world. It’s been a very, very rewarding experience, and it’s a sandbox that I could play in for a long time.
It sounds like a blast, yeah. What kind of tone are you trying to hit with both the film and the graphic novel? I’m assuming it’s not going to be as tongue-in-cheek ridiculous as the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, but is it going to be a lot more “slam-bang,” or will it be a mix between that and the deathly serious ‘holy shit, what if this actually happened?’ kind of thing?
It is a total mix of that. I think I would be extremely disappointed if it had turned out to be entirely slam-bang. One of the things that I fell in love with in the beginning was not only the robots and monster stuff, but the character stuff, too. The people in it aren’t at all monster fodder to me, but are kind of real, living, breathing people who I’m desperately in love with. The tone of the movie is a very human interpretation of this sort of story. It’s wildly fun and the visuals are great, but at the end of the day, I look at it and think it has a lot of heart. I think a lot of that comes through in the graphic novel, too, where we get to find out a bit more about characters who appear in the movie, but don’t necessarily reveal all of the details of their lives. Stacker Pentecost, Idris Elba’s character in particular, has a very deliberate mystique in the movie, and I think in the graphic novel, you find out a bit more about what makes him tick before you see the movie, and I think that’s fun. I wouldn’t call it overly solemn or bleak, but it’s definitely serious.
Thank you so much. It sounds exactly like what I wanted so badly back in 1998 when that Godzilla movie hit. Finally, someone was going take the giant monster seriously, but… nooo.
(laughs) Yeah. I agree. I agree. I’m so pleased. Given all your questions, I think you’re really going to like it. I hope you are. It feels that way to me.
