Roughly two years ago, screenwriter Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans) put pen to paper, or most likely fingers to computer keyboard, and staring creating a world of monsters and robots that would be brought to life by director Guillermo del Toro. Filming on Pacific Rim would begin in Fall 2011, and would have del Toro fans drooling for any and all information they could get as the movie began taking shape.
Then in July 2012, at Comic-Con in San Diego, CA, del Toro would unleash the first footage of the film, only to those in attendance in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center.
“A movie like this, it’s easy to forget how unique you can make it,” del Toro told the crowd, “and I didn’t want to forget I wanted to make the movie not a war movie, but an adventure movie that had a huge romantic sense of adventure, grandeur, operatic battles that were not only great spectacle, but had huge emotional content in them and a sense of hope, because in a movie like this one we have 25-story robots fighting 25-story monsters. If you don’t have a sense of awe and scale everything is lost.”
The film pits those enormous robots against the monsters when they threaten Earth’s existence. Some of the cast, including “Sons of Anarchy” star Charlie Hunnam, sat next to del Toro at Comic-Con, and proved the power of the director’s creative reputation.
“I signed on site unseen,” said Hunnam. ”There’s probably only two filmmakers in the world, Guillermo being one of them, that I would take that leap of faith with. But it was extraordinary working with Guillermo. I mean he is a slave driver, I have never worked so hard in my life, but it’s extraordinary because however hard I was working, he was always working twice as hard. So, it was a really joyous, fun, hard, ass-kicking, wonderful experience.”
Gerrad Hall from The Seven Sees sat down with Hunnam recently in Los Angeles where he elaborated on the experience of working on Pacific Rim with del Toro.
