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Pacific Rim the movie: It’s heavy metal time

Guillermo Del Toro had a lot he wanted to say about love and war, the beast inside us all, and a giant-robot-versus-giant-monster smack down as an allegory for humanity taking a stand as one consciousness. But first, he had to tackle a more pressing issue: Shoes.

Guillermo Del Toro had a lot he wanted to say about love and war, the beast inside us all, and a giant-robot-versus-giant-monster smack down as an allegory for humanity taking a stand as one consciousness. But first, he had to tackle a more pressing issue: Shoes.

“I love your shoes,” he said, his big blue eyes — magnified to humungous anime proportions through his trademark spectacles — inspecting my red, zip-up hi-top Supra kicks inspired by Michael Jackson’s Thriller jacket.

He asked if I could write down the name of the brand for him. Of course, I said, scribbling down the details on the Four Seasons hotel stationery lying on the desk we’re seated at. It quickly dawned on mercenary me that it might be the only chance I’d ever have to ask one of my favourite directors for something in return.

I hastily mulled over my choices: A hug from a famously huggy director? An empty promise to model his next peculiar creature after my own pale, wobbly figure? A spare room to crash at the next time I visit him in California?

“Sure, what do you want?” he asked when I suggested a little quid-pro-quo.

I smiled deviously.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

We were talking to the visionary director about Pacific Rim, Del Toro’s love letter to classic Japanese monster movies, where Jaegers (robots the size of buildings) battle Kaiju (monsters that stomp on buildings) for the survival of humanity in the not-so-distant future. It is the classic adventure movie played out as a jaw-dropping creature feature filtered through the imagination of the guy who gave us The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth.

In other words, there hasn’t been anything quite like it. At least outside of our imaginations and in cinemas.

Throughout the weekend, his adoring cast gushed about working with the Mexican auteur, playfully mimicking his mannerisms and accent like boys who met one brilliant summer at camp and have stayed friends for life.

“He called me up to his little man cave and told me a little bit about the movie,” said Charlie Hunnam, the Sons Of Anarchy star who plays reluctant hero Raleigh Becket. “Like, right away, within the first five minutes, he told me (imitates Del Toro perfectly) ‘So there are gonna be, like, f***ing giant monsters and there’s gonna be a robot and you’re gonna be in the robot and you’re gonna kick the monsters a** and you’re gonna save the world. So you wanna do it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, please. Thank you. That sounds awesome!’ I was just so excited. I love Guillermo, and I love his movies.”

And then there’s Hunnam’s co-star Ron Perlman, the Hellboy himself, who has worked with Del Toro five times since 1993’s Cronos. Perlman plays a Hong Kong triad boss named Hannibal Chau.

“If you think giant robots are outlandish, wait till you see Ron Perlman!” laughed Del Toro.

“I think Hannibal was conceived to be played by a small Asian guy,” said the hulking 1.85m-tall Perlman. “Somewhere along the way, and I think it was really an afterthought, Guillermo said (impersonates Del Toro, even better than Hunnam did) ‘You know, what if we turn him into a guy who’s completely full of shit? By having a big Jew from New York who calls himself Hannibal Chau … I know just the Jew!’”

Perlman’s relationship with Del Toro isn’t just on-screen. “He’s Uncle Guillermo to my kids. My son’s known him since he was born, my daughter was about eight when Guillermo came into my life,” said Perlman. “I brought my son to Japan for (the premiere of) Hellboy. Under the tutelage of Uncle Guillermo, he had become obsessed with: Number one, manga; and number two, (Hayao) Miyazaki. I worked the whole time I was there, but my son went all over Japan and came back transformed. It was a beautiful trip.”

Uncle Guillermo has also given Perlman’s daughter Blake her pretty nifty gift: She wrote and performs the song Drift for Pacific Rim’s end credits.

Yes, everybody loves Del Toro. Or do they

WHEN LOVE AND HATE COLLIDE

In the movie, two pilots are required to operate the 25-story-high Jaegers, and they do this in a cockpit situated in the head of the behemoth. To give the film a sense of tangible realism, Del Toro constructed a contraption that the actors would be strapped to — all day, for many days — and rattled about violently as a tonne of water is dumped on them while surrounded by high-voltage electrical equipment.

“It really, really was a torture machine,” said Del Toro, looking slightly guilty. “For me to say I needed another take, I really felt like a bastard. But I still did another one!” he laughed.

“I was in there for about 27 days, and after about four days, I was in full-blown panic attack,” said Hunnam. “We couldn’t move! We would do seven hours in the morning, and then we had a half-hour lunch, and then we’d do seven hours in the afternoon. We were, like, on an elliptical and fighting in this suit that weighed about 40 pounds (18 kg) and we wore helmets so we couldn’t really breathe. I thought I was gonna lose my mind.

“I’d be like so mad and, like, fantasising about punching Guillermo in the face or coming back at night and burning the whole place down. Just mad as hell!”

To get through the torture, Hunnam turned to an unlikely source for inspiration: Waif-like Rinko Kikuchi. The Japanese actress, best known for her Oscar-nominated turn as a tragic deaf-mute in Babel, plays aspiring Jaeger pilot Mako Mori.

“She’s a bada**. We’re all these guys thinking we’re so tough and all that, and then we get into the (cockpit) and we were crying like little babies. And she was the only one who never complained. She was just like a samurai. She just got super Zen … I’d say, ‘What do you think about in there? You’re so calm!’ And she’d be, like, ‘Chocolate. And teddy bears!’”

“So I channelled Rinko, silently thinking, ‘I f***ing hate this, I’m gonna f***ing kill someone, just think of chocolate, just f***ing think of chocolate, chocolate sucks!!!” laughed Hunnam. “At least I looked calm!”

OF PHILOSPHY AND SHOES

When Del Toro wasn’t inflicting mental and physical distress on his precious actors, the 48-year-old director was focussed on making the best darn monster adventure movie he could.

“I really wanted the movie to have sort of an operatic quality and to have the feel of gothic romance,” he said. “I like the idea of an aesthetic that doesn’t belong in a science-fiction movie, to bring almost a fantasy aesthetic.”

The aesthetics of a film do not merely serve a superficial purpose, said Del Toro, especially when it’s to do with an unapologetic summer blockbuster. Sure, he’s making a US$200-million (S$XXX-million) popcorn flick about fighting robots, but he was determined to set his film apart from other effects-heavy movies of the same genre that he said look like “new car or army recruitment commercials”.

“I admire film-makers who can do that sort of aesthetics and pull it off. I can’t … I don’t believe in the army and I don’t believe in war,” he said. “Aesthetic choices are political choices.”

“I wanted to show kids a real adventure movie that doesn’t make them fantasise about buying a weapon or joining the army, you know? I think that war is a tragedy,” he said. “My dream for mankind is that one day there will be no wars. If we were all a little better at loving, there would be no wars. I believe that. But unfortunately, we have a terrible beast inside.”

“The theme of the movie reveals itself easily: It’s about trusting each other. It’s not a subtle metaphor that we are all in the same robot … You can trust humanity — every nation, every colour, every sex. And not say that it’s going to take a white, male wasp (that would be White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, not the winged insect, thank you) to save the world. All of us save the world.”

I nodded in agreement. It was an awfully deep conversation to have when discussing a movie where a giant robot uses a tanker as a baseball bat to hit an alien monster over the head. And I would have loved to probe deeper into the mind of a genius but my time was almost up and I needed to claim my reward for pointing him in the direction of shoes.

I settled on a more enduring keepsake: A Guillermo Del Toro original self-portrait.

A doodle to remind me of a valuable life lesson learnt, that we can save ourselves from our metaphorical Kaiju if humanity would just stand together as one in the giant robot we live in.

That, and the importance of pretty sneakers.

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