Guillermo del Toro - Cabinet of Curiosities

–Cold colors in the Tokyo FB except for the shoe in Mako’s hand.

–Rain of slow, gray ash

–On the battlefield everything is blood and mud. The strongest lines are the horizontal ones and in the forest and the castle the most powerful lines are vertical. The cannons destroy the forest when they try unsuccessfully to halt the advance of the enemy troops.

–The confusion interrupts the battle, putting both armies in a constant state of alert, sensitive to the slightest sound.

“Mako on the stairs”

–Use the clock of war to mark time with news in last third of the film.

–“Don’t let your feet touch the ground” by Ash Koley.

–The Beast was afraid of becoming vulnerable. He isolated himself from the world, poring over his books and maps .

–When is the right time to say good-bye? How can we know if we’re unaware of the host’s identity? How to know if we are midway through the meal or if it has already come to an end?

–I’m a father but I still feel like a son, I’m an adult but my fears are those of a child. I’m alone but I live among many, I feel like time is running out when everything is just getting started

–The dark fairy hated the prince because she loved him with a passion.

–Always say what you think, always do what you say, and know what makes you happy. Live or die abiding by firmly made decisions, doing what you think is the right thing.

Mako in the rain, sans helicopter

MSZ:So Pacific Rim is part of a new notebook, which includes notes you made while working on The Hobbit , correct?

GDT:Well, what happened is, I lost a lot of the rhythm of working in the notebooks during The Hobbit , because I was so afraid—I’m still afraid—of carrying that notebook. I used to grab my notebook and travel with it everywhere and make annotations, but with The Hobbit , secrecy was so paramount I was paranoid about leaving it behind in a coffee shop. So I stopped carrying it. And to this day, I have it at home, but until I finish that notebook, I cannot carry a notebook, because the three movies haven’t come out yet.

MSZ:How did you get back into working in the notebooks for Pacific Rim?

GDT:I was really, really invested in this image of the girl with the red shoe [ opposite ]. Because it’s something that I felt was very iconic, and it defined the entire palette of the movie for me. The movie is incredibly saturated with color, but I wanted Mako’s flashback to have few colors and feel almost monochromatic. Blue is dominant in her memories and it permeates her in the present—her hair is streaked with that blue. She is marred by the past. I also wanted her introduction scene [ above ] to be monochromatic and we art directed that whole introductory sequence in the rain to be only concrete gray, cyan, and gold. So the two sequences are linked.

But once Mako and Raleigh connect, more colors begin to be associated with them. The first Drift they do is all in blue. After that, when they are fighting in Hong Kong, all these colors start coming in, and we end up with them immersed in a sea of red. And the red is the same red as the red of her shoe.

I think that if you’re going to go crazy with colors in a movie like we do in Pacific Rim , you have to have peaks and valleys; you have to have places where the eye can rest. And so we have that regular red, for when Raleigh and Mako connect. And then when they are not connecting, or when they are alone, they each have another color. Mako’s palette is cold, while Raleigh’s color code for when he is by himself is rust and grime and amber.

–The world is rapidly becoming a more and more vile place that celebrates vulgarity and brutality in the abstract but that hypocritically demands absolute moral perfection in public

–Sooner than you might think, with noise comes emptiness. The explosion occurs when emptiness trumps substance

–How pleasant is the sensation of absence. What a pleasing assassin is silence

–Absolute inconsequence, empty gestures, distance. To be so close and yet so distant from others; to fade away without thunder, without a roar and without fury. Without a vessel, without meaning, without a clear direction; without a destiny, finding nothing but echoes in the voices of other people.

–To which one of the voices should we pay attention? To the one that says “keep going, keep going”? To the one that speaks of tedium? What is the purpose of the gears? Entropy overcomes and guides us as we lurch along toward our cosmic destiny; perhaps, the most we can do is end our days as tiny discharges of energy. Positive, negative? What difference does it make? Murals made by ants, crushed under the feet of a man trudging along, part of an incomprehensible, indecipherable cosmic joke.

The code in the Kaiju’s viscera should he fascinating. Blues, iridescence; translucent and opalescent. Bioluminescent blood should come from the glow sticks; this would help with the FX brain

–Before the written language in Cluva events were recorded by knotting cords or making notches on a stick (SINOGRAMS is what the symbols are called) 6 categories. XIANGXING, ZHISHI, HUIYI, XIESHENG, ZUANZAU, and JIAJIE —PICTOGRAMS.

–Wide-angle lenses to capture the CHARACTER and the SURROUNDINGS in the same frame 18 mm

–For Beauty and the Beast, the Age of Reason, which is the period during the eighteenth century in which reason is enthroned above spirituality, which witnesses the birth of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. It’s in this spirit that the United States is born as a new country.

–Perhaps it might also be worthwhile to set it in the following period: during the Napoleonic Wars, when reason has been abandoned but spirituality has not been recovered or reclaimed.

–BOXING FIST FIGHT in the middle of a battlefield in F.

–Gathering pages from her encyclopedia Bella finds something ancient and magic.

“Sprouting Boy”

MSZ:What can you say about the flower here [ opposite ]? Does it resonate at all with the flower in Pan’s Labyrinth?

GDT:The idea in both films is that the flower tells the story. But I abandoned the idea in the middle of shooting Pacific Rim because I thought we wouldn’t have time. When we started shooting, the screenplay was about 130 pages long. That meant at least a 2-hour-and-45-minute movie for me.