From the obscure depths of the ocean, monstrous creatures rise to threaten humanity -- but Earth is not going down without a battle.
The fight for survival will play out in “Pacific Rim,” the apocalyptic action film born out of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) imagination. In an interview with HuffPost Voces, the 48-year-old mastermind spoke about the inspiration for his latest movie and what it was like to break into Hollywood as a Latino filmmaker.
“The film has a great sense of humor but tries to also be a film with beautiful, emotional moments between parents and their children, brothers,” del Toro told HuffPost. “There are times when, I hope and believe, the death of a human being will hurt. Although the plot revolves around robots and monsters, I wanted the movie to be about humanity, about how we have to learn to trust one another because in the end the only thing that will save the world is the world, nothing and no one is going to come and save us. The idea is that we are all inside the same robots.”
(Watch de Toro's interview, in Spanish, above)
In the film, mankind creates powerful robots, Jaeger, -- each controlled by a trio of human pilots -- to fight off the attacks of destructive creatures, Kaiju, that have entered Earth through a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Set in the near future (2020s to be exact), the storyline could easily be taken out of a nightmare, but del Toro assures HuffPost that his nightmares are not as interesting as his work makes them seem.
“My nightmares and dreams are very boring,” the Mexican directors said. “I think in my 48 years I’ve only had 3 or 4 extraordinary dreams, the rest have been quite silly. A nightmare I have often is that I’m being chased by sharks and zombies -- but separately, they don’t chase me together [laughs].”
Del Toro may be making summer blockbusters today, but he remembers a time when making a movie like “Pacific Rim” might have not been possible for a young Mexican director.
"When I first came to the United States, in '93, there was a lot of prejudice and barriers,” del Toro told HuffPost Voces. “Right now there’s Fede Alvarez, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a lot of Latino directors working in Hollywood and making movies as diverse as "21 Grams", "Babel", "Children of Men", "Harry Potter.”. When I arrived there was none of that, there weren’t any Latino directors as active as there are now, that made stories that weren’t about protest, dramas, or Latino melodramas."
“Pacific Rim” premieres nationwide on Friday, July 12.