Obviously there’s a big history of Kaiju movies, but also there’s a lot of ancillary media with giant monsters and giant robots. And the two that I think I felt an influence from – and tell me if I’m wrong, tell me if I’m just projecting here – was “Neon Genesis: Evangelion,” especially with the episode where they had to be in synch to defeat the Angel…
Travis Beacham: I don’t know if I saw that one. I haven’t seen all of the series, and I’ve only seen the first two of the…
The new movies.
Yeah. I think tonally it’s definitely an influence, because really what blew me away the first time I saw “Evangelion” was it treated this genre, this sort of silly genre – or a genre that could be sort of silly, and could be outlandish and cartoonish – and treated it with a real sophistication. Which I really liked. I think what I identified less with in “Evangelion” was the sort of apocalypticism of it, and kind of a surrender to human neuroses or whatever…
I think the entire thing is about clinical, crippling depression…
Yeah. Yeah.
But the apocalyptic angle – and I want to get back to that – but the apocalyptic angle that you said is interesting, because I feel like Pacific Rim is at least a pre-apocalyptic movie. That is the threat.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that’s definitely a threat, but what I liked about that was setting it up as something to destroyed, and not in a kind of… you get into a third act, and we have this plan that involves a computer virus, not to name any movie specifically. But like that. In a large respect it’s about the disaster, but throughout the movie as a whole it’s about this crazy thing that we did to deal with the disaster and to cope with the disaster, which I really liked. Because I think in the modern world, and especially around the time when I was thinking about the idea, I think people were talking about the 2012 predictions, and the financial crisis and all that. There’s this really fetishistic resignation to the idea of an apocalypse, and the end, and people were kind of lusting for it to come to that so they can tell all their friends, “I told you so! I told you the world was going to shit.” That, I really wanted to knock down. I wanted it to be this humanist story, this humanist sort of fairy tale, that was like, “No, this ends when we say it ends.”
There’s this thing I’ve noticed in a lot of science fiction: with the exception of “Star Trek,” and maybe Ghostbusters, science is seen as sort of the enemy, or at least the thing that will bring us down. Here, it is something that will save us.
Oh yeah, and that’s absolutely something that I was thinking about. This tradition you see specifically in Asian stories, and Eastern stories, and specifically in the whole “Mech” thing, is science as the solution. In Western storytelling I think you’re dead on. From Frankenstein to Faust, it’s like it’s this thing that’s going to bite you in the ass. I think that in this current climate, what we really need is a story where science and technology is sort of solving problems as opposed to creating them. It’s just a perspective that I think there needs to be more fiction devoted to.
The other film that I noticed some similarities to, and it’s one of my favorites… It felt a little bit like Robot Jox. In particular, obviously they’re giant robots, but also, if you think about it, these guys who are piloting the Jaegers, it could be like they were in the military. They could be brothers. But instead there’s a sportsmanlike sense of competition between them.
Yeah, yeah! Yeah.
That felt very Robot Jox-y.
Oh yeah, and also Top Gun really, too. It’s funny, because I hate pitching stuff, and I don’t think of things this way, but once you think of an idea you have to come up with a way to tell your agent about it.
Yeah. “It’s [Blank] Meets [Blank].”
The way I came up to talk about Pacific Rim was I said, “Basically it’s Top Gun except the jets are giant robots and the Russians are giant monsters.” [Laughs]
So at the end of this movie – it’s not a big spoiler – there is a rift, and there is a bit about going into the rift. Obviously we don’t really get a lot of information about what’s on the other side of that. How much of that, of what’s on the other side of the rift, do you imagine being in a sequel if it gets made?
A lot. Yeah, we’ve left a lot of that purposefully ambiguous, and have worked out a lot of who they are and what’s over there and why they’re doing what they’re doing. We’ve kept it very mysterious in this first story in the hopes that it’s something that we get to later.
Is there any chance we’re going to see Charlie Day’s character in a Jaeger?
There’s definitely a chance of that, yeah. Any time we’re talking about the sequel, it’s like it’s the craziest possible things that you could think of.
Do you imagine a trilogy or do you imagine this potentially going on forever?
I would love if it went on forever, but not necessarily in a linear respect. Even in the graphic novel, it covers like the first four years of the timeline, and the movie takes place five or six years after the last bit of the graphic novel. So there’s countless Jaeger/Kaiju battles that are outlined in the bible, specified, that are not detailed in any story, so I would be happy for it to go on in one medium or another for as long as people are interested in it.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
