Guillermo del Toro took to the stage at the Anaheim Convention Center today for a WonderCon panel focusing on his upcoming sci-fi actioner Pacific Rim.
Featuring a cast that includes Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman and more, Pacific Rim takes place in a not-too-distant-future where humanity has come under attack from enormous monsters known as Kaiju. To combat the creatures, all the nations of the world have constructed mechanical colossuses called Jaegers.
The panel opened with a brand-new trailer that Del Toro said was constructed specifically for WonderCon and isn’t planned for release anywhere else (besides one more screening of it at the upcoming CinemaCon). With a tagline, “Go big or go extinct,” the trailer offered quite a few shots that has the audience screaming with excitement including one where a Jaeger actually drags an oil tanker out of the ocean and, lifting it up like a bat, swings it into a Kaiju attacker.
The trailer offered a good look at Ron Perlman’s character, who Del Toro says is a black market Kaiju organ dealer. Shown in sunglasses and a smoking jacket, his character harvests the remains of the epic beasts and sells them for their medicinal properties.
Also showcased in the new trailer is Charlie Day’s Dr. Newton Geiszler. An expert on the creatures, Geiszler is described by Del Toro as looking throughout the film like “Rick Moranis, J.J. Abrams and the shorter brother of Bradley Cooper.”
“If you want to stop them, you have to understand them,” Geiszler says in the footage.
“Or we could just blow them to pieces,” Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Becket shoots back.
Production on Pacific Rim called for the construction of four-story Jaegar sets on gimbals so that, during combat sequences, the actors would actually be shaken. Del Toro says that, while all the actors enjoyed the practical effects, the constant shaking took its toll on everyone but Rinko Kikuchi.
“That’s why guys never give birth,” he says. “They’re crybabies. We’d go extinct as a species. They’d be like, ‘F- that!'”
The final film has nine different Jaegars and 12 different Kaijus, although far more made it to various stages of design.
“We designed a lot and, every week, we would do an American Idol,” Del Toro continues. “…Those that survived were refined further.”
The panel concluded with the reveal of the Alex Ross cover to the upcoming tie-in graphic novel Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero. You can check it out by clicking here.
