The film Guillermo del Toro wrote as a poem to his 11-year-old self: “It’s a very personal movie”
Cinema has often been an industry of wish-fulfilment, something Guillermo del Toro took to heart by embracing his inner child and using it as one of the major creative driving forces behind a career that’s seen him reach the pinnacle of the business.
As a kid growing up in Mexico, the two movies that impacted del Toro more than any other were Frankenstein and Pinocchio. The films have been monochromatic creature features and Disney animations, respectively, but he saw the two protagonists as being closer than most people realised.
The director’s entire filmography has been powered by outsiders, loners, monsters of a figurative and literal variety, and those on the fringes trying to make sense of both themselves and the world they inhabit. It’s Frankenstein and Pinocchio in a nutshell, and he took his admiration to the next level by adapting them both.
Del Toro’s take on the wooden boy won him an Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature’, and his next port of call after Pinocchio was to mount a new spin on Mary Shelley’s seminal story. He’s come full circle by putting his own flourishes on the features that inspired him the most, but they weren’t the ones he used to pay tribute to an 11-year-old Guillermo.
Fittingly, the idea of giant robots battling even bigger monsters in skyscraper-sized battles that reduce their surroundings to rubble does seem like something born directly from a child’s vibrant imagination. However, only one of those youngsters got the chance to realise it on the grandest canvas imaginable.
Pacific Rim was del Toro at his most self-indulgent, not that it was a bad thing. Sure, the blockbuster is a ridiculous movie that positions style over substance to a degree far greater than any of the auteur’s other works, but that was the point. He was a kid in a toy store where one of the biggest studios on the planet was footing the bill, allowing him to make exactly the sort of movie he’d have wanted to see as a nipper.
Per Filmmaker Magazine, del Toro aptly described Pacific Rim as “an absolute poem to my 11-year-old self.” Never mind that he was pushing 50 when it eventually hit cinemas in July 2013, he was guided almost entirely by imagining what the version of himself from four decades previously had wanted to see.
He faced difficulties reconciling the two, though, admitting he had to keep things simple to “prevent the 48-year-old getting in the way of the 11-year-old enjoying the movie.” Hulking beasts and robotic brawlers aren’t what constitutes a deeply personal project for most filmmakers, but del Toro disagreed.
“It’s a very personal movie,” he offered. “But it’s another part of my personality.” It’s nowhere near the best film he’s ever made, but ask 11-year-old del Toro, and Pacific Rim is probably his favourite.
