INTERVIEW: PACIFIC RIM’s Guillermo del Toro on Remaking Classic Japanese Monster Movies (Cinemovie)

9 July 2013

GDT: I’ve been doing special effects since I was a kid. I did them professionally for over a decade. I know every tool… The tragedy is to use them as a shortcut creatively and as an end all, like “the solution has to be a digital effect,” no. We use miniatures. We use incredibly elaborate physical effects in the movie. Not only are there pilots shaking, but the boat is in a gigantic gimbal. The street where Mana is was rigged with hydraulics. The whole street: the pavement, the lampposts; the cars, the sidewalk, everything. Every time the kaiju took a step, the whole street jumped every time and she reacted to that because the whole set jumped… We built one hundred physical sets in this movie, and completely overtook Pinewood Studios in Toronto and spilled over into two more studios.

-from the interview

Damn, Pacific Rim is just sounding better and better! Click on the big red link below to read an awesome and very entertaining new interview on Cinemovie.com with Guillermo del Toro on a bunch of cool shit, including what kind of monster scares him (we agree with his answer), digital VS. practical effects in big budget movies, and his favorite monster flicks.

INTERVIEW: PACIFIC RIM’s Guillermo del Toro on Remaking Classic Japanese Monster Movies / Interviews.

Guillermo del Toro Talks About Pacific Rim’s Formidable Female Lead And The Lack of a Love Story (themarysue.com)
SR Giveaway – Win a ‘Pacific Rim’ Prize Pack! (screenrant.com)
Hideo Kojima really, really, really likes Pacific Rim (vg247.com)
PACIFIC RIM Movie Review: Saving The World, Saving The Summer (badassdigest.com)

See Best Mama DVD Extra- Javier Botet, The Actor Behind Mama! Behind-The-Scenes Interviews, Creepy As Hell All-New Footage, More (Wired.com) SPOILERS!

6 May 2013

2 Comments

SPOILER ALERT-if you plan on seeing Mama (2013) on DVD but have not done so yet, it’s probably best to save watching this BTS footage till after the movie. More than one commenter on the Wired post said it sort of, well, spoiled the illusion.
Many of us who have been terrified by the movie for months, on the other hand, are more than happy to see that it was an illusion…

Well, we WISH we could take credit for any part of this, or just post it directly, but it’s a Wired.com Exclusive clip from the Javier Botet featurette on the Mama DVD/Blu-Ray. Click the big red link below for the never-before-seen footage!

Watch Jessica Chastain Kiss Mama in This Exclusive Clip/Underwire/Wired.com

SEE! Proof the CGI was mainly limited to the hair/clothes floating effect!

SEE! The only actor who could portray Mama in the feature film and give you the worst nightmares!

SEE! Javier Botet out of make-up, being interviewed, to possibly help you sleep a little better by reminding you it’s just a movie.*

Not to mention some very creepy concept art (it must be a co-incidence that one of the drawings looks like a relative of the Attic Monster/Medieros Girl from REC and REC2), Botet wandering around the set semi-casually in full makeup and costume (other than the CGI sensors/trackers wrapped around his bald head, making him look like the world’s scariest Christmas decoration), and we start to see him being swooped around on wires before the clip fades out. We do get to see over two minutes of amazing, never-before-seen footage, though. He does that horrifying, speedy crawl backwards, then they (apparently) reversed it to make it look extra creepy and unnatural.

You can watch the entire Javier Botet ‘bringing Mama to life’ (or death, as it were) featurette when the Mama DVD/Blu-Ray releases on May 7th… just in time for Mother’s Day.