Comic-Con 2012: Del Toro Debuts ‘Pacific Rim,’ Talks ‘Emotional Core’ with THR (Video)

Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming sci-fi film, has alien monsters and giant robots, but at its core, it’s about the human element.

The filmmaker visited The Hollywood Reporter’s exclusive video lounge before his panel at Comic-Con to talk about the ambitious film, which will hit theaters in July 2013.

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“I went against the grain. What normally the big blockbusters tend to adopt is a very impersonal, a very cool – almost the style of a recruitment video for the Army [with] long lenses, steel blues, polished metal,” he told THR.

Instead, he said he wanted to the film, which stars Idris Elba, Ron Perlman and Charlie Hunnam, to have “a very operatic, romantic, adventure feel.”

“I wanted to make a movie that is very emotional at its core,” he said.

The robots in the film, which are 25 stories high, are powered by two human pilots, he explained. One pilot handles the right hemisphere, while the other handles the left.

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“The size of the battle is almost like watching a thunderstorm, a cyclone, clashing with a hurricane,” he said.

And even with terrifying monsters and giant robots, Guillermo calls the film a “beautiful poem to monsters.”

“I think when you create images that are beautiful about things that are normally not beautiful, they have a haunting sense of poetry,” he said.

When asked about where he sees this genre of film moving in the future, del Toro said he hopes that no matter what, his films are always “grounded in reality.”

“For me the hope is that the technology doesn’t overshadow the expressive nature of the film,” he said.

Watch THR’s complete interview above. Find all of THR’s Comic-Con interviews here.

Email: Rebecca.Ford@thr.com; Twitter: @Beccamford