Guillermo Del Toro has been bigging up Pacific Rim ahead of its release, talking of the ambition and scope that went behind the film, and how that went beyond just the finished product and down to the people involved themselves – starting with him.

“I made a life decision that this movie needed to be huge in scope but run very, very tight on the production,” he said to Variety in a recent interview, “and the first person to change was me.” Variety points out that it was the first time he shot a movie in less than 115 days - Pacific Rim was done in 103. It meant a huge work load of 17 and 18 hour days.

Del Toro also changed the way in which he approached the movie compared to his older ones. “If you watch Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone, I had an obsession that was really, really all-consuming with making the actors move in an extremely mannered way that matched the camera moves,” he commented. “In those movies I wanted it to be balletic, but I also wanted it to be almost like a ritual or a dance. But on Pacific Rim I needed to allow the actors to breathe a lot more. I wanted to shoot a lot looser and even allow for improvisation, which I had never done.” The movie is a huge scale action film, which sees giant robots deployed by humans to fight off aliens. It stars Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam and Charlie Day, among others.

Guillermo Del Toro
Guillermo Del Toro is all in for Pacific Rim

Idris Elba
Idris Elba stars in the new film