Travis Beacham may have written a script about giant robots fighting giant monsters, but it’s anything but simple. Pacific Rim contains so much information that structuring the screenplay in such as way as to include characters and an actual plot seems like it must have been daunting, to say the least. So sitting down with Beacham in San Francisco, CA, we had a lot to talk about. Pacific Rim stars Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi as Raleigh and Mako, two survivors of giant monster (Kaiju) attacks who team up and link their consciousnesses to pilot a giant robot and battle the interdimensional threat from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
CraveOnline: I’m really, really glad I get to talk to you because this script is very interesting.
Travis Beacham: Thank you!
You had a very tough gig with this script, because it strikes me that you have two inciting incidents in your script. You have “The World is Invaded by Kaiju,” and then you have the plot begin years later.
Yeah.
That’s a lot of information to give to the audience. How many iterations did you go through? How did you decide to parcel the information off?
My philosophy is sort of not to worry about the parts in between, you know what I mean? Sort of like [how] Blade Runner just sort of drops you into this world, and then it’s like, “I don’t know, dude. You sort it out.” [Laughs] I didn’t want to do it quite to that extent, because it had to be audience-friendly for the subject matter.
Right. It needs to be a crowd-pleaser. You can’t alienate anyone.
Yeah. But at the same time, I didn’t want it to be a bacon-and-eggs, morning commute, aliens land sort of disaster movie. I wanted to join the world already in progress and history already in progress, because otherwise you have to explain how do they think of this idea with the Jaegers? [Then] the world is in the story as opposed to the story is in the world, and I wanted to do something where the story is in the world. In practice, that means thinking of a lot of stuff that you know you’re not going to use in the movie, but thinking of it means you have it to reference, which means that it informs the confidence with which that you tell the story, and people I think can sense that.
Yeah, there’s clearly a lot of detail here that we’re only picking up on the surface.
Yeah.
What sort of things did you think were important, originally, that were not in the film?
Specifically there was one idea that involved Mako and Raleigh speaking different languages. Like, she spoke Japanese and he spoke English and neither of them spoke each other’s language at the beginning, but then when they linked up she would start hearing her from our – as an audience perspective – he would be understanding her in English. Which, while an interesting idea, and sort of illustrates the kind of neural uplink that’s happening, I think it sort of proved too esoteric to articulate for people just getting used to this idea that the pilots are neurally connected.
Tell me about the “neural connection” idea. Because it would have been extremely easy for you to just do a “Voltron” thing, where you control the arms, I control the legs. Why was the neural uplink so important?
Well, I think initially I really wanted to do a movie about giant monsters and giant robots, but that in-and-of-itself isn’t really a plot. It’s not really a story. I didn’t know that I had anything at all until the idea came along that it’s two people driving the Jaeger, driving the robot, and that it requires that to work, because then it can be about relationships. It can be about the baggage they bring into the battle. That becomes part of the context or the battle itself, as opposed to just this human story that’s grafted onto these action scenes. It’s at the core of the action scenes. From a practical perspective, while they’re controlling a sort of hemisphere – generally the left side controls the left side of the Jaeger, and the right side controls the right side of the Jaeger – there’s exceptions to that, and in order for those sides to be synched up, in order for those two hemispheres to be synched up, their brains have to be synched up. I had somebody ask, “Why do they have to do the same thing in the Jaeger?” And I said, “They don’t have to do the same thing in the Jaeger. That’s backwards. You’re seeing the effect of them being aligned. So they aren’t ‘trying’ to be in synch. They’re in synch mentally, so they’re in synch physically.”
