In my experience, very few people walk out of a movie. You have them for two hours, and you're free to explain or not explain whatever you see fit.
Making 'Pacific Rim' was a lot like what you imagined making movies would be like when you were 12.
When you watch zombie movies, and people say, 'What's going on? What are we going to do?' it's like they live in a world where they've never seen zombie movies.
The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.
The benefit of having a story that takes place in the real world is that you don't have to invent the real world. It exists.
You have to think about space differently; you have to think about time differently when you're talking about a graphic novel versus a movie.
That's part of what I remember about seeing the movies that influenced me: the experience of watching them with a crowd and how they react to something.
I actually got into 'Ultraman' through the video games first, before I realized they were based on something. You remember how they had those fighting Ultraman video games? That's how I got into it. Then I started watching the show. Their kaiju look so weird.
I grew up in the '80s, and you had these original, big-budget sci-fi adventure things all the time, not based on any source material - you'd have 'Gremlins,' 'Back to the Future,' 'E.T.' 'Ghostbusters,' the list goes on and on. I would love it so much if 'Pacific Rim' was but the first in a new wave of that sort of thing.
I would definitely, definitely love to do more comic work. I think, creatively, there's something that's differently rewarding about it than the rewards of filmmaking.
If I could pick any story idea or script I had that I wanted everything to go exactly right for, it would probably be 'Pacific Rim.'
It seems so cliched and obvious, but write the movie you want to see in the theater.
When I saw 'Jurassic Park' as a kid, that was the first time I thought about making movies for a living.
I love movies, but I would love to write as many graphic novels as people would read from me.
I think the graphic novel form works, in practice, a lot differently from watching a movie. You can put it down and pick it back up whenever you want - something you can't do in a theater.
In a graphic novel, you have to allow for a certain amount of freedom on the reader's part to experience it how they choose.
There's a few things I learned from my experience on 'Hieroglyph.' First of all, I learned that building a world doesn't need to be as expensive as a summer blockbuster. Yeah yeah, newsflash, I know.
As I've probably said before, television exposes writers to far more of the nitty-gritty than film does.
Where do you go after something like 'Pacific Rim?' Which, for me, was such a moment, to have this thing and see it all come together, and it's big, and it has this cult following... You ask yourself, 'What's next?'
If you squint at 'Deadwood,' you can see 'Game of Thrones' coming. That's the show that first got me thinking 'Carnival Row' could be a series.
