'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things.
Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing.
A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material.
I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star.
Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.
I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie.
