The visionary movie director Guillermo del Toro has explored his deep fascination with monsters throughout his excellent filmography. However, del Toro’s monsters are not necessarily present to cause fear as they often are in other films, but rather, they serve the purpose of metaphor and embody the kind of beauty that is often found in the weird, bizarre and grotesque.
Through Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, del Toro portrays a profound humanness within his monsters and consequently gives a voice to the oppressed and looked down upon, creating a unique sense of empathy in his audiences, allowing viewers to project their own biases and preconceptions and challenge them through the medium of cinema.
With Pacific Rim, though, del Toro brought his monster vision to gloriously action-heavy heights. The 2013 movie takes place in the future when humankind is at war with Kaiju – huge monsters that emerge from an interdimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean – fighting by creating giant mech-robots called Jaegers.
However, it transpires that the Jaegers are not enough to beat the Kaiju, and Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi’s characters must partner up to take control of an old Jaeger to save humanity. While the vision of Pacific Rim is undoubtedly the thinking of del Toro, he once suggested that he’d been inspired by the works of John Wayne.
In an interview with New York Daily News, del Toro explained that he’d wanted the Jaeger Gipsy Danger to be as “American” as possible, and the film had used the New York City skyline as one of its inspirations. To really ramp up the Americanness of Gipsy Danger, though, del Toro and his art design team consulted The Duke for further influence.
“Concept artist Oscar Chichoni and I discussed the idea of basing its shape on the art deco buildings of New York like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and combining it with John Wayne,” del Toro said. “I wanted him to have the gait of a gunslinger. If you watch the movie, he has the hip movement that gunslingers have in Western movies.”
After all, Wayne had featured in several gunslinging fight scenes throughout his remarkable career in the cinematic offerings of the Old West. His characters were known for fighting dirty, and he possessed a physicality that his contemporaries could only ever dream of emulating, stature and presence that was taken on in full force by del Toro and his concept artist on Pacific Rim.
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