Guillermo del Toro Talks Getting Back in the Director's Chair, the Evolution of the Script, Creating the World on a Giant Scale, and More on the Set of PACIFIC RIM
One thing we got to see on our tour around the different sets is we got to see the Russian Com pad and we got to see the gimbal and what’s interesting about it is the fact that the way the gimbal is operated is very similar to the pilots.
DEL TORO: We wanted to base the sort of machinery of the pilots on existing technology. There’s footage on the internet of a Japanese scientists moving a giant arm of a robot with his own arm. Snd Mark Setrakian, who is one of the great mechanical designers, has worked with me on Hellboy and Hellboy 2, creates robots for disarming bombs, military operation robots, and he has a robot that can tie a tennis shoe, it’s that refined. And he has 3D goggle vision that he puts in the robots, so you literally can se. What we did is we layered the suits so that could happen. I always called it bullshit-tanium, they’re all made of bullshit-tanium, solid core bullshit-tanium. So what we did is we said, “Okay they will have a neural link on the spine, then they will have neural links to this blah blah blah, and then they will connect.” There’s one sequence in the opening of the movie where you see them blend with the machine, get tied to the machine, the neural cortex and how they connect with each other, one handles the left hemisphere, the other one handles the right hemisphere. In order to move that size of a machine the neural influx is too much for one single pilot but if you put two they can control it. It’s based on the idea that it could be, but not at that size [laughs].