I am Guillermo del Toro, director, writer, producer. AMA.

I love the idea of you doing a Cthulu movie. Do you think you'll ever get a chance to make At the Mountain of Madness?

It would be fantastic to do it! I promise that if we don't get to do it for some reason, I will do my best to have Universal allow us to publish the book with all the making of, the behind the scenes art that we generated, because it is staggeringly beautiful. But any Lovecraft movie I could do, I would love - I love many of his tales, so if it's not Mountains, I hopefully can do one day one of his smaller short stories.

Please. For the love of god, visualize some Lovecraft for us. We need you to do this. Thanks so much for your work to date! The Devil's Backbone was my introduction, and changed the way I view supernatural thrillers.

Well I thank you, and I thank you for liking The Devil's Backbone. I am very very happy to say that you should then look very much forward to Crimson Peak coming out October 2015, because it's a full-blown gothic romance story with Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska and Charlie Hunnam. And it is sort of the big sister companion to the Devil's Backbone. The Anglo, turn of the century, big big English mansion companion to The Devil's Backbone.

From Pan's Labyrinth to Pacific Rim, you've written some of the most epic and imaginative films I've ever seen. Where do you get the inspiration and the motivation to write such scripts?

I am (and I have always been) a weird guy. And my mind doesn't function completely in the real world. I have to have, every day, abstract myself into a language of fable and monsters to try to manage and understand what the world means. I interpret the good and the bad in our lives through monsters and parables that I find help me grasp who we are, or how we can make sense of this life we have. And to compliment that, my office, every morning I leave my family home and I go to my office, which consists largely of 11,000 square feet of books and weird objects of art, and I am constantly inspired by the paintings surrounding me, the objects surrounding me, or the books I have read or read every day. It's fun. And to finalize it, I would say, the final part of this is I think that in order to create movies, you should not solely be inspired by movies. It is important to enrich your storytelling language with every form of storytelling media that resonates with you. It can be a fairy tale, a classic book, or a video game, or a painting in a museum, it makes no difference, as long as it stimulates your storytelling drive.

Charlie Day said in a 2012 interview that you are a big fan of It’s Always Sunny, and that led you to cast him for a role in Pacific Rim.
What is your favorite It’s Always Sunny episode?

Well, I laughed out loud in the episode where Charlie vomits blood on his date in the back of a limo, I loved the bums fucking under the pier on the Jersey Shore episode, I loved (sentimentally) the kitten mittens episode, the episode where Charlie becomes a Green Man, and I love the episode where Charlie and Dee befriend a few WASP, superrich siblings, and Charlie rejects the love of the girl for his love of the waitress. But almost infallibly, I actually almost infallibly love every episode of the show, but if I was to recommend one show to somebody that hasn't seen the show, I would recommend they watch the Ponderosa Massacre episode in which I appear under heavy makeup in the character called Poppy McPoyle.

One of the most thrilling acting performances in the history of the medium!

I have always loved the color palettes of you films! How did you come up with colors for pacific rim? i.e. the beautiful blue from inside of the kaujis

I am so glad you mentioned this! Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak now are as close as I've come in my life to creating moving paintings on film. I directed every frame of the computer animation in that movie, art directing them with the same care that I art directed the live-action, in order to create what I was hoping would be a palette that was impossibly vibrant. A saturation of color that I thought would have been much more difficult to obtain in a "real world" movie. And that created the perfect environment for those that embrace the faith to believe again in giant monsters and giant robots.

I normally do a very minute color timing on my movies, I spend many many many months assuring that the movies have the right color - it starts by color-coding every piece of wardrobe, every piece of set design, and then continues by making sure that the light has the hardness or softness and visual design that will support a color palette like that - gelling the lights with the right colors (I started experimenting very boldly on the Troll Market sequence in Hellboy 2) - and eventually taking the resulting frames and then saturating the color in the color correctional suite, ensuring all through the process that the base of these images is a rich, dense, slab of blacks. I find that the vibrancy of the colors, and the density of the black in an image, increase the pictorial beauty of a film.

What are your thoughts on Gareth Evan's new Godzilla film?

I enjoyed very much the tone of the film, which straddled the line between the somber tone of the original Japanese Godzilla, and the sort of Spielberg-ian spectacle, and knowing him a little bit and his tastes, I think the film represents him as a filmmaker playing with the big toys in the big sandbox pretty accurately. I think he is very, very talented, and I can't wait to see his take on the Star Wars universe.

What was the most difficult part of filming Pan's Labyrinth?

That was a particularly difficult movie. I would say that in reality, there was no easy parts to shoot in that movie. But perhaps our most challenging aspects of it were to orchestrate the sequence with the Pale Man. And trying to orchestrate the battle scenes in the movie, because we were under mandate to not fire any shots or use any explosives during those sequences, so I needed to use non-pyrotechnical explosions and I had literally the actors pretending that their guns were working, like children playing Cowboys & Indians, they were moving their hands as if their guns were shooting, but we weren't allowed by law to have any blanks in the guns, all the firing on the muzzle flashes and the guns recoiling were done digitally in post-production, because we were told not to do it. And for some reason, it made everyone look silly in rehearsing. I remember Sergy Lopez, who played the Captain, in the first or second take of that, he was going through the take saying "Bang! Bang! Bang!" like kids playing Cowboys & Indians. And I had to remind him that was just for the rehearsal. And for the Pale Man, every scene with Doug in that movie was compiled in the fact that the Faun and the Pale Man were makeup jobs that were blind. Doug couldn't see almost at all, you know? In the case of the Pale Man, he was looking through a pinpoint the size of a needle, and in the case of Pan, he was looking through a similar difficult situation because the eyes in the Pan makeup were beautifully rendered acrylic pieces, and he had to do a couple of the scenes in Spanish, blind, walking through uneven terrain and in the one scene, in the dark, walking backwards in Spanish, semi blind. But the difficult thing with the Pale Man for me was to sustain the suspense and make it feel (at the same time) that it feels horrific, you needed to maintain a sense of a very dark, fairytale atmosphere. It took several days to shoot that sequence, and to keep the young actress in continuity emotionally through that scene which needs to feel like a single piece emotionally, was very difficult also.

I am a huge fan of your work, thank you for taking the time to do this!! Couple Questions: Any Hellboy 3 details you can share?! A lot of your films largely use practical effects and makeup instead of CGI. While, from what I’ve heard, CGI can be more cost effective and quicker, they can sometimes take me out of the experience. Practical effects always make the characters feel like they are more real and seem more detailed while on screen. A good example of this would be the comparison of CGI Bolg(left) to practical Bolg(right) from “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” seen here: http://www.thelandofshadow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/BolgvsBolg.jpg I was curious what your thoughts were on where the industry is headed in terms of special effects and the large shift towards CGI?

Well, you know, we don't have that movie on the horizon, but the idea for it was to have Hellboy finally come to terms with the fact that his destiny, his inevitable destiny, is to become the beast of the Apocalypse, and having him and Liz face the sort of, that part of his nature, and he has to do it, in order to be able to ironically vanquish the foe that he has to face in the 3rd film. He has to become the best of the Apocalypse to be able to defend humanity, but at the same time he becomes a much darker being. It's a very interesting ending to the series, but I don't think it will happen.

I believe that each generation demands a little shift technologically on the effects. For my generation, we experienced a transition from the beauty, the handmade beauty, of Ray Harryhausen's majestic stop-motion, into the CGI animation that we are experiencing now. I believe that it's the duty of every filmmaker and storyteller to try to bring as much reality as physically and economically possible to an FX sequence. I myself am incredibly oriented to physical sets, rather than doing green screen, whenever the sets are physically possible, and I try to always find a physical FX equivalent in a solution to a filmmaking problem, regardless of it having to be a little bit more time consuming or less easy to shoot, I think it's incredibly important to do it, the last movie I just did, Crimson Peak, and in many ways The Strain the series, were executed largely with practical FX, and only in the instances in which you cannot do it with physical FX should you resort to digital FX. They should never be used as a shortcut, as a lazy shortcut. They should always be used when the ultimate solution is to convey that you need.

I am utterly confused. Why on earth do you not want to make Hellboy 3? There's such a clamoring for it, and you clearly have an amazing concept in mind, so why not make it? Especially with Ron Perlman chomping at the bit as well?

It is a question that I myself ask of the world many times, but we have gone through basically every studio and asked for financing, and they are not interested. I think that the first movie made its budget back, and a little bit of profit, but then it was very very big on video and DVD. The story repeated itself with the second already, it made its money back at the box office, but a small margin of profit in the release of the theatrical print, but was very very big on DVD and video. Sadly now from a business point of view all the studios know is that you don't have that safety net of the DVD and video, so they view the project as dangerous.

Creatively, I would love to make it. Creatively. But it is proven almost impossible to finance. Not from MY side, but from the studio side. If I was a multimillionaire, I would finance it myself, but I spend all my money on rubber monsters.

Hello Mr. Del Toro, I'm a big anime fan and I was impressed with your Pacific Rim movie, which shows some influence from japanese mecha series like Evangelion. I could say it was a first time when I saw well done mecha live-action movie. I'm sure upcoming sequel will be top notch too. I wonder if that franchise success, and also good reception of recently released Edge of Tomorrow movie, will push forward some anime/manga live-action adaptations.

I'm both excited and frightened by such perspective, since japanese culture that influenced those series is nothing like what Hollywood is used to. I'm quite excited through about possible Monster adaptation, that I heard you was collaborating with. So now some questions:

• are there any news about Monster that you could share with us?

• is there any manga or anime series that you are familiar with, that you would be interested in adapting into movie if given a chance?

Well, I am a huge anime and manga fan, as is my daughter. In fact, I have an entire cabin in my office in the garden dedicated just to manga and anime, where I keep my books and my movies. I have never seen Evangelion, I love the designs and am very familiar with the designs of the EVA robots and Angels, but I have never actually sat down to see the series. Some people pointed out - I don't know if Travis who wrote Pacific Rim saw Evangelion - they saw the gel that connects the people to the robots, I came up with that myself, without seeing Evangelion. I however fully acknowledge the influence of Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Tetsujin 28-go, Space Giants, Mazinger Z, and many many other anime that I have watched and enjoy. I love very much the work of Osamu Tezuka, whose work influenced me growing up as a child, and I love quite a bit of the work of Mamoru Oshii, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon (big big time, whom I think was the finest narrator in anime other than Miyazaki and Takahata).

I also love the work Jiro Taniguchi, which I find incredibly contemplative and meditative,highly influential for me are the sculptures of Mirasawa, and the horror stories of Junji Ito, whom I met on my last trip to Japan. He was very very shy, and I kept slapping him on the back, which was not very Japanese. Junji Ito is the only author of comics that has scared the shit out of me. When the shark takes the stairs in GYO, grows the mechanical crab legs chasing them up the stairs, I literally threw away the comic and yelled "NO!" i was so absolutely scared.

I also think that I am very influenced by Japanese game designers. I am friends and a big friend of Hideo Kojima, and I have been lucky enough to be friends with Otomo-San. But the series I think would be FANTASTIC to adapt, but I would love to adapt live-action GANTZ. I love the books, I love the book i don't know if you're familiar with it, called BLAME - it's a really surreal, beautiful book, but I don't know if you know it. But it's written by Tsutomu Nihei. And I love the work of Katsuya Terada. But I tried my best as an anime fan to try to do the first live action anime movie with Pacific Rim. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to achieve an almost superpure color palette of super-saturated colors. I was hoping to make the movie feel as dynamic and as vibrant as anime.

I am a long time fan, and I had 2 questions.

The first. I met you at a signing of The Fall in Manhattan and I asked you if it was true that you used to hang out in my grandfather's rotulos (sign paining) shop on Ninos Heroes in Guadalajara. You confirmed, saying that yes you used to borrow paints from him. This was a huge revelation for me because my grandfather always swore it was you. One of my earliest memories is seeing grotesque clay monsters in that shop and I'd ask him about them, he would tell me not to touch them. Later he told me you were the one who made them. I wanted to ask if you had any recollection of this because these clay monsters inspired me (no joke) to be an artist and draw robots, monsters, and creepy things of my own for the rest of my life. Whether or not this is true I wanted to say that you had an impact on me since I was little and I grew up watching your films from Cronos on. (I actually grew up above that shop and my family and I can verify that it was haunted as fuck!)

My second question: other than The Book of Life which you produced, do you think you will ever make a major film which explores Mexican folklore? Maybe La LLorona, or maybe some interpretation of the many horror tales in Guadalajara or Guanajuato?

Thank you so much for your time!

Well I used to have my makeup FX office at Ninos Heroes, and I used to sculpt little clay figures, so it's highly likely that they were mine, because I used to give away some monster clay figures here and there. You know, it's very very possible that this is true. It's hard for me to confirm it without a picture, but I was, when I was doing makeup FX, obviously I had to train myself as an illustrator, a painter, and a sculptor. So I have all those disciplines as a basis for my work, and I can and do sculpt, I can draw and illustrate to a degree, and I spend a long time - whenever I can, I try to put together a model kit and paint it because i love painting models, so very likely this is true. If you have any pictures, I would love you to show them to me, whether it is at a Comic-Con or book signing. I also gave away many, many drawings when I was a kid. A few friends of mine kept one or two, I don't know if i was any good, but I certainly did it with great enthusiasm.

Well, actually, I am extremely grateful for the life I have and the career I have had, but if you had asked me at age 25 what kind of movies I wanted to make, the movies I most wanted to make were Mexican movies. Yes. I very much wanted to make little ghost stories in Mexican towns in the provinces, or to adapt the great Mexican novels that depict Mexico as a very magical dark land, like the novels of Juan Rulfo or Augustin Janez. And there is always a little bit of heartbreak in my heart because I would love to be able to go back and do such small movies, but it is not safe for me to go to Mexico after the kidnapping of my father in 1998 and I regret it. I miss it, and that's another reason why I wanted to make my adaptation of the Count of Monte Christo which was set in Mexico, to be able to go back to a culture that I feel like - I think I am the proudest of the dialogue I write in Spanish, if you see Cronos, or more importantly for me, if you catch a small short film called Dona Lupe which is available on a collection called Cinema 16, this short is truly truly poorly produced, but has some really great dialogue, and I love the characters. It's a very miserable production, it cost me exactly $2,000, and it looks the $2,000, but the characters talk the way I talk in Spanish, I recognize my voice in there. I believe that as I die in my deathbed the one tear i know I will shed is for these movies that I never made.

It's hard for me to pick a movie of yours that I don't like and nearly every director has a movie that they consider their worst. What do you consider your worst movie (even though they're all great)? Also, we all know that you're a part of the hobbit crew. Which do you like more: Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones?

Hehehe. I feel that after doing the director's cut of Mimic, I came to like the movie again - I used to hate it - but audio-visually, cinematography, design, sound design, creature FX, I was always in love with that part of it. It is harder for me now, that I like Mimic, to choose a movie I don't love, because they each took 2 or 3 years of my life every time, and I give them that time because I love them.

I think that I have rarely been as transported in a movie theater as I was when I saw the Fellowship of the Ring unfold on the screen. I consider Peter Jackson one of the most gifted directors ever to tackle the fantasy genre. I believe that Game of Thrones, however, operates at a different level within arguably, the same genre. Game of Thrones has a social and sexual complexity that makes it a very different cutting-edge post-Vietnam Era fantasy story that deals with not only an impending enemy, or the purity of evil, but the relative evil that lurks within the hearts of all mankind. Therefore, tonally, I think that the works of Tolkien provides a completely different experience to Game of Thrones, but they are both masterworks of world creation.

What was your experience like when you first met Ron Perlman? Do you have any interesting stories pertaining the two of you?

Hahaha! Many, many that I cannot reveal. But I can tell everyone that Ron is secretly a fat man. He loves sweets, and it takes great follow-through for him to diet and train before we make one movie together. I am his torturer, and a fire barrier, a firewall, between him and the flan. If he was left to his own devices, Ron would be all jiggle and would look just like me.

I first met him over Indian food in a restaurant in LA on Wilshire Boulevard. And we started our friendship by ordering dessert before the main course! A) because I didn't know I could afford the whole meal, and B) because I always try to start my meals with dessert. We met to talk about Chronos, and Ron, I remember distinctly, Ron was dressed in what looked like a Miami Vice suit, he had like a blue Miami vice suit, with a silver bolt in the back of his jacket, very very hardcore 1990s! Big shoulder pads. And i was already such a fan of his, that I was absolutely overwhelmed to meet one of my favorite actors to discuss a project of mine. This was 1989, or 1988. 1989, it was.

What was the name of the restaurant and where do you get your flan?

It was called Bombay Palace.

And I recommend very much that you combine - here's the dessert I like for you to try - you order Kulfi ice cream, and mix it with another dessert called Gulab jamun, which are fried milk balls, and this is heaven on earth. A calorie bomb.

Where do I get my flan? My wife makes THE MOST AMAZING FLAN ON EARTH. Unfortunately, it's also the most closely watched flan on earth. So I can only serve myself reasonable portions.

Hey man, what are the contents of your perfect sandwich?

I love bologna, then a little bit of turkey, if at all possible, multigrain bread, if i'm not on a diet pastrami, a little bit of cheese... I'm getting hungry... mayo, a little bit of sundried tomatoes, I'm a sandwich maker! When I go to work at the house, that is all I eat. A little bit of dijon mustard, and 2 drops of truffle oil.

That sandwich recipe is called "The Fatso."

Or "El Gordo."

Whatever happened to that haunted mansion movie? I was so excited when I heard about that.

Well, I spent 2 weeks ago, I went back to Disneyland with the executives with whom I am developing the screenplay. It's a hard screenplay to crack. We've done it a few times. We are on our third or fourth draft, with 2 different writing teams, and I think the main thing is to try to combine everything that is great about the ride into the movie, and to make it a really intense but with a sense of fun - just like the ride. It's a tough balance, and I would be happy to report if we had the screenplay. We always feel like we are very close, but not yet. We have developed 50-60 pieces of art, We've developed maquettes of the Hat Box Ghost, over the body and face of Doug Jones, but we have not succeeded yet in cracking the screenplay. I have to believe that Disney will make this movie as soon as we crack the screenplay, but until then we cannot tackle it. It is a movie I would love to direct, but I would be happy to just produce it if the timing is not right. I, by the way, was named Guest for the Day for the Haunted Mansion the last time I did, which gave me unlimited access to ride the mansion several times during the day. Unfortunately it was just the moment my left knee decided to bust and I had to go back home with a busted knee.

Do you get a chance to play video games every once in a while? What is the latest game you've enjoyed? Thanks

Well, I play video games constantly. I mean, I dabble on the games with mostly my 2 daughters, they are often my wingmen, or I am the wingman for their campaigns. The latest game I played was Wolfenstein: The New Order, I am about halfway through, I am enjoying it, you know. But before that, I think my daughters and I started The Last of Us.

We like it!

And my daughters and I enjoy playing whenever the time allows, we play games that have years and years of playability, like beautiful Katamari.

You're know for having insects pop up a lot in your films, is there a particular reason for that?

Well, I am sort of an amateur biologist, and I am very biologically curious, and you can see it on my movies. Jim Cameron jokingly told me one day that there is no autopsy scene that I would not like because I basically have had mortuary or forensic scenes of a monster or a human in Cronos, Mimic, Hellboy, Pacific Rim, The Strain, and Crimson Peak! To continue the answer, as a child I was surrounded by insects in my grandmother's house, and I found them to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I spent many hours reading about them, particularly in the books of a famous entomologist that was very influential on me, called Fabre. I highly recommend his work to all of you. I became sort of an amateur entomologist, because I think that insects are creatures that are so unnatural that they are fantastical and out of this world.

There was a line on Mimic on the screenplay, it never got shot, but in the screenplay there was a line that said "They have six legs, multiple eyes, composite mouths, white blood, and no heart. How can we possibly ever think we understand them?"

It was a good line.

Do you have any plans doing any type of miniseries for TV?

I would love to do a mini-series for TV. It was really great to see a miniseries as I was growing up, I love the BBC miniseries, and I think that much to the point, you can adapt some great books in that format. I think that I have no immediate plans of doing it, but my favorite thing to do would be to do a horror anthology program in the vein of Night Gallery, which was one of the most important TV programs when I was growing up as a kid, where you can present one or two really really scary short stories every week and then it all depends on linking them through the host, I used to also love Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and I particularly enjoyed a few of the episodes that Hitchcock himself directed.

Big fan!

What drew you to directing and who plays the biggest influence on you?

Well, I was directing before I even realized that it was called directing, when I was about 8 years old. I was doing it with my father's super 8 camera, and my toys from the Planet of the Apes movies, and the found objects - I did one of my shorts about a serial killer potato. I don't still have it, thank God, but it was a serial killer potato that dreamt of conquering the world, that murdered my mother and my brothers, and then stepped outside and was crushed by a car. The biggest thing to me, is a man whose work I have studied to the point of writing a book about him when I was 27, a book that was published in Spain & Mexico, a book on Alfred Hitchcock. The reason why he inspires me is because there was a very painful honesty that seeped into his movies about the way he saw the world as a dark and dangerous place. And he was very articulate about his craft, making it understandable for any beginner filmmaker, but more than what he said about his craft, the fact that the man, his personality, was in his films, because he was ultimately very unguarded about the darkness in him, that was the inspiration for me. I mean, I am who you see in my movies. I try to present the way I see the world in my movies sincerely and openly, and I am a very imperfect person, and I am a person with many many bad traits, and I try not to talk about them, but the one trait I am very very proud of is that i have never, to this day, at age 49, I have never undertaken a movie that I don't completely believe in. To the point where sometimes you sacrifice personal life, health, and most certainly time on this earth to create these little stories in the hopes that some people find them touching.

Hi Mr. Del Toro! There’s a pretty big H.P. Lovecraft fan-community on reddit, myself included, and we wanted to know a few things about the possible Mountains of Madness film.

/u/megadethbobtail says: "Do you know how important this undertaking is? Lovecraft fans have been waiting a long time for a great movie based on his work."

/u/AndSushi is concerned “about the disconnect between the script we've all read and the atmosphere of how the story really is? I'm sure he's heard it before, but it couldn't hurt for him to know that more Lovecraft fans are looking for something that really captures the feel of the story.”

/u/GavC asks: "is there any aspect of the book that will just be impossible, any scene that he already thinks, "oh shit, i'll have to change this for the screen? "

/u/wowbrow wanted “to make sure that the giant penguins won't be replaced by more traditional monsters”

I personally love your work, and want to know if the Kaiju in Pacific Rim had any Lovecraft inspiration. Rim is one of my favorite movies, and it screamed modern Lovecraft to me.

Yes, I am an equally big fan of his, if you browse my book Cabinet of Curiosities, you can see that I have in my house a life-size very, very accurate reproduction of H.P. Lovecraft in my library. And I recently supported the funding of the H.P. Lovecraft memorial bronze bust that a Kickstarter campaign led. And I think that I would love to be able to do that movie, it's unfortunately quite a big movie, and the material is particularly challenging for a studio to understand as a commercial movie. I have great hopes for it, and I wish that I could share it with everyone, i know there is one version of the screenplay circulating online, but be warned, this is a very old version of the screenplay, so for me, there is no way of showing you, but i re-iterate the promise, if the movie does not get made in the next 6-7 years, I will go to Universal and beg them to let me publish the screenplay along with the art that we did.

To a degree, it's almost impossible to shoot the book exactly as written, because the book has a very dry form, basically you have a minutely and very accurate scientific expedition diary of the exploration of Antarctica beat-by-beat, with not much character or anecdote, until the impossible breaks through with the apparition of the albino penguins, the discovery of the city, and the discovery of the remnants of the Old Ones, and the fossil records that the expedition stumbles on. You actually need to create character and anecdote to frame all those moments in the novel. So in that sense, a straight adaptation is very difficult. One of my favorite moments in the book is when they look back in the horizon and they see something horrible and indescribable, I think that that's a really difficult moment to have on-film because film is description. But I think that it should be attempted. And I will attempt to give my own solution to that moment.

Hi!

First of all thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. You are one of my favorite directors so you cannot imagine my excitement when I heard that you were planning on doing an AMA. Obviously there are a lot of questions that I could ask so I decided to narrow it down to three.

Firstly, one of the many reasons I am such a fan of your films is because of your eye for monsters. Now I know that you have always been intrigued by monsters, but do you have any idea as to why this is?

What is your favorite monster and why?

Lastly, I know that you have expressed interest in a Justice League Dark movie. As a huge fan of the comics, I was wondering if there are any characters that you are particularly interested in adapting.

Thanks again!

Well, I have said this in the past, so I hope i don't bore you by repeating it, but I think that we live or die under the tyranny of perfection. Socially, we are pushed towards being perfect. Physically, beautiful to conform to standards that are cruel and uncommon, to behave and lead our lives in a certain way, to demonstrate to the world that we are happy and healthy and all full of sunshine. We are told to always smile and never sweat, by multiple commercials of shampoo or beer.

And I feel that the most achievable goal of our lives is to have the freedom that imperfection gives us.

And there is no better patron saint of imperfection than a monster.

We will try really hard to be angels, but I think that a balanced, sane life is to accept the monstrosity in ourselves and others as part of what being human is. Imperfection, the acceptance of imperfection, leads to tolerance and liberates us from social models that I find horrible and oppressive.

My favorite monster of all time is the Frankenstein Creature. And it's because I basically - kids growing up, dream of being Spider-Man or Superman. I grew up wanting to be the Frankenstein monster, because when I was a kid, I was so transformed by the enormous humanity that Boris Karloff gave to the role, he was able to make the creature at once horrifying and vulnerable, and I completely completely felt a kinship and an empathy with the monster that I felt very few times in my life.

Well, one of my favorite monsters in every medium is Swamp Thing. So Swamp Thing, and Demon, as I mentioned before, and John Constantine, are very very interesting to me, as is Deadman. And many many others in the Dark DC Universe. When I was growing up, if I had to firmly land myself in one camp, with the exception of Morbius, Spider-Man, and Hulk, I was more firmly planted on the DC comics side as a kid.

Hi GDT! Thank you for sharing all your distinct and brilliant creativity with the world. I love your work and am excited to see your adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness come to fruition, no matter the MPAA rating (but please try to prepare a R-rated cut for separate release, if possible!) I am delighted that you are taking questions, because I have one that I would love for you to answer.

Towards the end of Pacific Rim, there is a sequence that I think contains some footage that is shown in "fast forward" relative to the speed at which it was shot. It is when Raleigh has taken Gipsy through the breach, and unstraps from the cockpit to move to Gipsy's core. The clip can be seen here, at the 1:20 mark: http://youtu.be/vmoN6Yn-mpo?t=1m20s I think the footage has been speeded up, but my friends think I am imagining this effect. I am probably somewhat biased since I may have been under the influence of psychedelics the first time I saw this scene, but I've since seen it plenty of times sober or otherwise intoxicated and I still feel that the footage appears to be moving extra fast! So please settle this so I might win back the respect of my peers: did you speed up any of the footage in Pacific Rim to make the action seem more kinetic?

You know, something I learned while shooting Blade 2 was to shoot at a high rate, meaning shoot some of the action in slow motion, and then print it at a rate of 22 or 24 frames, and that gave it the feeling of being faster whilst not being really super-jerky faster motion. So what you may have been noticing ( and please specify the drugs you were on) is that the scene that you talk about was in fact sped up, but probably to only 24 frames which is only normal speed, or at the most, 22 frames, which is still close to normal speed.

However, tell your peers that I would encourage them to respect you at any rate!

Hi Guillermo,

You're a favorite director of mine, mainly because your characters are all so varied in their ways. If you could make a film featuring just ONE of your characters who would it be?

Thank you!

P.S Who would win a fight between Ron Perlman and Doug Jones?

Well, you know, as far as characters go, I really would love to have made a whole movie just about Mako in Pacific Rim. Because my favorite part in that movie, other than the Hong Kong battle, which is the action sequence I am the proudest of, is the flashback to Mako as a child, which is almost fairytale in the way that it's staged. But that illuminates for me exactly who Mako is, at her most vulnerable. With her character and the character of Raleigh, which are the 2 main characters in Pacific Rim, I tried something a little crazy, which is to actually give them LESS lines, less dialogue lines, than almost any other character in the movie. Because i viewed them both as loners. But that actually creates in me more and more desire to know more about Mako's past, between the time she was in the flashback and the time when the movie starts on Pacific Rim 1, so she is the one I am the most curious about.

Haha! That's not even a contest. I think that A) They are both lovers, not fighters, but if push comes to shove, I would put my money on Ron.

Hello! I'm really looking forward to The Strain this weekend. You are one of my favorite directors and just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to do this.

Do you have a creature that you've created that stands out to you? As a favorite or any other reason?

You are involved in comics, with your adaption of Hellboy and with comic versions of The Strain and Pacific Rim. Do you have a favorite series or graphic novel?

Are there any films that you are looking forward to seeing that are coming out soon?

Thanks again!

If I can nominate a couple - I am very very fond of the Pale Man and the Faun: I am incredibly fond of Otachi, Leatherback, and Knifehead, on Pacific Rim: but I am equally in love with my vision of Abe Sapien on Hellboy. And my version of Kroenen on Hellboy. AND finally, the vampires on The Strain!

Yes. I curiously enough don't read that many superhero comics that contain no monsters. I like superheroes that are monsters. For example, Swamp Thing, particularly on the brilliant run by Alan Moore. I love Demon, in the original Jack Kirby inception. I love John Constantine, on the Hellblazer series, and so on and so forth. But my more personal taste in graphic novels and comics tends to go towards the underground comic or indie comic sensibilities. I love and recommend the very disturbing work of Jim Woodring, Chester Brown, Ben Katchor, Charles Burns, Robert Krumb, Richard Corben, and many many others that we could geek out for hours.

Well, at the risk of sounding really nationalistic, the movie I most want to see is to re-watch the movie of my compadre Alejandro González Iñárritu. It's called Birdman, and I have already seen it, but I very much long to see it again.