Travis Beacham Quotes

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.

Once you start putting in political subtext, it does create intellectually challenging science-fiction, but with ‘Pacific Rim,’ I always thought it would be a shame if kids couldn’t go see this movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters because it seemed to have a political point of view.

We wanted it to be that you could go to the comic shop and read about the back story of ‘Pacific Rim’ and the drama inherent in it.

As I’ve probably said before, television exposes writers to far more of the nitty-gritty than film does.

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.

If you look, like, in 1960, there was no such thing as an astronaut. It was a totally fanciful concept, but nine years later or whatever, we were landing on the moon, which is just astonishing.

The writer is just so much more intimately involved in the television process than the feature film process.

I do tend to be on the more optimistic end of things.

I think, television and comics, what’s appealing to me as a writer about both of those mediums is that they allow you to sort of let the story unfold in its own time as opposed to trying to compress it into a two-hour discreet unit of narrative.

You don’t necessarily have to have your movie made to have success.

I remember starting working on the concept and the script for ‘Pacific Rim’ with a very, very conscious decision to say, ‘I don’t want any of these big sequences to take place in America,’ because I feel like that’s become so regular to the disaster genre, and then it sort of devolves into landmark stomping.

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.

If it involved giants on any level, as a kid I was really wrapped up in that.

Television has always been an appealing medium for writers to work in.

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.

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?’

You can only see ‘Star Wars’ for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it’s a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.

I think my earliest ‘Star Wars’ memory that I have was from ‘Return of the Jedi.’ I distinctly remember the scene with the rancor under Jabba’s Palace.

Making ‘Pacific Rim’ was a lot like what you imagined making movies would be like when you were 12.

With bad sci-fi – sci-fi that I don’t really like – you watch it and get the impression that you’re just seeing exactly what they created because they needed it in the movie. You feel like there’s nothing more beyond that.

‘Carnival Row’ is us looking at the stranger; ‘The Curiosity’ is the stranger looking at us.

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.’

Legendary is in the unique position in that they have the resources to take risks, which I think has really benefitted ‘Pacific Rim.’

That is always really fun when you get to work with a director you understand and uses references you can identify with.

I was way into ‘Voltron,’ Ray Harryhausen: anything with giant monsters, I was really into. Even dinosaurs – for a while, I wanted to be a paleontologist. So it’s almost like primal, ancestral mythology to me, this fascination with monsters.

I think that’s where the magic happens, when you get a bunch of people who are really, incredibly talented and good at what they do and very passionate about the project that they’re working on and in love with it. I think that’s when you get something that’s really special.

It seems so cliched and obvious, but write the movie you want to see in the theater.

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.

There’s a lot of possibility in the ‘Pacific Rim’ universe for additional stories to be told, whether that’s additional graphic novels or animated series or video games or movie sequels.