Concept art of a pivotal ‘Batman v Superman’ scene, featured in the Art of the Film book
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I carefully avoided the car commercial aesthetics or the army recruitment video aesthetics. I avoided making a movie about an army with ranks. I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world. I was very careful how I built the movie.
One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character. One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people…
I have been offered movies that have huge budgets that have war at its centre and I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ I have two daughters and I wanted to make this movie for kids. It’s my lightest movie and yet it’s one of the most precise, adult exercises in world design I’ve ever made. It has the craft of a 48-year-old (del Toro’s age) and the heart of a 12-year-old.
What I wanted was for kids to see a movie where they don’t need to aspire to be in an army to aspire for an adventure. And I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers…it has the language of an adventure movie. I want kids to come out of the movie and say, I want to be a Jaeger pilot! I really think that would be my dream come true.
Guillermo del Toro
ever had a dream with such breathtaking obvious Symbolism that it’s like your subconscious contracted out to a shitty art film screenwriter
By Gideon Lichfield
Quartz: December 29, 2012
Google published its annual Zeitgeist survey a couple of weeks ago, which tracks the year’s most popular searches in different countries. It breaks them down by category—people, movies, shopping, etc.—and for most countries, one of the categories is “How to…?” We took the top result for each country that had this category and translated them where necessary. (In a couple of cases, we weeded out spurious results caused by quirks of language.)
There’s some interesting variation. The most pressing challenges for many nationalities are kissing or slimming, but the Japanese are evidently obsessed with making their cellphones last longer, Colombians with cupcakes, and Russians with not being quite so mean to each other.
Most popular Google searches beginning “How to…”
Argentina: how to update Facebook
Australia: how to love
Brazil: how to remove Facebook
Canada: how to rock
Chile: how to make a family tree
Colombia: how to make cupcakes
Czech Republic: how to lose weight
Denmark: how to kiss
Finland: how to get a fever [for the purposes of sick leave]
France: how to lose weight
Hungary: how to kiss
Ireland: how to draw
Israel: how to make money
Italy: how to have sex
Japan: how to save [battery] power
Kenya: how to abort
Mexico: how to vote
Netherlands: how to survive
New Zealand: how to screenshot
Nigeria: how to love
Norway: how to write
Poland: how to delete Facebook
Portugal: how to lose weight
Romanian: how to kiss
Russian: how to become nicer
Senegal: how to address an envelope
Singapore: how to rock
Slovakia: how to pick up babes [i.e., women]
South Africa: how to kiss
Spain: how to install WhatsApp
Sweden: how to make out [i.e., kiss]
Ukrainian: how to lose weight
United Kingdom: how to draw
United States: how to love
Bloody Finland
You’re allowed to be excited about the little things. You’re allowed to be goofy. You’re allowed to be dorky about your favorite tv show, to make blanket forts, to enjoy cheesy movies, even just to sleep with stuffed animals. You’re allowed to do any of the things that make life a little more bearable. It’s fine, ok?
Even in poetry I forgive you nothing
not even your new empire of grief.
— Hera Lindsay Bird, from “Wild Geese by Mary Oliver,” Hera Lindsay Bird
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