Caliburn24 here at the P.P.D.C. Jaegaer Academy.
Travis Beacham, the screenwriter of Pacific Rim and also 2010’s Clash of the Titans, was interviewed by Legendary News about the new graphic novel, Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero. The prequel graphic novel is in hardback and covers the story of Tendo Choi (played by Clifton Collin Jr.), Dr. Shoenfeld, and brothers Raleigh (played by Charlie Hunnam) and Yancy Becket. Beacham was asked about what the graphic novel covers that is different from the film, “Yes, the comic book is a prequel to the movie actually. The movie in a sense begins very late into the Kaiju war. This is maybe ten plus years after the first Kaiju hits. The graphic novel covers the very beginning of that. It covers the first Kaiju, the first Jaeger, and it really established a sense of how our world became the world that we see in the movie.”
Beacham then discusses the writer’s prespective of the graphic novel, “From a writer’s perspective, I think the graphic novel covers the parts of the story of the world that we wish that we can cover in the movie, but you know, the movie is its own thing. The graphic novel goes back to the beginning, it tells the story of the first Kaiju attack, it tells the story how the Jaegers were invented, it shows you what its like at the Jaeger academy. So we are filling in these parts of the world that we’d imagined from the beginning but didn’t get the chance to use in the movie.”
He continues the interview noting the close tie-in of the filmmakers with this licensed product, “We are meeting characters at pivotal moments in their life that aren’t necessarily covered in the movie. I think what I really like about it and what I like about the process of having done it is that its not something where we’ve licensed it out or we’ve left it in anyone else’s hands. This is in every sense a product of this same exact people who created the movie. Legendary’s publishing it, Guillermo oversaw it every step of the way, and its written by the screenwriter of the movie and it’s a seamless artifact that bleeds right into that world which is something that I am really proud of.” Pacific Rim opens on July 12th.