It is a punishingly hot summer day in Homebush, the relentless heat bouncing off the giant concrete pad we’re standing on, leaving everyone sweaty and frazzled. Crew members take shelter under portable pergolas when they’re not rushing back and forth to do whatever needs to be done in preparation for the next shot. There are dozens of extras milling about, many of them – the poor bastards – in full black combat gear and armour. One of them is wearing a fitbit – he expects to clock over 10 kilometres today. Running. In the heat.
We’re good to go. Director Steven S. DeKnight, a TV veteran making his feature debut, calls action. Military vehicles emblazoned with the heraldry of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps start rumbling across the concrete. Troops of soldiers jog in formation while techs in coveralls scurry about clutching clipboards and tools.
Through all this organised chaos stride John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, and Cailee Spaeny, playing Stacker Pentercost, Nate Lambert, and Amara Namani, respectively. Cailee/Amara looks around excitedly, rattling off dialogue and pointing up at stacks of shipping containers draped in vast green tarpaulins, storeys high.
Later, when the post production team’s work is done, that’s where the Jaegers will stand.
We’re on the Australian set of Pacific Rim: Uprising, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 robots vs monsters delight, Pacific Rim. Soon the company will decamp to China for further shooting, but for now Sydney is Kaiju central, and the forge of the next chapter in the Pacific Rim saga.
Shooting in China was always on the cards – although its domestic take was less than stellar the first Pacific Rim’s popularity in such foreign markets made the sequel possible – so shooting in Australia made logistical sense, DeKnight tells us. “There’s an action scene that’s based in Australia,” he adds, but refuses to be drawn on the details.
Set a decade after the first film, Uprising sees a new generation of heroes stepping up to the plate to take on a new threat from the trans-dimensional giant mosnters called “Kaiju” in the film’s jargon. Original star Charlie Hunnam is out – this time our leading man is Boyega, who’s in the middle of a very busy year. Not only is he reprising his Star Wars role in The Last Jedi, he has a part in the tech thriller The Circle, a major role in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit and “…I think I’m playing an animated rabbit in Watership Down.” (turns out he is)
Boyega’s character is the estranged son of the heroic Stacker Pentecost played by Idris Elba in the first movie. A rebel with a chip on his shoulder, Pentecost Junior is making his way in the world as a black market salvager when the call to adventure hits.
“Jake’s been living under the shadow of his father,” Boyega explains. “Stacker Pentercost, in the first movie, saved the world. And he starts to realise that they didn’t have the best relationship and that led him to have another life – basically just being a crook. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but stuff happens and he ends being given the opportunity to be a Jaeger pilot and to redeem himself.”
His journey sees him team up with young Amara Namani, a prodigy when it comes to the technology behind the giant robots called Jaegers, and together the two outcasts must find a way to overcome their old emotional wounds and defeat the new threat (as is always the case with tentpole films these days, exact plot details are being kept under wraps).
Amara is the first feature role for 18 year old Cailee Spaeny, who landed it after two and half years on the LA audition circuit. “She’s very independent,” Spaeny, clearly excited, says of her character. “She has to figure out how to work well with others because she likes it her way and she makes that very clear. No one scares her. She doesn’t really gauge who is above her and who is below her – she just knows she’s talented and can do great things.”
“At first Jake just sees her as a little bug on his shoulder to get rid of,” Boyega says. “But she grows on him. She goes through the process he went through when she joins the cadets, when he went through Jaeger pilot training.”
Yes, the cadets – the world of Pacific Rim is much bigger in this one. Whereas the first film saw the heroic PPDC were pretty much one last, desperate strike against the Kaiju, Uprising lets us see what a fully funded giant robot army looks like.
“Things have really moved on and there’s a bit more money,” muses Burn Gorman, reprising his role as scientist Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. “In the first one it felt like they were really under duress and they were working on a budget and scrambling for ideas, whereas this is a fully funded science department. Still very much looking for solutions to safeguard against any new Kaiju attacks.”
That means, of course, more – and better – Jaegers. None of which we’re allowed to see, of course. DeKnight assures us that, when we do see the finished product up on the screen, we will be impressed.
“This is several generations of Jaegers later,” he explains. “And humanity has had time to perfect and upgrade them, and we wanted to be able to attack the action a little bit differently. So each of the Jaegers has a very defined…” he settles on a gaming term. “…what we call the Y button. Each of them has a special ability, a special talent. Each of them has a personality of their own. Some of the Jaegers are faster and can be more acrobatic, some are bruisers, stick to the ground and have the heavier weaponry, but we really wanted to make sure that each one you could really distinguish and identify with.”
It is, let us not dissemble, a massive undertaking, especially for a first time feature director. Still, DeKnight has form – he created the bloody and ambitious Spartacus series for Starz and served as showrunner on the Marvel/Netflix series, Daredevil. Prior to that, he apprenticed under one of the modern eras most acclaimed TV creators.
“Thankfully, I trained with Joss Whedon so I feel like I’ve had a good background in that I got to direct for him on Angel and Dollhouse and then I got to do Daredevil, my most recent thing. So when people ask me, ‘Oh it’s a huge movie! How do you feel?’ It’s just a longer shoot schedule than I was doing in television. I was doing action and visual effects and genre stuff in TV, and usually that was a 10 to 12 day shoot. This one’s a 90 day shoot. So it’s pretty much the same skill set, just bigger.”
He also has the support of original director Guillermo del Toro, serving as a producer on the sequel, who imparted an important secret: “The big movies are in some ways a little easier than the small movies because you’re so well taken care of, but the big movies are a marathon. We’re on around day 50 of 90. But everybody’s in great spirits and it’s fantastic.”
Boyega is also producing, through his company Upperroom Entertainment Limited. “It’s fantastic that I’m a producer,” he tells us. “Because I get to have much more creative control – especially helping them out with casting and that kind of creative control. And then on the acting side it’s business as usual. It’s all been fun.”
He’s also been enjoying the chance to do more stunts and fight scenes. “I’ve loved it. I’ll be honest with you, with this I didn’t feel quite like I was gonna do as much, and I ended up doing a lot. It’s actually more physical than Star Wars!”
Pacific Rim: Uprising is in cinemas from March 22, 2018.
