Steven S. DeKnight interview: Pacific Rim Uprising, sequels, and losing Charlie Hunnam

Steven S. DeKnight has had an incredibly impressive career. Starting as a writer on the MTV series Undressed, the filmmaker moved onto the popular vampire hunting series Buffy, helping produce the spin-off series Angel.

From there, DeKnight worked on SmallVille and Dollhouse before eventually creating his first show - Spartacus - and eventually acting as showrunner on the Marvel series Daredevil.

Now, though, comes DeKnights biggest challenge yet: directing the sequel to Guillermo Del Toro's monster-mashing blockbuster Pacific Rim.

The Independent sat down with the filmmaker to talk about Uprising (his feature-film directorial debut), the movie's possible sequels, and why Charlie Hunnam did not retun.

This is your first film as a director, after many years in television. Why this, Pacific Rim, now?

Completely unintentional. People ask ‘Why did I chose this as my directorial debut’ but Pacific Rim chose me. I had actually written a small psychological thriller called The Dead and the Dying. It was literally three people in a house, the whole movie. And I sent it to [producer] Mary Parent, who I met year ago. She read it, loved it, and wanted to set it up with one of the studios to be my feature debut. My plan was always to do the small movie, then a couple of medium movies, then hopefully someone would be foolish enough to give me a big movie. So, we were working on it, the studio were great — it was not development hell or anything — but getting a small movie through the studio system is practically impossible. There are too many other big things going on, and they’re just not built for small movies. Me and Mary were both getting a bit frustrated, so Mary called me up one day and said ‘Maybe this was not meant to be your directorial debut.’ I thought ‘Oh s**t, she’s pulling out, back to TV with me.’ But then she followed up with Pacific Rim 2. I thought ‘Wow, this is a lot bigger than three people in a house.’ But, I’m a massive Guillermo fan, ever since Cronos, and I grew up watching Ultraman, Spaceman, and all those man-in-suit monster movies. I love that genre. Quite frankly, any wannabe director would be foolish to say no to an opportunity like this. So once I found out why Guillermo was not doing the film — because I did not want to step on Guillermo’s toes — but I found out he was not available because of another movie. That was The Shape of Water as it turns out. Just that small little movie. Once I knew it was not him being given the boot, then I had to go through various stages of approval, the last one being Guillermo. Because he had to give his blessing, otherwise it was not going to happen. But we immediately hit it off because of our love for the genre, movies and comic books. It was like winning the lottery, and completely out of the blue — not what I was planning at all.

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Did it feel like diving straight into the deep end?

Oh, definitely! It was diving into the middle of the ocean. Thankfully, I had all this experience in TV. If I had not written and produced and directed shows in television, I would never have been able to have made such a huge undertaking.

That jump from TV to film. That may not have happened many years ago. Why do you think the lines have blurred so much?

You really started to see it around HBO’s The Sopranos, when TV started shooting more cinematically. It eventually became more expensive to shoot, with longer schedules, just like the movies. It was fantastic that with cable and streaming that they adopted the cinematic feel and look. What helped was not doing 22 episodes a year. I’ve done that, for many years of TV. You go into that knowing five will be great, five to six will be terrible, and the rest you think we just swapped by. When you drop that down to 10 or 15 you really begin to be able to craft it like a movie. So TV learned a lot from movies and their storytelling. Now movies are learning from TV and their practices. We put together a writers room for this movie, which is something from the TV world, and now they’re doing that on big movies, which I think is a fantastic idea.

Obviously, you’ve been a showrunner, and Pacific Rim is looking to expand into many more films. These cinematic universes are basically huge TV shows — you could call Kevin Feige the shortener of the Marvel universe. Are you positioning yourself as the ‘showrunner’ of Pacific Rim alongside Guillermo?

Why not! I had the pleasure to be part of the Transformers think tank, when they were planning the next 13 movies. Whether any of that planning happens, who knows. But that process was fascinating. And nobody does that better than Kevin Feige. What he’s done is absolutely brilliant — to look at a franchise and plan that out as a TV show is brilliant. That’s why so many fail, because they do the movies as a standalone, not thinking where they are going. Kevin’s brilliance is that every movie is a piece of the puzzle, especially now with Avengers: Infinity War.

You’ve made that leap now from working on TV to film. Was the cinema where you always wanted to be?

When I first started my career, I wanted to be a features writer, with the aim to direct. But I couldn’t get into the feature world. I was writing one feature after another that nobody wanted to make. I accidentally fell into TV through a friend of mine. I’m so glad I did because I’ve always loved television, of long-form drama. I always planned to go back to films, but things were going so well with TV that it took much longer than I anticipated. When I finished Spartacus, I spent a year developing a space action military show for Stars which didn’t end up going. After that, I decided to take some time off, write this thriller that I had been planning for years, and go straight into that. But then Daredevil came up. I never dreamed that my first movie would be of this staggering magnitude. But I’d always wanted to do a big science fiction movie.

Do you prefer the writing side or directing side?

It’s a little of both. I will first and foremost always be a writer at heart, because that’s how I came up the ranks. But writings a lonely proposition. You’re just holed up, beating yourself up. Directing is so much more interactive, but you have a lot less control because there are so many elements. But when you’re writing, you’re the only person in charge — at least until the notes come in. So it’s a split. I love both so much, I wouldn’t want to give either up.

It must be quite thrilling now to have your name up in lights as director of this huge movie?

Absolutely. Thankfully I had done some directing on the TV side. Because there was no way I could have jumped into directing this without that experience.

Pacific Rim also has a very diverse cast, something you see more on TV. Was that something you wanted to bring over?

Definitely. But even more than that I wanted to take this idea from Guillermo’s first movie, that countries from all over the world are coming together. In the first movie, you have these Australian pilots piloting an Australian Jaeger, Chines pilots piloting a Chinese Jaeger. I wanted to make the Pan-pacific Fighting Core a truly global fighting force. So I did away with nationalities of Jaegers and mixed up the pilots. You could have an English pilot with an America pilot, or Chinese pilot with South American pilot, really push that idea of unity. The biggest thing for that multinational cast was taking that narrative from the first movie and push that forward.

Has Guillermo seen it?

That’s an interesting question. He has been so busy with The Shape of Water, going on that world wind tour and winning the Oscar. I know he has seen early cuts that we have notes on, but I don’t know whether he has seen the final cut.

That’s the blessing you need!

Absolutely. The ultimate blessing.

There are many aspects in the film that set up future instalments. Are you looking at this franchise as your future as a director?

When I was developing Uprising I was absolutely making notes about the next chapter and where I would like to see it go. I don’t know whether that’s where they will go, we just made sure not to paint ourselves into a corner. So we know, if the box offie is great, we’re not asking ‘What do we do now.’ It’s always good to plan for another instalment, because the last thing you want is to be flat footed.

How do you avoid the trap of doing a sequel that’s not just bigger than the first?

The last thing I wanted to do was imitate what Guillermo did. That’s the reason most of the action scenes are during the day, because he did such a fantastic job of those scenes at night and underwater. I didn’t want the audiences to think this is just a retread of the first movie. Instead, I wanted to take the spirit of the first and say ‘Here a new instalment, that’s familiar but different.’ I think the worst thing you can do in a sequel is recreate the exact magic of what came before. The Empire Strikes Back is the perfect example, where they didn’t try to repeat the first. That’s what makes that movie so great — it was different, it was darker. It had all the same elements but was not trying to be the same movie.

With such a prolific back catalogue — what would mark your proudest achievement?

I think they’re all my proudest achievements for different reasons. Spartacus was the first show I created and ran. After a rocky opening, that eventually got to where we got to. I was very proud of what we did with Daredeveil. And extremely proud of this movie. Even some stuff that didn’t work out as well as it should have, I’m still proud of that.

One noticeable thing about this movie was Charlie Hunnam was missing. What happened there? Did him being unavailable scupper your plans?

I had originally planned a whole story with Raleigh Becket. And Charlie Hunnam is a wonderful guy, and I spoke to him about my plans — which he really liked — but unfortunately it was announced shortly after that he would be shooting a remake of Papillon, his passion project. Then I saw the dates and knew it was not good. So that was tricky. But I wanted to make sure it was open for his possible return. We spoke about, at various times, his death between movies, or that he disappeared, but none of that seemed right. So we mention that in this movie, and I know for fans of the first it will be a bit of a mystery, but hopefully I’ll answer that in the next movie. I have a really, really cool way to reintroduce him. And I would love to see Charlie Hunnam alongside John Boyega, that would be a lot of fun.

John and Scott Eastwood’s dynamic is a lot of fun.

As a director, you always hope your cast will have that chemistry and not hate each other. But they were fantastic.

A more technical question: why change the aspect ratios in-between films?

You’re the first person to ask that! I love that! I’ve always wanted to work in the 2.40 aspect ratio. I grew up watching movies in the cinema, and that’s what I saw. That was the movie experience. I would see these beautiful, anamorphic 2.40 film, and then go back to my 4:3 television in standard definition. For me, there was something about that ratio that is so cinematic, and I wanted this movie to have that throw back to the late 70s, early 80s, action adventure movies. When Dan Mindel, our DP came on, I asked him about doing that and he said ‘I love 2.40! We should shoot in anamorphic and not spherical.’ I said ‘Now you’re talking my language!’ Obviously, there’s a reason Guillermo shot 1.85 in the first movie, because of the size of the Kaiju and Jaegers size, and having that extra top and bottom really helps out. It was not easy framing the action in 2.40 in a movie like this, but it was a challenge we call felt we wanted to take on for those cinematic reasons. If I were ever going to do the next movie, I would want to shoot 2.40 for the bulk and IMAX for the big sequences. The combination would be the sweet spot.

When I saw the change, and knew about your past as a TV showrunner, I immediately thought that was the hallmark of someone going ‘Oh my God! I get to work in cinema! I need to do this!’

Oh, absolutely. I’m the first to admit that. There have been several TV show — I pushed on Spartacus to go 2.40, but they were like ‘You can’t do that on TV!’ Part of it was that for years and years I tried to get my TV work at least letterboxed, but they were against it. Literally, I was pushing for a letterbox version and they said ‘We can’t do that because of international, because there are many international markets that still use 4:3’. I was like ‘That’s insane!’ But I wanted this to feel like the cinematic experience of when I was a child.

What is the next project from here?

Hopefully that little thriller, which I’m hoping to squeeze in here, unless Pacific Rim 3 calls or some other big project.

Pacific Rim Uprising is in cinemas now.