TRAVIS BEACHAM

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.

When I saw 'Jurassic Park' as a kid, that was the first time I thought about making movies for a living.

When you watch zombie movies, and people say, 'What's going on? What are we going to do?' it's like they live in a world where they've never seen zombie movies.

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.

When you have a movie that has big stars in it... like, Will Smith does a great job in 'I Am Legend,' and it's a magnetic performance, but he's always Will Smith. That's not his fault. That's not anyone's fault. He's the center of it, and he's a movie star. But when you see something like 'Jurassic Park,' Sam Neill is Alan Grant.

I really fixated on any time there was any kind of monster in 'Star Wars,' even to the briefest second. As a kid, it really captivated my imagination.

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

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.

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.

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

If you squint at 'Deadwood,' you can see 'Game of Thrones' coming. That's the show that first got me thinking 'Carnival Row' could be a series.

Usually, you come into it, and there's half a dozen different views or angles on what different people are wanting to see, from the producer to the director to the writers to the actors. I think 'Pacific Rim' has been an example of something that illustrates what you get if everyone is driving towards a common purpose.

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

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.

I grew up in the '80s, and you had these original, big-budget sci-fi adventure things all the time, not based on any source material - you'd have 'Gremlins,' 'Back to the Future,' 'E.T.' 'Ghostbusters,' the list goes on and on. I would love it so much if 'Pacific Rim' was but the first in a new wave of that sort of thing.

You have to think about space differently; you have to think about time differently when you're talking about a graphic novel versus a movie.

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.

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

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

You don't naturally tend to identify with someone who's very different from you on the outside.

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

A lot of screenwriters write certain characters, certain parts, with actors in mind. I don't really tend to do that. I describe them as specifically as I can, but I don't really picture anyone in particular.

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.

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