Once Guillermo was on board as The Hobbit’s director, financial difficulties with MGM led to the film’s delay. After two years cooling his heels in New Zealand waiting for production to begin, Guillermo ultimately left the project, intent on making up lost time and getting back to work.

Back in the United States, Guillermo met with James Cameron, who asked him if he was still interested in making a film of H. P. Lovecraft’s novel At the Mountains of Madness—because, if so, Cameron wanted to produce it.

Guillermo had been making notes—and notebook entries—on Mountains of Madness for more than fifteen years, and with Cameron fresh off the billion-dollar-plus success of Avatar, it seemed at last the stars would align to bring Guillermo’s most avidly desired project to fruition. Tom Cruise and Ron Perlman were cast in lead roles, and many months of intense preparation began, including astonishing creature designs, breathtaking production artwork, detailed storyboards of the entire film, location scouting, and more.

Then, at the last moment, the studio pulled the plug. No R-rated, two-hundred-million-dollar film had ever been greenlit to production, and the studio feared that the movie wouldn’t turn a profit without the child and teen audience. Heartbroken, Guillermo leapt into another film he’d been developing with Legendary Pictures, Pacific Rim—the ultimate giant monster-versus-giant robot movie.

“I think I’ve been preparing for Pacific Rim all my life,” Guillermo says. “When I was a kid, I saw The War of the Gargantuas in a shitty theater in Mexico, and I got a glass of pee thrown on my head from the balcony, and I stayed to finish the movie. That’s how much I love kaijus, you know?”

Pacific Rim was the perfect remedy for all the emotional and psychic wounds Guillermo had suffered while trying to make The Hobbit and At the Mountains of Madness—then emerging without a picture to shoot after four years. As he puts it, “Pacific Rim has been the best experience for me in producing and directing a movie that I’ve ever had.”

Best of all, this big summer movie embraces many of Guillermo’s favorite themes and motifs: the balancing act between the forces of chaos and order, darkness and light, human and mechanism entwined, duking it out with gigantic weird creatures from another dimension—much like H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones.

Filled with new creative fervor, Guillermo returned to working out designs and ideas in his notebooks. “Pacific Rim has a number of pages, which means a lot,” he relates. “If I have more than two pages on a movie, that means I’ve been at it for a long time because I don’t write that often in the book anymore.”

He hasn’t written in the notebook since completing Pacific Rim, but he adds, “Now that I’m doing [the TV version of] The Strain and Crimson Peak, I may restart. But I really want to finish this volume, so I can put it in a safe place, and I can start carrying a new notebook again. Once I’m not working on a supersecret project, I’ll be relaxed.”

What of the future? For a writer-director with such dark visions, Guillermo’s outlook is enduringly hopeful. Paraphrasing science fiction legend Theodore Sturgeon, one of his favorite writers, Guillermo observes, “There’s the famous Sturgeon’s Law, which is, ‘Ninety percent of everything is shit.’ Now the way I live my life is the del Toro Law, which is, ‘Ten percent of everything is awesome.’ You know what I’m saying? I agree with Sturgeon, except I think that it’s amazing that we get ten percent.

“All I know is that hatred makes life so much shorter and bitter. And every time you can give love, give love, if you can—and you can’t all the time, I mean I’m not a candy-ass Teletubby, I’m a human being, you know. I hate people and I love people. But whenever you can, just fucking love. If you can choose, choose love.”

^{Kaiju concept by Guy Davis.}

^{Concept of Stacker Pentecost in his office in the Shatterdome by Vicki Pui.}

^{Film teaser poster art by Hugo Martin.}

^{Mako Mori (Mana Ashida) is rescued by the Jaeger Coyote Tango.}

^{Sketch of the Chinese Jaeger Crimson Typhoon by Francisco Ruiz Velasco.}

^{Concept of a Precursor by Keith Thompson.}

^{Concept of the Kaiju Knifehead by Wayne Barlowe.}

^{Del Toro applying some more patina to the Alaskan wall set during shooting.}

^{NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 7}

–Ultra Primes (T1.9) 14, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 40, 50, 65, 85, 100, 135, 160 mm for each unit Macro Primes (T21) 16, 24, 40 mm, VariablePrimes (T2.2) 16–30 mm 29–60 mm, 55–105 mm zooms 15–40 mm, 28–76 mm, 17–80 mm 24, 290 mm, each unit.

–Cold colors in the Tokyo FB except for the shoe in Mako’s hand.

–Rain of slow, gray ash

–On the battlefield everything is blood and mud. The strongest lines are the horizontal ones and in the forest and the castle the most powerful lines are vertical. The cannons destroy the forest when they try unsuccessfully to halt the advance of the enemy troops.

–The confusion interrupts the battle, putting both armies in a constant state of alert, sensitive to the slightest sound.

“Mako on the stairs”

–Use the clock of war to mark time with news in last third of the film.

–“Don’t let your feet touch the ground” by Ash Koley.

–The Beast was afraid of becoming vulnerable. He isolated himself from the world, poring over his books and maps.

^{NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 10}

–When is the right time to say good-bye? How can we know if we’re unaware of the host’s identity? How to know if we are midway through the meal or if it has already come to an end?

–I’m a father but I still feel like a son, I’m an adult but my fears are those of a child. I’m alone but I live among many, I feel like time is running out when everything is just getting started

–The dark fairy hated the prince because she loved him with a passion.

–Always say what you think, always do what you say, and know what makes you happy. Live or die abiding by firmly made decisions, doing what you think is the right thing.

Mako in the rain, sans helicopter

^{Del Toro’s notebook sketch of Mako Mori’s first appearance, alone in the rain, inspired costume designer Kate Hawley.}