Watch: Guillermo del Toro talks 'operatic' adventure 'Pacific Rim'

SAN DIEGO -- Very little, visually, has been previewed from Guillermo del Toro's monster and robot film "Pacific Rim" outside of San Diego Comic-Con, but the director described to the press what the movie won't look like.

"When we started the movie, I made it clear that I wanted to bring an aesthetic and a narrative point of view that is different from what is normally used. Usually, a lot of these movies look like recruitment videos -- polished steel surfaces, blues, slow motion, very military," he told HitFix at the San Diego Con. "I said, 'Look, I don't want to make a war movie. I want to make an adventure movie.

The end result -- which hits theaters in July next year -- will be "saturated with colors, saturated with drama, big operatic moments, fights that are extraordinarily operatic and wild. I was supported all the way. The movie that we're going to see is dramtically and visually perfectly fitting into things I do."

Del Toro said that he wants his audience as exhausted as his characters, to have an emotional and practically physical response to viewing. Making the film over the few months, the "Pan's Labyrinth" helmer has certainly put his "all" into it.

"I have never worked as hard in any movie I have ever done and I've never worked as joyously as I did with ['Pacific Rim']. I was putting in 18-hour days, 19-hour days," he said. "If I could I would have done 24-hour days."

Check out what Guillermo del Toro has to say about kaiju films and growing up in Mexico with these sea monsters.

Katie Hasty
Managing Editor

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After five years as a columnist and editor at Billboard, Katie Hasty joined HitFix in 2009 for music and film reporting out of New York. The Midwest native has worked as a writer, music promoter and in A&R since 1999 and performs with her band Numbers And Letters.