Written Interview: Travis Beacham
One of the summer’s most anticipated movies is Pacific Rim. Here is an interview with the movie’s co-screenwriter Travis Beacham with SuperHeroHype:
SHH: Obviously you’ve been working on “Pacific Rim” for some time so have you had time to do anything else in that time?
Beacham: (Laughs) Well, it’s been a lot of “Pacific Rim.” At the moment, I’m working on a sci-fi TV show at AMC, sort of like a cable space thing that’s kind of a cross between “Chinatown” and “Battlestar Gallactica.” (Note: It’s called “Ballistic City” and he’s developing it with Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski.) I hate describing things in combinations like that, it never does the actual thing justice, you know? (laughs) But yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. 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.
SHH: You’ve been involved with writing a couple remakes over the years because obviously you wrote “Clash of the Titans,” but you were also involved with the screenplay of “The Black Hole” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?” Are you still involved with any of those or did you just do a pass on the script and move on?
Beacham: Usually, you turn in a first draft and then it sort of just kind of moves on without you. That’s, for better or worse, it’s just kind of the natural way that it works. I was very lucky on “Pacific Rim” to have a very different kind of experience where I was on set and I’ve become kind of the de facto cheerleader of all the continuity details that they go through every once in a while. It’s really been a lot of fun for me working on that and totally atypical of other movie experiences, which like I said, is usually just you do a first draft that you’re deeply and passionately in love with and you think it’s just the best thing in the world, and you turn it in, and they go and do something else based on what it needs for production or if they need the time, they need the budget, and that sort of thing. But as a screenwriter, it’s sort of like sending your kids out to sea and saying “I’ll see you in five years!”
For the rest of the interview, go here.