Quotes from Travis Beacham

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

I have always been a fan of genre stuff and fantasy and sci-fi.

Where do you go after something like 'Pacific Rim?' Which, for me, was such a moment, to have this thing and see it all come together, and it's big, and it has this cult following... You ask yourself, 'What's next?'

We wanted it to be that you could go to the comic shop and read about the back story of 'Pacific Rim' and the drama inherent in it.

Making 'Pacific Rim' was a lot like what you imagined making movies would be like when you were 12.

Legendary is in the unique position in that they have the resources to take risks, which I think has really benefitted 'Pacific Rim.'

If I could pick any story idea or script I had that I wanted everything to go exactly right for, it would probably be 'Pacific Rim.'

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

I think my earliest 'Star Wars' memory that I have was from 'Return of the Jedi.' I distinctly remember the scene with the rancor under Jabba's Palace.

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.

You can only see 'Star Wars' for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it's a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.

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.

I feel like, as an industry, we've gotten too dependent on source material originated in other mediums.

I love that sense of discovery. You're experiencing something for the first time, and your parents aren't in on it, previous generations aren't in on it. It has a chance to belong to you and your generation in a way that nothing has. If 'Pacific Rim' is a fraction of that, I would be very proud.

The writer is just so much more intimately involved in the television process than the feature film process.

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.

I would definitely, definitely love to do more comic work. I think, creatively, there's something that's differently rewarding about it than the rewards of filmmaking.

There's a few things I learned from my experience on 'Hieroglyph.' First of all, I learned that building a world doesn't need to be as expensive as a summer blockbuster. Yeah yeah, newsflash, I know.

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.

The benefit of having a story that takes place in the real world is that you don't have to invent the real world. It exists.

I've never believed in the end of times. We are mankind. Our footprints are on the moon. When the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit - we will kill it.

There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait.

I was way into 'Voltron,' Ray Harryhausen: anything with giant monsters, I was really into. Even dinosaurs - for a while, I wanted to be a paleontologist. So it's almost like primal, ancestral mythology to me, this fascination with monsters.

That's part of what I remember about seeing the movies that influenced me: the experience of watching them with a crowd and how they react to something.