Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

by Adam Savage

A couple years before Tom and I went down the 2001 rabbit hole, I visited Guillermo del Toro on the set of Pacific Rim. I was gobsmacked by the sheer scale of the endeavor he’d undertaken. He was in charge of hundreds of people who were all charged with working together toward a gigantic shared vision of huge robots fighting massive monsters—world building on a nearly inconceivable scale. How does one even begin to captain such a gigantic ship? How is it possible to manage a group of dozens of artists to keep to a cohesive vision? At dinner that night I asked Guillermo how he did it. “You have to give everyone complete autonomy within a narrow bandwidth,” he replied.