We’re smack in the middle of the summer blockbuster movie season, which Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is about to give an added jolt with next week’s Pacific Rim.

It has giant monsters (called Kaiju) fighting giant robots (Jaegers). Cities explode and the Earth’s molten core erupts. Sweaty heroes grapple with a global threat. It’s all in 3D. Popcorn will be consumed.

Sounds pretty blockbuster-ish, and it is — to everybody except del Toro.

“When is a summer movie not a summer movie?” the burly, bearded and bespectacled auteur asks me during a recent Toronto interview, smiling at the surprise he’s about to reveal.

“When every decision is taken not to be!”

Del Toro calls this “standing on your own two feet” as a filmmaker. The made-in-TorontoPacific Rim may rumble, roar and thud like a summer blockbuster, but he went out of his way to ditch many of the usual tropes.

“I carefully avoided the car commercial aesthetics or the army recruitment video aesthetics. I avoided making a movie about an army with ranks. I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world.

“I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character.”

If this wasn’t contrarian enough, del Toro also decided to forgo conventional romance, even though Kikuchi’s monster-fighting character Mako Mori is paired both physically and mentally with Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Becket.

“One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people.”

It’s not that del Toro doesn’t know how to make a conventional blockbuster film. He did that twice over with Hellboy and its sequel, and he did straight genre with the monster film Mimic, which he also filmed in Toronto. He’s also known for doing art house films in grand visual terms, such as The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth.

He just didn’t want to make a movie that just blows up and shoots up stuff for no reason.

“I am a pacifist,” del Toro says.

“I have been offered movies that have huge budgets that have war at its centre and I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ I have two daughters and I wanted to make this movie for kids. It’s my lightest movie and yet it’s one of the most precise, adult exercises in world design I’ve ever made. It has the craft of a 48-year-old (del Toro’s age) and the heart of a 12-year-old.

“What I wanted was for kids to see a movie where they don’t need to aspire to be in an army to aspire for an adventure. And I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers . . . it has the language of an adventure movie. I want kids to come out of the movie and say, I want to be a Jaeger pilot! I really think that would be my dream come true.”

His use of the word “light” to describe Pacific Rim seems a bit odd, especially since del Toro also speaks proudly of how carefully he orchestrated the realistic smashes and crashes of the monsters vs. robots slugfests.

“I wanted the robots and the Kaiju to have the weight of their stature. Basically, we’re animating buildings — they’re 25 storeys high. The way they move needs to reflect that mass, and that’s the thing (filmmakers) have the hardest times with. They don’t know how to root or anchor the model in gravity.

“We spent approximately five months directing the film, the live-action portion of it, and another nine or 10 months directing the animation. Every time an animated piece would come in, I would comment on the weight, the physics, the placement of the camera lens. This is a not a movie where an effects house does everything. We were working as creative partners. That’s a big difference.”

If del Toro’s definition of “light” needs some explaining, so does his thinking that a movie about scary monsters can be “a family movie.”

It can be if you had the kind of upbringing del Toro had in Mexico.

“I’m a monster guy. I grew up loving the monsters. My natural tendency is to create a pageantry. I love movies with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, Godzilla.

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“In Mexican horror films, we show the monster — a lot. Why? My theory is that it’s because it costs so much. I like to show a money shot every few minutes, because the monster is the star.”

Del Toro admits to having “a monster fetish.” His talents include drawing, and at my request he quickly sketches a pen-and-ink drawing of himself as a giant, grappling with monsters and robots.

And he doesn’t just film and sketch monsters; he also lives with them.

Del Toro has two separate homes in Los Angeles, one for his regular family life and the other for his imagination. The latter is a place he calls Bleak House, and it’s packed full of movie memorabilia, much of it from monster movies.

“I have literally two houses full of monsters! I wake up, I kiss my kids, I take them to school. By 8:30 a.m., I’m in my (other) house full of monsters, up until dinner time.”

It may seem odd that a Mexican filmmaker has made a film, Pacific Rim, that is so devoted to the monstrous traditions of Japanese films, which are loaded with beasts named Mothra, Ghidorah and, of course, Godzilla.

Del Toro sees a direct link between the two cultures, for him at least.

“There’s a very deep link between my childhood in Mexico and Japan. I grew up in a moment in Mexico where we were basically invaded by Japanese pop. I grew up like a kid in Tokyo. I was watching Osamu Tezuka, all the Kaiju, Ultra Q, Wolf Boy Ken, Captain Ultra . . . We grew up with that. It creates a bond.”

He also feels bonded to Toronto, a city he loves and which has become a second home to him. He believes he’s the first filmmaker to make T.O. resemble Tokyo (in Pacific Rim scenes filmed behind City Hall).

He’ll be back in September to shoot the TV vampire series The Strain, and again in January for Crimson Peak, a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Jessica Chastain and Pacific Rim’s Charlie Hunnam that’s described as a gothic ghost story.

Whatever del Toro does, he does with total devotion. The biggest romance in any of his films is his love for his craft.

“I’ve done eight movies as a director, and I’ve done them because I’m madly in love with them. They’re equally important aspects of my personality. Pacific Rim is as much me and as pure me as Pan’s Labyrinth. I’ve never made a movie, even the most commercial ones, that I would not be willing to die for. Literally!”