When James Cameron and Guillermo Del Toro lived together and exchanged anime

In addition to having already had his say on the highly anticipated new film Avatar: Fire and Ash, the Oscar-winning director Guillermo Del Toro he told in a recent interview about the time he lived with James Cameron.

The Mexican auteur, who just released Frankenstein on Netflix, visited the famous Video Club video store in Paris to spin the French version of the Criterion Closet, created by French media Konbini Video, and it took him five minutes to locate Cameron’s Avatar DVD.

Recalling their first meeting over 30 years ago, Del Toro said: “We hit it off right away. I don’t know why he liked me. I know why he liked me, because he’s a genius. I lived in his house for a long time,” he continued. “We watched anime together. He introduced me to Patlabor, I introduced him to Battle Angel.” Cameron was so impressed with Battle Angel that he spent twenty years trying to get a live-action adaptation made in Hollywood, and his dream finally came true in 2019 with Alita: Battle Angel, directed by Robert Rodriguez and written and produced by Cameron.

Instead, the director introduced del Toro to the iconic Patlaboralso known as Mobile Police Patlabor, a major manga and anime series of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Masami Yūki as the writer and Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell as the director. The plot follows the Special Vehicles Section 2, Division 2 of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, which uses giant robots called Labor to fight crime…pretty much something del Toro would do again with Pacific Rim.

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For other content, we remind you that Avatar: Fire and Ash is available on Disney+ with a preview scene.