Loren Greeblatt: So, Guillermo Del
Toro has a lot of things on his plate. Pacific Rim is his
first film in five years, but he hasn’t been sitting on his ass.
Right after Hellboy II, he was going to direct The Hobbit,
but there were a bunch of catastrophes, like MGM collapsing. After a year and a half of waiting in limbo, not even knowing if the film would ever be allowed to shoot, he decieded to bow out leaving it to Peter Jackson to direct.
Max
O’Connell: He still has co-writing credits, though we can’t
really blame him for how mixed we were on the film. It’s really
Jackson’s problem that it’s so all over the place. Meanwhile, Del
Toro has a bunch of other projects, and that’s not including his
planned Pacific Rim sequel if the film is a hit. Hey, dude,
finish Hellboy III first.
LG:
The status of Hellboy III is sadly in limbo. Because of
“mediocre” box office returns on the last one, he really needs to
push to get it made. Lately he's been saying the prospect is looking
grim, but he is trying and the recent partnership with his Pacific
Rim producer Thomas Tull and Universal Pictures (who currently
owns the rights) is a good sign. But he still needs someone to sign
over the cash, and apparently he feels that this third film would
need to be a lot more expensive than the first two because of the
apocalypse he wants to show. In terms of projects that are actually
happening, a few years ago he co-wrote a trilogy of horror books with
Chuck Hogan called The Strain. I’ve read part of the first
one. It’s a bit of a mishmash of a lot of Del Toro elements-
vampirism as an outbreak, the American version of the villain from
Cronos, some fairytale elements, and an amazing set-piece on
an airplane, but the human drama is terrible. It’s the reason I
stopped reading.
MO:
Del Toro is also directing the pilot of a TV-series adaptation that
debuts on FX hopefully this year. It’ll star Ron Perlman, Corey
Stoll (Hemingway in Midnight in Paris), Kevin Durand (Lost,
Cosmopolis). I’m hopeful. Right now he's gearing up his Pacific
Rim follow up, a small-scale horror film that he’ll hopefully
be able to knock out quickly. It’s called Crimson Peak, and
it’s a haunted house film that’s a modern horror film that’s
classical, set-oriented, and a throwback to films that don’t get
made anymore because of found footage. His influences are The
Omen, The Exorcist, and The Shining, all of which I
love, the last of which is my pick for the scariest movie ever made
(with The Exorcist being not too far behind).
LG:
I haven't been exactly sure what to make of this, but recently he's
stated that he considers this film to be akin to his more adult
oriented Spanish Language films. So expect this to be in the Pan's
Labyrinth mode, but in English.
MO:
The cast includes Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy and
Pacific Rim, Jessica Chastain, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mia
Wasikowska…not exactly lightweights, though I really hope Hunnam
decides to actually act this time around.
LG:
But for every project that Del Toro makes, there are many that
don't make it like Mefisto's Bridge or that Western retelling
of The Count of Monte Cristo called
Left Hand of Darkness. After Mimic he pitched
an idea for Exorcist IV which would have involved Father
Merrin investigating an occult murder at the Vatican during WWII
(Spoiler Alert: The Devil did it), but the studio didn't want it
because it would have ended with an exorcism and the studio
felt that was the reason Exorcist III didn't make any money.
They wanted Exorcist IV, but they didn't want to have any
exorcisms in it.
MO:
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
LG:
Yes it is. But Hollywood is full of people saying 'no' for dumb
reasons. The most high-profile unmade Del Toro film is At the
Mountains of Madness, based on the H.P. Lovecraft novelette. Del
Toro has a major thing for classic horror and Lovecraft, and has
inserted references throughout his filmography. He wants to do it as
a tentpole horror, citing The Thing as the kind of thing he's
going for.
MO:
The problem is that it would be very expensive, and it’d have to be
rated R. You can’t go PG-13 on this, and he was insistent on that.
LG:
Del Toro went through this problem on his produced-written film
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which wasn’t very graphic but
the MPAA rated it R for being too scary. Del Toro had some big guns
on Mountains - Tom Cruise was going to star, and James
Cameron was going to produce it right after Avatar.
MO:
It came close to happening- the script was done, Matthew Robbins
was his co-writer, and the creatures were half-designed. But
Universal got cold feet at the very last second.
LG:
Then Del Toro got
nervous because it turns out Ridley Scott’s Prometheus had a
lot it common, but he’s talked about doing it since then. If
Pacific Rim is a hit, he’ll get the chance.
MO:
That’s what I’m hoping for- Pacific Rim is a big enough
hit overseas that he gets to make this, and then he makes Hellboy
III, damn it.
LG:
We will see anything he does so long as it is At the Mountains
of Madness or Hellboy III.
MO:
He’s done a lot of production work, playing godfather to talented
young horror directors, most notably the very good film The
Orphanage by Juan Antonio Bayona. And Del Toro executive-produced
Splice, which I was mixed on but has things going for it.
LG:
He produced Rodrigo y Cursi, directed by Alfonso Cuaron’s
brother. He’s also on pre-production of a stop-motion Pinocchio
film that he’ll co-direct. Tough that could still end up in the
unmade category as stop-motion is at a low point for audience favor,
which is unfortunate because I really loved ParaNorman and we
both like Coraline.
MO:
I’m hoping that it gets made, because Del Toro’s love for
outsiders and dark fairytales would really work there.
LG:
And then there’s the projects we don’t know will happen. He’s
doing a Frankenstein movie for Universal, but we don’t know
when it’s going to happen or if. He wants Doug Jones and Benedict
Cumberbach to star, and he wants it to be a Miltonian Tragedy and
adventure film that plays up the religious and tragic elements.
MO:
Sounds beautiful, let’s just see it. Some of his influences are on
Karloff’s sense of tragedy and Christopher Lee’s sense of
emptiness, and he wants to combine those characteristics. He’s also
influenced by Frank Darabont’s original script that was
unfortunately made into a terrible movie by Kenneth Branagh.
LG:
He’s also working on an adaptation of Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five.
MO:
Vonnegut has not really been a good source for films. George Roy
Hill’s adaptation of that novel has fans…
LG:
I've seen bit's of it over the years, it is just okay.
MO:
While Keith Gordon directed an adaptation of Mother Night that
has fans, and Jonathan Demme made an enjoyable adaptation of
Vonnegut’s short story “Who Am I This Time?” for TV. But every
other Vonnegut film is pretty much terrible. Slapstick was
terribly adapted into a Jerry Lewis movie, the film of Breakfast
of Champions went straight-to-video and is really bad, and
there’s a short film of “Harrison Bergeron” called 2081
that gets the tone completely wrong by being portentous rather than
satirical and playful. I feel Del Toro’s would be closer to the
tone, at least, but it’d be a difficult adaptation.
LG:
The fantasy/reality elements of the book might be interesting with
him, but I don’t know if he could do it well unless he changed
things that would annoy Vonnegut purists. (NOTE: since we recorded
this, it has been announced that Del Toro is pursuing Charlie Kaufman
to write the script. This makes a lot of sense as Slaughterhouse-Five
really requires someone who is naturally adept with unusual plot
structures of the kind that Del Toro has never even tired. Kaufman
has written some of the most unusual scripts to come out of Hollywood
in the last decade and a half)
MO:
He also planned on adapting Drood, based on the novel by
Dan Simmons that’s itself based off an unfinished Charles Dickens
novel. It’s a bit of a murder mystery having to with an opium
addict and an uncle in love with his nephew’s fiancée, I believe.
Could be interesting, and I understand Simmons’ book incorporates
stuff that has to do with Dickens’ life. It’s planned with
Universal, but we’ll see if it happens.
LG:
There’s something called Saturn and the End of Days,
which is about a boy walking back and forth to the supermarket and
seeing the end of the world on the way. It’s an original project,
which have historically been an amazing sign, but his original
scripts take a long time to get made.
MO:
He’s planning on producing a new adaptation of the Disney Ride The
Haunted Mansion, let’s just forget about the terrible Eddie
Murphy version.
LG:
We already did.
MO:
Well put. This is to be based on the Hatbox Ghost, one of the
more obscure ghosts in the attraction, which was there when the ride
premiered in the late '60's, and it was supposed to be very
frightening. I’ve been on the ride a few times, and I’ve never
seen this thing because it was taken out of the ride shortly
thereafter.
LG:
At one point he was planing to do a trilogy of videogames, and he
wants to be the “Citizen Kane of games”, but the developer
for that went bankrupt. He was planning on producing an Incredible
Hulk TV show, and he was waiting for an unspecified famous writer
to be available, but we’re not sure if this could happen anymore
after Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk became so well-liked.
MO:
He’s also planning on another show he’s producing for HBO. It’s
called Monster, it’s based off a manga. Neither of us are
manga guys, and we don’t know what this is, but it has his name on
it, so we’re interested. If it gets made.
LG:
That’s the key clause. He also wants to direct a segment of the
planned third Heavy Metal movie, and he loves the original
incarnation of the French comic that Moebius curated, not the
ugh-worthy thing most people are familiar with these days. But we
don’t know what’s going on with this thing. I know Robert
Rodriguez is godfathering this.
MO:
He was planning on producing a new Van Helsing movie with Tom Cruise
starring, but we’ll see. He’s producing a new Beauty and the
Beast, though there’s so many of those. And then there’s the
ones we know that’ll never happen. He wanted to direct new versions
of Stephen King’s novels Pet Sematary (King's misspelling,
not ours) and It. The former was made into a pretty-OK
film in 1989, the latter into a cheesy miniseries mitigated by Tim
Curry’s performance in 1990. He could do both of those, but he’s
booked pretty solid.
LG:
He has a Justice League Dark thing planned, with misfits
of the DC Universe that'd be headed up by John Constantine (who had
that slightly underrated Keanu Reeves in 2005), Swamp Thing, and the
Specter, among others. It’d be Warner Bros., He claims that it's
still very active, waiting for the availability of a “big writer,”
but WB would certainly be doing the regular Justice League
movie first, and that's not coming out anytime soon.
MO:
Basically, we’re worried about when Del Toro sleeps, but we’re
excited to see anything he does.
LG: There
are things we want more than others, but if he makes it, I’ll be
first in line. He is truly one of the most interesting auteurs out
there.
Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim
Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim
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