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Guillermo del Toro
With the success of last year’s award-winning fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro has had no shortage of fascinating follow-up projects to choose from...
With the success of last year’s award-winning fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro has had no shortage of fascinating follow-up projects to choose from. SciFiNow recently caught up with the ever-busy filmmaker on the Budapest set of Hellboy II: The Golden Army and while details of that visit remain strictly embargoed until summer, we were able to quiz him on a variety of topics, including his recent involvement (as producer) in the Spanish horror film The Orphanage…
Has your career changed after Pan’s Labyrinth?
It has in the sense that I’m now actively being able to sponsor other filmmakers. One of the things I’ve been trying to do with the companies I form is to try to do first or second movies, or find a guy that has done three movies but hasn’t been noticed as much as he should be. That’s where I notice it the most. I’m finding it easier to champion films like The Orphanage, where I can put them together faster, and get the money, because that movie was done so much against the grain of the budget and the time, but as a producer I do notice. With [director Juan Antonio] Bayona, we put together the money and the actors; there are a couple of scares in the movie and a couple of little things that I came up with, but it’s his movie and he’s a competent director, so if he needed me, he would call me. As Pedro Almodóvar said to me when I was doing Devil’s Backbone, “If you need me, I’ll be there; if you don’t need me, I won’t.”
Do you know what your next film is going to be yet?
I don’t know, and that makes my wife happy. She’s waiting for me to get reacquainted with my daughters and the dog.
Are you getting closer to making Mountains Of Madness?
Universal has acquired the rights, which is a great piece of news for me, because it was kind of in limbo. I have, together with [makeup FX wizard] Mike Elizalde, self-financed some designs and maquettes, so we’ll see. It’s R-rated; it’s expensive and it doesn’t have a happy ending, so it’s a tough one, but I think big-scale horror, tent pole horror, which you used to have with Alien, The Shining, or The Exorcist, should be back at some point, so I’m patiently waiting my turn.
You recently had Neil Gaiman on your set here in Budapest. Presumably you talked about Death: The High Cost Of Living, which you’ll be producing with Neil as director?
We talked about him directing as soon as possible, but again, I hope that one of the advantages of doing Pan’s Labyrinth translates into being able to put these projects together, because I think the most interesting thing in any genre is the new director; old farts like me are continuing but also young guys are constantly coming in. I think with finding a Neil Gaiman or Juan Antonio Bayona, the really interesting thing is that first or second movie.
Did you take Neil under your wing as a director? He’s only shot a short film before.
I think if anybody knows that character, it’s him, and then if we need to create a support structure, we will. In my mind, there is without a doubt no one more qualified to tell that story than Neil Gaiman in my mind. Neil is a guy that thinks in terms of ideas and very concrete images. He’s not an artist in the sense that he’s not a draftsman, but he is the creator of that universe and if you can surround him with a really strong team, I prefer first-time mistakes to tenth-time mistakes. I think these first-time guys are going to do things that no one else is going to do, so hopefully that will happen. What we did with Orphanage, which was interesting, we went at it with everybody being first-time – first time DP [director of photography], first-time editor, first-time director – and it worked. I think there’s a great advantage to not knowing how things should be done; people just go and make them happen, because they don’t know that they are impossible. We did that movie in a very short time, for 4.5 million euros and it looks pretty beautiful.
Will you be involved in the English language version of Orphanage?
I cannot say yet who the director and writer are, but if I get who I want, it would definitely make a difference. It won’t just be a movie done by a guy that has an American name.
You’ve talked before about wanting to bring back some of the Universal horror icons, such as Frankenstein or Dracula?
The movie I would kill to do – and I know it’s been done and I’m very conscious of that – is Frankenstein, and to do it as the Miltonian tragedy that it is. I remember reading the Frank Darabont screenplay that was illustrated with Bernie Wrightson artwork and saying, “That’s it, I’m screwed, I’m never going to do it!” but thanks to Kenneth Branagh, I still can.
You were also involved in a remake of Creature From The Black Lagoon at one point?
The take I had was Victorian exploration type of Jules Verne type of adventure, but Abe Sapien is sort of my Creature From The Black Lagoon, so I’m pretty happy with him.
With so many different scripts in the works, how do you decide which will be the next one?
One at a time. The problem is, if I have the freedom to choose, and the chance to hold the others until I’m ready, I would do Mountains right away, but what I learnt in the horrible years between Cronos and Mimic, and Mimic and Devil’s Backbone is that if I did that, it takes me four years to get a movie off the ground and it never happens in that order. I wrote Mephisto’s Bridge [an adaptation of the Christopher Fowler novel, Spanky] right after Cronos and it was a beautiful script, and then I wrote Monte Cristo and The List Of Seven and none of them have happened yet. What I understand now is if I keep four or five things that I truly love in the fire, one of them becomes true.
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