Guillermo del Toro is one busy filmmaker. While other filmmakers wait by the phone for new projects, Guillermo can’t seem to find time to do all he has already committed to.
His top priority as of now is readying “The Hobbit” for New Line and MGM. But That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Universal has had him on contract since June ’07. With them he has plans for four directing gigs including a remake of Frankenstein; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Slaughterhouse-Five and an adaptation of Drood, a Dan Simmons novel acquired by Universal that will be published in February by Little, Brown.
Drood is a story in which Simmons supposes that survival from a catastrophic train crash changed author Charles Dickens, plunging him into the depths of London depravity and possibly turning him to murder before he wrote his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
If that wasn’t enough, Guillermo’s pet project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, will also be in line.
Frankenstein has always been a fascination for Guillermo. He was quoted as saying, “To me, Frankenstein represents the essential human question: ‘Why did my creator throw me here, unprotected, unguided, unaided and lost?’ With that one, they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands to prevent me from directing it.”
On Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Guillermo says he wants stick more closely to Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose and explore the addictive high the repressed Jekyll experienced as his murderous alter ego.
Guillermo plans to provide a more literal interpretation of Slaughterhouse-Five than in the 1972 film adaptation, hewing closely to the Vonnegut novel about a prisoner in a German WWII POW camp who travels through time and space. “There are ways that Vonnegut plays with and juxtaposes time that was perhaps too edgy to be tackled on film at that time,” he’s quoted as saying.
To top all of this off, Guillermo still has a vision for Hellboy III. “I think they’ll decide (Universal) when the last euro hits the piggybank,” Guillermo said. “We laid the groundwork to have a magnificent third act. I’d like to return to an action franchise with 60-year-old actor Ron Perlman, because he’ll be scratching at that age when I get to it.”
So, let’s all hope that this magician of celluloid doesn’t burn himself out. These films do not even include ones that he may produce. He has become a worldwide treasure.
Source: Variety
