by Joe Nazzaro
What a difference two years make. When writer/director Guillermo del Toro first announced his plans to co-write and direct Peter Jackson’s long-awaited adaptation of The Hobbit, that news was met with a somewhat mixed response. While del Toro had often been associated with darker genre fare such as Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone, there was little doubt that the gifted filmmaker would bring a unique sensibility to the project, which would be split into two films.
But earlier this summer, del Toro announced that he was leaving The Hobbit after working on the screenplay for both installments and overseeing most of the design for part one. The reason for his departure was the continuing lack of a start date for production in the wake of rights co-owner MGM’s continuing financial problems. With obvious reluctance, and no shortage of high-profile projects awaiting his attention, del Toro and his family returned to America.
It’s a few weeks later and the visibly weary filmmaker is sitting in a San Diego hotel suite, an untouched lunch in front of him as he finally nears the end of a long day of press interviews. He’s come to Comic Con International to promote the upcoming release of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of the little-known 1973 TV movie about a couple that inherits an old mansion inhabited by tiny demon-like creatures. The new version, which stars Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, is directed by Troy Nixey and produced by del Toro from a screenplay he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins. While reaction to the film has been hugely positive, its coverage has been somewhat blunted by Disney’s recent announcement that del Toro would be tackling a remake of The Haunted Mansion, which had been previously made as a less-than-successful 2003 comedy starring Eddie Murphy. Not only that, but there is no shortage of questions about other del Toro-related projects, including The Witches, Frankenstein and At the Mountains of Madness to name a few.
For the sake of clarity, let’s get The Haunted Mansion out of the way first. “That’s not the next movie I do,” notes del Toro. “That’s the next movie we announced after The Hobbit. The next movie I’m going to do is actually going to be announced in two weeks and it’s a project that has been with me for 13 years.
“The reality is, The Haunted Mansion came as an opportunity and being a Haunted Mansion nut, I couldn’t pass it up. But it’s not even written; there is no screenplay yet. It’s just the announcement.”
Del Toro is much more interested in discussing Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which will be released by Miramax on January 21, 2011. As far as the reason for remaking a semi-obscure TV horror film from the seventies, “When a movie is ingrained in you, in a way it becomes yours,” is the response. “The other day I finally found a story I read as a kid. For forty years I’ve been looking for it because I’ve never seen it reprinted anywhere else, so every bookstore I went, I looked for it and finally last week I found the damn story. I’ve been Googling it since Google came out and Yahoo before that and I finally found the story, but when I read it, I found that I had made up three-quarters of what it is.
“The same thing happened to me with Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. The movie I loved as a kid when I saw it again in the nineties, I said, ‘Jesus, I made up most of the stuff that I liked the most!’ The stuff that was there was great, but I felt I did have a different take on that story and I feel it’s a genuine take. It’s not driven by mercantilism or numbers; no one was clamoring for this remake. If you put all the people who know Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark in one room, it would not be a very large room and yet it was driven by a genuine desire to honor that story.”
For the remake, which del Toro had planned to direct himself at one point, the mythology of the original creatures was changed entirely. “The ambiguity is still there,” he notes, “but it’s an ambiguity that has a different origin.
“In the original story, they were creatures that nobody knew where they came from, nobody knew what they wanted and nobody knew what happened other than they absorbed the people in the house, and I loved that ambiguity, but I wanted to make them have a more Algernon Blackwood/Arthur Machen root, which is they are ancient fairy entities that predate mankind and that love dragging people down like the children in fairy tales. I always found the notion of the tooth fairies very creepy, so I thought it would be really interesting to let you come to the realization that these could be really nasty tooth fairies and that changes a lot of things.
“We took a very calculated approach, because originally I wrote this movie to direct myself, so I was incredibly tactful and careful in writing it; but after Pan’s Labyrinth, I thought it was a repetition to do another tale about a dark fairy universe, with a young girl in the center, so I thought I was going to let somebody else take a whack at it.”
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is the latest project that del Toro has taken on as producer, putting a promising young filmmaker in the director’s seat, in this case Troy Nixey. It’s a role he wants to continue while directing his own projects, assuming one doesn’t preclude the other. “It does if something goes wrong, and I’ve had both experiences. I’ve had the experience where everything goes well and you are essentially a glorified bodyguard and then when it goes wrong, you have as equal a share of weight as the director.
“What I love about doing this is I can take risks that a normal producer doesn’t. I can go and support mainly first-time filmmakers, which gives us stuff like The Orphanage or Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, or I can support a filmmaker’s dream project, like Vincenzo Natali and Splice. He had been trying to make Splice for years and couldn’t get the money, so fortunately I became a vehicle for him to get that money, so it’s a real privilege. From now on, I’m trying to concentrate on first or second-time filmmakers and continuing to do that and trying to concentrate on really beautiful stuff that I want to present.”
Turning the subject to his own next project as director, del Toro shakes his head impatiently as if sensing that A) he’s going to have to go through the usual checklist of long-standing projects and B) there isn’t all that much he could say if one of them was about to happen. But surely these films have become metaphorical millstones around his neck, where he is forced to address them over and over until they’re produced or abandoned? “That’s the way I am,” he insists. “With the exception of The Hobbit, I have never given up on anything in my life. I had to renounce The Hobbit, not give it up, so it was a renunciation out of pure need and my situation being not sustainable anymore.
“Other than that, I stay with the stuff. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark took over 13 years to get made; I wrote it with Matthew Robbins in 1998. The movie I’m going to do next has been with me for the same amount of time. I still carry Monte Cristo with me, The List of Seven, The Wind in the Willows, The Witches; all those things I carry around as long as I can keep them alive. I would love to make them someday but some of them go away.”
Among the projects that del Toro can talk about is the third and final volume in his best-selling vampire trilogy, which was begun in The Strain and continued in The Fall. “I’m having a blast with it,” he declares with genuine enthusiasm. “I really cannot emphasize enough how much fun it is for me to write fiction; I really enjoy it, and how much of a kinder blank page it is for me. With the blank pages of a screenplay, you know you’re going to be in a cage of present; you have to write everything in present and you cannot write anything that you cannot demonstrate with the camera, so you’re very limited and you cannot even put any purple in the prose. So I’m doing that right now.
“There are a couple of left field things that are going to come over in the next couple of months, but I’m going to be starting a movie in May-June so it’s already decided what movie it is. The people that are going to be doing it with me are great but we are not yet at liberty to discuss it.” The director grins mischievously. “You know, I would love to whisper it in your ear. But it’s something, as I said, that has been with me for so long.”
It’s now been a month since that conversation took place. Just after Comic Con, the news was “leaked” that del Toro’s next project was indeed his adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness, which would be shot as a 3-D film for Universal with no less than James Cameron acting as producer. It’s a project the director has wanted to do for years, which certainly tallies with the hints in the previous interview. With that in mind, was del Toro ready to confirm that news?
Well, the answer is not just yet. With the deal just about done, he still can’t make a formal announcement, which means the rest of this chat has to fall into the realm of hypothetical for now. “We hope everything goes right, and it would certainly be a dream to find the opportunity to do Mountains the way I have tried for nearly 15 years, but it’s still premature to announce that it’s a fact. We will know soon enough, but it’s still in progress.”
One fact that can be reported is del Toro’s relationship with Cameron, a long-time colleague and confidante. “We’ve been friends for 20 years now, and the one project I’ve wanted to do for those 20 years, before I even got the rights to write the screenplay, has been Mountains of Madness. So we’ve discussed it over the decades plenty of times, but the fact is, I’ve always found a moment to show Jim my movies before I locked the cut and he’s always given me the privilege of seeing his movies in the early stages.
“This interaction has given us both a really good taste of what it like to be working together so I do hope that everything comes to fruition and we do Mountains together, because it’s a great combination of a personal relationship. It’s also an incredible opportunity to get one of the finest minds on the planet going into the biggest adventure of my career.
“I think Jim is an ideal guy to bounce ideas off of; he loves the screenplay that Matthew Robbins and I wrote years ago, but I also have some really audacious ideas about designs and so forth, and you couldn’t ask for a better partner and sounding board than that, and it’s not just about the 3-D. It’s about having a really strong partnership in the moment when I feel I’m finally at a stage in my career and craft to tackle a movie this size.”
And while such discussions remain strictly hypothetical, it’s certainly worth mentioning that the technology finally exists to do justice to a film like At the Mountains of Madness, where they might not have been ready a decade or even five years ago. “I would agree with that,” concedes del Toro, “but it’s not just the technology; it’s also the fact that there are two or three movies in my list that are Holy Grails for me, that are mountaintops that I have to prepare to reach and Mountains is the one because as a director I feel that I finally have the tools to tackle it. It’s a very difficult movie from every perspective.”
While the status of Guillermo del Toro’s next project may still remain the subject of conjecture, there is no doubt whatsoever that the director is itching to get behind the camera again. “The reality is that part of the reason that made urgently needing to come back to Los Angeles was very direct,” he maintains. “I needed to start fulfilling the obligations and projects that were languishing or at risk of disappearing, so when I left New Zealand, I left with a very strong sense of purpose. I think what would be ideal is if my next film is a film I’ve been looking to do for a decade and a half.”
And that just leaves room for one more foray into the -ahem- hypothetical. “Look,” promises del Toro, “when we finally announce my next film, it may not be a surprising announcement. It may be something that people already know about, but it would be a complete and official and well-prepared announcement and hopefully won’t be just a leak or unofficial piece of news. I would love to be able to do a proper announcement on what my next movie is but as always, it’s taking more time than one expects!”
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Comic Con photo credits: Eric Charbonneau
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