Even though he's knee deep in The Hobbit preproduction, Guillermo del Toro still had time to support Hellboy. He hosted a presentation of the Hellboy II: The Golden Army Blu Ray features, including entire scenes in plate form with no visual effects and inside peeks into his director's notebook. As we started discussing the newly released Blu Ray, we got to talking about all his other exciting projects and he was happy to just keep going.
Crave Online: How gratifying is it that Blu Ray shows all the detail in the finely crafted creatures?
Guillermo del Toro: I love it because the experience I think as a collector, when a Blu Ray transfer is optimal, it's the only way you're going to really experience the movie again and again. So more hours went with the cinematographer in this case on the transferring of this film than any of the others. Usually I put a lot of time myself because Navarro is away shooting another epic and this time I was lucky enough to have him unemployed and in the color correction facility. I tortured him longer than he's used to and sound-wise, we have the advantage of having one of the main sound designers be at the mixing stage at all times with scaling down the aural experience for the movie.
Crave Online: You're doing The Hobbit and Frankenstein now, so at what point could Hellboy III happen?
Guillermo del Toro: You know, I think that they will not greenlight it or not or they will not talk about it until the last Euro hits the piggy bank. The fact is the movie, even although it was dually sodomized by Hancock and The Dark Knight, still did theatrically better than the first movie, internationally is doing exceedingly better than the first movie. It really is in some cases doing 300% more business, and depending on the territory and globally I think is doing about 100% more business than the first one. Let's see what happens with the DVD and the people that make the decisions do it based on the calculator function of the iPod, not on the other one.
Crave Online: Would they wait for you or would you let another filmmaker do it?
Guillermo del Toro: I would beg them and amputate myself in order for them to wait for me but I don’t control it. If they say, "No, no, no, we're going to do it," I personally think this incarnation of the trilogy, I would love to finish because it's not arbitrary that we went into a different direction on the second one. I really think when and if you see the three movies, you're going to have a comedic one, a tragic one and you're going to see three movies that are incredibly apart in registration one from another. It's really exploring Hellboy in very different ways.
Crave Online: Would you remain part of it producing if you didn’t direct?
Guillermo del Toro: I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I can. You know, I think producing, partially producing is being able to extricate yourself from the director. If you don’t do that, you are not really producing. I don't f*ck around with my directors. I don't tell them what to do. I trust Bayona, I trust Vincenzo and I let them do whatever the f*ck they want to do. In producing something like Hellboy, I don't think I would be objective. I really think it's a dangerous position so maybe in the writing, I would have a better handle, but I don't know if I could be involved to that degree.
Crave Online: Which of your older films are you excited to present on Blu Ray?
Guillermo del Toro: I believe that very, very, very soon we're going to be announcing a very special Blu Ray edition of Cronos. And when you know who is doing it and how we're doing it, it will be more exciting. I cannot announce it properly but we're doing a Blu Ray of Cronos which is very exciting for me because it's one of those movies that I think I want to revisit, retime, restructure the sound for the Blu Ray experience in a big way.
Crave Online: Will there be different extras than the Lionsgate DVD?
Guillermo del Toro: Yeah, we're going to do basically the most exhausting extras we can do on Cronos that can ever be put together because there are many editions around the world that have different extras, but there's not one definite edition of Cronos.
Crave Online: We had a conversation in the elevator at the Four Seasons over the summer.
Guillermo del Toro: Was I dressed?
Crave Online: It was at Hellboy II press junket, you told me about designing puppets for The Hobbit with real muscles. That just made my day, so how is that going?
Guillermo del Toro: That's going to start early next year, the developing of that and we are talking about certain creatures. There are so many more creatures to be explored in The Hobbit that were not explored in Lord of the Rings, that we want to do a muscle system, radio control driven suit for a couple of things. We will start. I already started that with Mark Setrakian on Hellboy II with Wink. I think Wink was pushed as much as we could within the time limits and the budget limits of that movie and we're going to take what we learned and apply that.
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