Guillermo del Toro on The Hobbit and Hellboy III

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.

Crave Online: Would that be how you do Smog?

Guillermo del Toro: No, Smog is THE creature in The Hobbit. The way Tolkien wrote it already is magnificent. It's already a fantastic character. So obviously dragons, you ask every person what their best favorite dragon is, they will give you a different answer. In my mind, what we're going to attempt on the design of this creature and the creation of this creature needs to push the envelope beyond anything you've ever seen on that kind of creature. There is some stuff that has been done with dragons that I find there are very few landmarks created for me. One of the best, one of the strongest landmarks that almost nobody can overcome is Dragonslayer. The design of the Vermithrax Pejorative is perhaps one of the most perfect creature designs ever made. So what you have to be careful is not to try to be distinctive just to be distinctive, but Smog has certain characteristics that make him unique already. I cannot. I am bursting at the seams about spilling the beans but I won't because I would be shot.

Crave Online: I know it's too early to talk casting, but doesn't James McAvoy sound like a good idea right about now?

Guillermo del Toro: Really, if I was to answer either way, it would be unfair because I will tell you, Bilbo changes every time we write a new scene. It really is not facetious. Wherever we end up at, it's going to come out of those pages.

Crave Online: But that was the most publicized rumor.

Guillermo del Toro: Yeah, but the fact is, the only thing I know of McAvoy is his movies. I've never met him. We've never had a chat and this is not me saying, "I did not have sex with that woman." It really hasn't happened. If it happens with any actor, I think it's going to come out of the pages.

 

Crave Online: Have you had lunch with Viggo yet?

Guillermo del Toro: No, no, no. The only time I have had lunch with Viggo was years ago and he brought some Argentinian fish.

Crave Online: Will you bring up Aragorn?

Guillermo del Toro: You know, when the time comes. I hope New Line buys lunch.

 

Crave Online: Have you made any casting decisions?

Guillermo del Toro: Not yet. Just the ones that have been announced. There's not lack of information. It's not withholding. We really don't have more information because we're writing. And literally, like every week, what you discover writing the two movies, writing the two stories, it changes. So every week there's a discovery and anything we say this week would be contradicted next week. Certainly that would be true in casting. Why create hopes or why create expectations if down the line you're going to go, "You know what? That was not a good idea." So we won't cast it until we finish writing.

Crave Online: What do you want to do with Frankenstein that hasn't yet been done on screen?

Guillermo del Toro: That is two separate conversations. One is I would love to do like a miniseries of the novel, but the project I have at Universal is not that. The project I have at Universal is trying to approach the mythology from a different point of view. So what you will see will be seeing the Frankenstein myth but from a side, like an oblique way. If I told you exactly what it is, then it will be completely surpriseless by the time it is announced but it won't be the straight Frankenstein I don't think.

 

Crave Online: When you say it's an oblique perspective…

Guillermo del Toro: It's not exactly Mary Reilly. It's not Igor's diary. No, but it's an ancillary story to the Frankenstein, but it is period.

Crave Online: What do you think are the pros and cons of the Karloff and the Branagh versions?

Guillermo del Toro: I think there are zero cons on the Karloff versions. Obviously, the James Whale version, the two movies, they stand as the holy grail for me. They are untouchable and they are their own thing. The Branagh thing, what happens is before I saw the movie, I read Frank Darabont's screenplay. It's not figuratively, I cried. I thought, "This is perfect. It's the Frankenstein movie." And the movie was so different from the screenplay that it's not even comparable for me. So I still think that the Frank Darabont screenplay with the Bernie Wrightson illustrations, the way Frank put it together, that's the movie I would have loved to see. It's not going to be. It's never going to be. So but any iteration of the myth, I'm attracted to it whether it's Roy Batty in Blade Runner or it is Frankenstein Conquers the World. I enjoy all of them. I love Abbott and Costello. I really love that movie and I'm a Frankenstein freak. The way Peter Jackson is with King Kong, I am with Frankenstein. It's the holy grail of movies for me.

 

Crave Online: And you'll get to it eventually?

Guillermo del Toro: I would love to. I would actually love to do the series one day.

Crave Online: Are you ever going to get to do your Lovecraft movie? A lot of your fans would like to see you do that.

Guillermo del Toro: Me too. Me too, me too. Part of the arrangement with Universal in being essentially there for now until 2017, part of the arrangement was they would finance research and development for Mountains of Madness. And we are doing it. There are many technical tools in creating the monsters that don't exist and we need to develop them. The creatures, Lovecraft's creatures, the tools that exist for CG and the materials that exist for makeup effects, you need to push them to get there and we're going to push them.

 

Crave Online: What is the effect you want to get?

Guillermo del Toro: Well, the fact that the shape shifting implicit in the novel and implicit in the creatures needs to be just, if you think in technical terms, digitally, that means normally you generate for example one model per creature. If you talk about shape shifting to the degree that these creatures do, then you're talking about essentially, if you're using traditional tools, you're going to need to generate 30, 40 models fully rendered per creature. That's A, limiting and B, incredibly expensive. So what we are trying to do is we're developing sort of a Swiss Army Knife approach to modeling. The details are going to be evolving but it's almost like a Chinese box approach to the models where we can encase one model on another one and make them modular. And the tools that we need for that to be fluid don't exist. We're going to need to write digital code we need to develop, the way Peter had to develop software for Lord of the Rings. It took so many movies to develop intelligent fire software to the point where Peter could render the Balrog or to develop a massive software to do the crowds in Lord of the Rings. By the same token, we're going to need to develop a new tool that will be. We are thinking of calling it The Howard for Lovecraft.

Crave Online: If you're doing Lovecraft, how much do you put your own stamp on it? There's a distinct look to Guillermo del Toro creatures already.

Guillermo del Toro: You do it by not thinking about it. If you think about it, you kind of defeat the process. By definition, a material that struck a chord with you as a young kid or as an adult, that means there is an affinity. You don't resonate with things that are alien to you, so that affinity is the conduit for you to put something of yourself, but you don't do it a priori. You don't do it like, "Okay, where am I going to put the clockwork in this? Where am I going to put the insect or the fetuses?" It either is there or it isn't, but there is going to be something of you.

 

Guillermo del Toro: I have. I met with Vincenzo for four hours this morning. We went through the cut very carefully. I really came into that project because I admire Vincenzo. I found it, when I was reading it, I found it to be a really unique take on creatures. You know, it's very seldom that you get a creature movie where they are willing to push the creature as a concept to places that are uncomfortable to watch and he did it, is doing it. I'm a big fan of is.

 

Crave Online: It's a sexual creature, isn't it?

Guillermo del Toro: That's one of the aspects of it and the other one is that it's a nonhuman, morally. So that's it, that's the thing. The choices of a creature are not choices that have any human correlation. You may find a cat cuddly but the cat's still going to scratch you whenever the f*ck he wants. It's the same with this creature. I think Vincenzo is doing some really smart stuff. I think it's the thinking man's creature movie for me. I really love what he's doing.

Crave Online: What was the decision to produce Hater for Bayona?

Guillermo del Toro: I was pursuing very few people. I only try to produce for people I admire because then it's very easy to let them do what they want. If you produce people that you have any doubts about, you shouldn't produce them because then you're going to screw around. I mean, I have the distinct displeasure of being produced on Mimic the wrong way. I would never do that or I would try to never do that to anyone I produce.

Crave Online: Will that be less sentimental and touching than The Orphanage?

Guillermo del Toro: Yeah, but what is funny is when we talked about Hater, I told him what I thought the final scene would be and it's an incredibly moving final scene. It's not in the book. When he heard that he said, "I want to do it." Because I think it's a very contemporary movie. Perhaps less so now after the election, where I really feel a huge breathe of relief but it's becoming incredibly easy to hate. What I love about the premise is that it's irate righteousness. It's not a viral situation, it's not a contagion, it's not a DNA. It's a situation of a social disease. The fact that we can actually road rage into murdering someone in a second and social epidemic is what made it really attractive to me. It's not a zombie movie. It's the fact that the people that kill the people can rationalize why they did it. That's what is scary about it, the fact that people will say, "Well, it was coming to him. He had it coming."

Crave Online: I bet they reissue Mimic as "From the director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy."

Guillermo del Toro: I'm working on it. I'm doing it. It's going to be as close to a director's cut as we can. We actually had a great experience the other day. We watched my original cuts and we were like, "Oh my God, this is such a f*cking different movie."

Crave Online: I'm just glad to know that exists somewhere.

Guillermo del Toro: We rescued it because I kept a copy at the right moment. I said, "In case it never happens, I'm going to distribute it at conventions."

 

Crave Online: Now they want your version of it.

Guillermo del Toro: No, what is great is we have unearthed incredible, a bevy of material.