Today in The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski presents an intimate portrait of horror visionary, Guillermo Del Toro. Del Toro discusses his relationship with The Hobbit, a film he walked away from directing in May last year after two years struggling with the script.
“I never was a mad fan of the ‘Rings’ trilogy.” “The Hobbit,” he said, “is much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. They’re charming, funny, seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!”
On bringing such an admired book to the screen: “It’s like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night . . . bam.”
Del Toro goes on to discuss his current ties to studios (a tie he has regularly expressed a desire to sever) and reveals he is now working on an adaptation of Frankenstein and also hopes to begin an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Mountains of Madness; both of which are horror fairytales.
“The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he explains. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.”
Guillermo Del Toro is one of the greatest minds working in cinema today. I personally cannot wait to see what terrifying delights the future holds.
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