Guillermo Being Guillermo (and that’s del Toro, btw)

Getting a comment about his films from Guillermo del Toro is like pulling teeth…out of butter.

ComingSoon has coverage of Guillermo del Toro’s talk at the New Yorker Festival this weekend (CS nicely refers to him as Guillermo “I’m making The Motherf****** ‘Hobbit’” del Toro) and as we all know, Guillermo being Guillermo means a wealth of chattiness and as much information as he can give away without the suits fainting.

So Guillermo, want to tell us anything about your prep for The Hobbit?

“I find you have to discipline yourself to write in the morning, and then watch and read in the afternoons stuff that seems relevant, even in a tangential way. For example, reading or watching World War I documentaries or books that I think inform ‘The Hobbit,’ strangely enough, because I believe it is a book born out of Tolkien’s generation’s experience with World War I and the disappointment of being in that field and seeing all those values kind of collapse. I think it’s a turning point that you need to familiarize yourself with. I’m starting. Peter Jackson is such a fan of that historical moment and obsessive collector of World War I memorabilia, and he owns several genuine, life-size working reproductions of planes, tanks, cannons, ships! He has the perfect obsessive reproductions of uniforms of that time for armies of about 120 soldiers… each. I asked him which books he recommended… because I wouldn’t be watching ‘Krull’ or ‘The Dark Crystal,’ I need to find my OWN way into the story. That’s the same way I did ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ or ‘Devil’s Backbone,’ by watching stuff you wouldn’t think about.

“All my life I’ve been fascinated by dragons. I was born under the Chinese sign of The Dragon. All my life I’m collecting dragons. It’s such a powerful symbol, and in the context of ‘The Hobbit’ it is used to cast its shadow through the entire narrative. Essentially, Smaug represents so many things: greed, pride… he’s ‘the Magnificent,’ after all. The way his shadow is cast in the narrative you cannot then show it and have it be one thing, he has to be the embodiment of all those things. He’s one of the few dragons that will have enormous scenes with lines. He has some of the most beautiful dialogues in those scenes! The design, I’m pretty sure that will be the last design we will sign off on, and the first design we have attempted. It is certainly a matter of turning every stone before figuring out what he looks like, because what he looks like will tell you what he is.”

Krull? Wow, that’s a movie you don’t hear about enough…or maybe you do.

So, Guillermo, we hear you’re a huge fan of Frankenstein and plan to make your own version. Comments?

“I’m not doing ‘Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.’ I’m doing an adventure story that involves the creature. I cannot say much, but it’s not the central creation story, I’m not worried about that. The fact is I’ve been dreaming of doing a ‘Frankenstein’ movie since I was a child. The one thing I can promise is, compared to Kenneth Branagh, I will not appear shirtless in the movie!”

We thank you for that, Guillermo, and to be honest, kind of wish Kenneth had shown the same restraint.

Can you tell us anything more about The Hobbit? Any specific details? Apparently not–del Toro jokes that Warner Brothers “has a sniper in the theater.” And then he proceeds to go on and talk more:

“There will be different sensibilities involved in this movie than there were in the original trilogy. First of all, because we have the travelogues in ‘The Hobbit’ which goes to places and variations on races that were not addressed in the trilogy. My belief on the ‘Wargs’ issue is that the classical incarnation of the demonic wolf in Nordic mythology is not a hyena-shaped creature. It is a wolf. The archetype is a wolf, so we’re going to go back to the slender, archetypical wolf that is, I think, the inspiration for Tolkien. Listen… if we were having a drink two years from now I would spill the beans, because I’m a pretty easy guy about spilling the beans, but I can’t in this instance I can’t because it’s three years from now… believe me, I am jumping up-and-down inside this fat body!”

You’re jumping up and down in your fat body, and that sniper/WB exec has fainted dead away.

I think it’s safe to say that we won’t lose sight of del Toro for years while he buries himself in making The Hobbit films. He likes to share too much.