Although on hand at this weekend’s New York Comic Con to discuss his upcoming comic book adaptation Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Guillermo del Toro took a few minutes to address what might be next on his directorial plate, promising that an official announcement as to whether he will be directing the Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit for Rings-director Peter Jackson, within the week.
“It is my personal belief that in the next four or five days it’ll be like watching the end of American Idol with a very fat singer,” he said. “In the next four or five days, we will know if we were able to conclude every legal thing that is pending for me to be able to do it or not. It can go either way, but I can assure you very soon we will know and that’s all I can say about that. I hope I get to do it.”
But if his deal to direct The Hobbit unexpectedly falls apart, Del Toro has plenty of options left open to him. The only obstacle standing in his way is finding a studio willing to front the money to make one of them.
“I would love to do Mountains Of Madness, of course, but unfortunately, they don’t finance it,” he admits, mentioning his long in gestation adaptation of the classic H. P. Lovecraft tale At The Mountains Of Madness. “It’s not a movie I can finance out of pocket, which I do when I can. It’s huge to create that city and so forth. The only thing I control is the smaller movies, Pan’s Labyrinth, Devil’s Backbone and so forth. I have other things – List Of Seven – these things need huge financing.”
If he is unable to secure the financing he needs to make one of these films, he would be just as happy to go back to making the smaller horror films on which he built his reputation.
“So I’m starting to sketch, to write and it’ll take me a couple of years to write this thing,” he states. “But I’m starting to sketch one more, perhaps final, little movie about childhood and horror. It’s called Saturn And The End Of Days. It’s about a kid named Saturn watching the Rapture and the Apocalypse while on the way back and forth from the grocery store. It’s like, what would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you [while] doing errands. You go back and forth and nothing big happens except the entire world is being sucked into a vortex of fire.”
