Re: The Official "The Hobbit" movie thread
Guillermo Del Toro Says 'Hobbit' "Cannot Serve a Peter Jackson Film"
Posted on Saturday, August 9, 2008
A show of hands here: Who thought Hellboy II not only deserved to make more money but would make more money? With Guillermo Del Toro's blossoming reputation, his selection as the director of The Hobbit, and the groundswell of support for the original Hellboy in the years after its release, the fact that it has, through this weekend, only put about about $75 million is a bit of a surprise.
Of course, it did have The Dark Knight to contend with, but the sequel has been surpassed by Journey to the Center of the Earth and Step Brothers at the U.S. box office, which I certainly didn't see coming.
But Del Toro is ready to move on - sort of - according to a new interview with The Sunday Times. He'll spend much of the next half-decade in New Zealand, working on the prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy with producer Peter Jackson, which almost certainly won't have to explain its box office performance to anyone. But the inventive filmmaker admits that, because he covers a lot of the same territory in most of his films, so while he may be working from someone else's material, The Hobbit still attracts him on the same level. The Times says, "All his characters inhabit a universe that is structured but uncaring."
“That’s what I love about fairytales; they tell the truth, not organised politics, religion or economics. Those things destroy the soul," claims Del Toro. "That is the idea from Pan’s Labyrinth and it surfaces in Hellboy and, to some degree, in all my films.”
"I don’t think it’s a conscious decision," the director reasons of his recurring themes, adding, "it’s a proclivity, a compulsion.”
As for The Hobbit, Del Toro says that he can't concern himself with making a carbon copy of the massively popular film series his now-producer Jackson directed:
“I’m trying to be faithful to what I read when I was young. That’s The Hobbit I’m serving. I cannot serve a Peter Jackson film. We also hope to bridge the trilogy. We will create an expansion of what lies in the four books and in a number of appendices. I’m not going to New Zealand for two years to do one movie. I’m going there for four years.”
When asked whether he will find room for the kind of evocative symbolism he's known for in The Hobbit, he replies, “Of course I will...It’s a proclivity, a compulsion.”
The first Hobbit film is currently scheduled for a December 2011 release, with the follow-up arriving a year later.
