INTERVIEW | Guillermo Del Toro, Part II: 'The most important element of filmmaking is your freedom.' - indieWIRE

by Eric Kohn (August 24, 2011)

EK: "...Most recently, you were going to make an epic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” produced by James Cameron, but Universal passed because it would have been rated R. Why not try to make something like that outside of the studio system?

GDT: "It would have been impossible. Part of what made the novel interesting to me was that it had scale. There are other Lovecraft stories you can tackle with small budgets, but this is not the one. It’s essentially a period film about exploration, almost like mounting a movie about Ernest Shackleton stumbling upon the horrifying remnants of a civilization. So you need scale for that. You need to not compromise. I think it was possible that we could have gotten a PG-13 from the MPAA, but as proven by “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” you can’t be sure, and we couldn’t deal with that danger.

EK: Still, the way things are headed now, couldn’t you find a way to do the special effects with a couple of green screens and create a sense of scale without a massive budget?

GDT: If you know the Lovecraft novel, you know it’s about mounting and expedition, which means going as much as possible to real locations up north. Most of it happens in Antarctica. I really thought long and hard about this, because it would not have been an issue if we had gone under $100 million. But the way I saw it, I couldn’t find a way to solve that. By the way, I’m really good at making small scale movies. “Devil’s Backbone” was about $4 million dollars. “Rudo y Cursi” cost about the same. I’m not alien to that. I made what I thought was the best decision.

EK: What happened to your involvement with the “Haunted Mansion” franchise? You were talking about directing a story focused on the Hatbox Ghost.

GDT: Yeah, we’re working on all that. The first draft has been delivered to Disney. That’s exactly the same thing we were discussing—there was a version of the “Haunted Mansion” movie before that I’m not touching at all. I’m trying to honor the ride, so in my mind it’s not a remake, but entirely a new approach to what I think, as a fan, the “Haunted Mansion” is. I was at the theme park the year that ride opened and I’ve been going at least twice a year since then.

EK: Speaking of which, “Pacific Rim,” which you’re shooting now in Toronto, sounds like it will also be a large scale production.

GDT: Yes, it will. It’s a movie that, even thematically, is all about scale. It’s a big, spectacular monster movie full of action. I’d like to flex those muscles, and then with a little bit of luck, I can go back to something smaller and more like a chamber movie."

via indiewire.com

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