Del Toro Talks Frankenstein And The Hobbit

Affable fat-man and visionary genius Guillermo Del Toro has appeared in New York to talk about some of his upcoming projects reports Coming Soon.

The amazing director of Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy diptych is currently in pre-production on The Hobbit - a two part prequel to the staggeringly successful The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Most of the talk revolved around his working methods (writing in the morning reading or watching films that inform the process throughout the afternoon) but was pushed to talk a little about his plans for the wargs.

For those not in the know, wargs are mythical wolf-like creatures who appear in the Tolkien books as conscious agents in league with the orcs. Fans were disappointed when Peter Jackson failed to incorporate them into his Rings films but it seems Guillermo has other ideas: "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!"

Elsewhere in the talk the big-man divulged his ten-year plan which involves completion of the Hobbits by 2012, the realisation of his long-cherished hopes to film At the Mountains of Madness from the story by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as his own version of Frankenstein:

"I'm not doing Mary Shelley'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!"

- too bad!

Sheldon Levene