Few filmmakers seem to have as much on his plate as Guillermo del Toro. He always has a plethora of projects threatening to occupy his time, this is even though the director hasn't had a film in theaters since 2008's fantastical superhero tale "Hellboy II: The Golden Army." He recently spoke with Wired Magazine, ostensibly about the conclusion about his lackluster vampire trilogy "The Strain" (co-written with original "Town" author Chuck Hogan), and he talked about a number of things that he has coming down the pipeline, including acknowledging the involvement of a Guillermo del Toro regular in his new monster movie.
After a lot of boring stuff about "The Strain" (including the small tidbit that he and Hogan are working on a new, as-yet-unannounced series of books), he finally talks about "Pacific Rim," his giant monster movie which was quickly assembled after his gigantic "In the Mountains of Madness" fell apart at Universal, which starts shooting in Toronto this week.
"We are working with actors I absolutely adore," del Toro told Wired. "Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman." Record scratch! Yes, you heard right, Ron Perlman, who has been a del Toro mainstay since his first feature, "Cronos," has joined the cast of "Pacific Rim." Shit just got real.
He goes on to describe the movie as "A very, very beautiful poem to giant monsters. Giant monsters versus giant robots. We’re trying to create a world in which the characters are real and how it would affect our world politically, how it would affect the landscape if creatures like this really came out of the sea, etc."
Del Toro also tells the magazine that he has turned in a draft of his "Haunted Mansion" project to Disney and continues work on the "Hulk" television series for ABC. (If you'll remember he was originally supposed to have a production shingle at Disney called Disney Double Dare You, but his prolonged involvement with "The Hobbit" meant an end to that arrangement. Since then he's decamped to DreamWorks Animation, where he serves as an executive creative consultant on all of their animated features.) He's also still working on a videogame called "inSANE," a process he described as being quite different from moviemaking: "With a videogame, you don’t have to solve one screenplay, you have to solve 20 screenplays, because you are giving the player the illusion of free will. If the character kills another character or destroys a building, the game goes one way; if the character doesn’t, it goes another. It keeps you very nimble."
But he's not forthcoming about everything — when the interviewer brings up del Toro's abandoned "Slaughterhouse Five" adaptation, the filmmaker is uncharacteristically cagey. "I hope you don’t mind, but I’d prefer not to discuss projects that aren’t active," he said. "It creates the impression of…I am diverse, but I’m not that diverse." He may night be that diverse, but he can sure try. Thankfully we have these various del Toro projects to keep us busy, since "Pacific Rim" doesn't open until July 12, 2013.