The Hobbit may still be three years away, but in a new interview for BBC’s Newsnight Review, director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) has been talking a bit about the movie, as well as his upcoming version of the classic horror tales, Frankenstein and Dr. Jeykll And Mr. Hyde, as well as his new vampire novel, The Strain.
Asked whether all this horror will spill over into the Hobbit, he says “The intensity of the scenes of the Hobbit will have the intensity they had in the book when I was a kid reading them. The spiders of Mirkwood are a pretty harrowing experience and facing the great goblin in the caves is quite a thrilling moment. The Battle of the Five Armies, the first encounter with Gollum – there are scary moments in the book. But they are already there. We are not inventing or trying to do horror for horror’s sake, we are trying to imbue those moments of intensity in the book into the movie.”
He also promises that Gollum and the look of Middle Earth will stay similar to the world created by Peter Jackson in his take on the Lord Of The Rings. When asked what the biggest challenge of working on the The Hobbit has been so far, he answered, “Believing that it’s real! I am so happy doing this movie that I truly dread that it will be a dream. It’s fantastic.”
Talking a bit about his Frankenstein and Jeykll and Hyde movies, he’s promised a unique take on the stories. With Frankenstein he says, “I think there is still one story to be told, at least from my point of view. And that’s using the monster of Frankenstein as a very Miltonian figure, a man abandoned by his creator in a world he doesn’t understand”. While he believes his look at Jeykyll And Hyde is quite perverse and will see Jeykll becoming addicted to the liberation involved in turning into Hyde.
To read more of the interview, CLICK HERE to go to the BBC News website. It will also be shown tonight (Friday June 5th, 2009) at 11.10pm on Newsnight Review.