DNY: As director, you could have gone to work for Warner Bros, doing a Wizard of Oz movie, and, I’ve heard, the studio wanted you to resurrect Superman...Del Toro: There were other projects [he laughs].
DNY: That’s diplomatic. Why did you instead choose At the Mountains of Madness, a much harder picture to get greenlit?
Del Toro : I came out of The Hobbit, and it was the biggest heartbreak I’ve experienced as a filmmaker, because I will never know what that movie would have been. I was very mindful that I didn’t want to have a rebound movie, as happens sometimes when somebody comes off a long romance. There were very big, lucrative, beautiful projects on the table, and I was developing one of them with Jim Cameron. In my stubborn fashion, I slipped Jim the script, again, when we were meeting on that other project. He said, you still want to do that? To his credit, he said, well, let’s pursue that instead. This is the movie I most want to do. I haven’t done horror in a long time. Devil’s Backbone tries to make the ghost a victim, and not a scary character. Blade 2 is more action than horror. I really love the genre and last time I did a horror film was Mimic, and that was not a horror for the right reasons. That’s a muscle I want to flex. Frankenstein has the mitigating factor that for a length of the narrative, you favor the monster. For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light. I mostly love monsters too much to see them in that light, but Lovecraft allows me to.
DNY: Because the villain is an otherworldly species?
Del Toro: Because the proportion is so big. When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that’s the route I usually want to go. The cosmic proportions of the Lovecraft horror are so immense, it forces you to find humanity in other aspects of the tale. You can keep the monster inhuman, remote and scary, which is a great benefit.
DNY: Universal needed to be convinced to make this film, which is a bold play. I’ve heard there was a meeting with you, Jim, Ron Meyer and his Universal execs that swung the deal. How did you walk away with a yes?
Del Toro: Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley have always been friends of the project. The screenplay that is on the internet is an old screenplay, and the one I gave to Jim and Universal is different. When I came back from The Hobbit, I gave my Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington speech at Universal. I pitch with heart on sleeve, and Donna and Adam were moved, liked the new take and said, let’s develop it hard. But I wanted to be shooting by June next year. I didn’t want to let another year go by without shooting, it made no sense. So Jim, Jon Landau, Rae Sanchini, came with me for that big meeting. Jim and I were able to do a double tag team, talking about the world and the experience that Mountains would be. We found new ways for them to see it, and they agreed to investigate it further. We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. That was truly one of the highlights of my fat life, a demigod like Muren saying that.
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 14:40 (thirteen years ago) link