He’s wearing the producing hat this time
To say Guillermo del Toro is “busy” is an understatement. The Hobbit is gobbling up much of his time, but on the side he’s shepherding a number of films along under the direction of other filmmakers. Splice, from Cube director Vincenzo Natali and starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, is one picture produced by Del Toro that is in post-production.
“I met with Vincenzo for four hours this morning,” Del Toro updates ShockTillYouDrop.com. “We went through the [recent] cut very carefully. I really came into that project because I admire Vincenzo. When I was reading it, I found it to be a really unique take on creatures. It’s very seldom that you get a creature movie where they’re willing to push the creature as a concept, to places that are uncomfortable to watch.”
Brody and Polley spawn a female creature (pictured) after tinkering with human and animal DNA. But like Frankenstein’s creation, their experiment becomes hard to control. “Sexuality is one of the many aspects of it. It’s also not human, morally,” Del Toro chuckles. “The choices of the creature are choices that don’t have any human correlation. You might find a cat cuddly, but a cat is still going to scratch you whenever the f**k he wants. It’s the same with this creature. Vincenzo is doing some really smart stuff. I really love what he’s doing and it’s the thinking man’s creature movie.”
Hater, meanwhile, reunites Del Toro with The Orphanage‘s Juan Antonio Bayona who is adapting David Moody’s tale of hatred and violence spreading like a disease.
“I was pursuing very few people [to direct],” admits Del Toro, again on producing duties for this project. “I only try to produce people that I admire because then it’s very easy to let them do what they want. If you produce people you have doubts about, you shouldn’t produce them. I had the distinct displeasure of being produced on Mimic the wrong way. I would try to never do that to anyone.”
In spite of the rather old school aesthetic Bayona brought to Orphanage, Del Toro felt he was a perfect fit for this film which goes for the throat. “What is funny is when we talked about Hater and I told him what the final scene will be – it’s an incredibly movie final scene that’s not in the book – he said, I want to do it. Because it’s a very contemporary movie, perhaps less so after the election, because I feel a huge breath of relief, but it’s becoming very easy to hate. And what I love about the premise is that there is a righteousness. It’s not a viral situation, not a contagion, it’s a situation of a social disease. That we can road rage into murdering someone at any second. That it’s a social epidemic is what attracted me. It’s not a zombie movie. The people that kill the people can rationalize why they did it. That’s what is scary about it.”
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
