Guillermo del Toro now looks set to revisit his unmade adaptation of H P Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness.
Lots of directors have that one project on their slate that never quite came into being, no matter how hard they tried to push it over the line.
Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jackson and Blomkamp’s Halo, Kubrick’s Napoleon have all entered into legend as interesting films that powerful filmmakers still somehow, couldn’t will into existence. Sometimes, though, despite seeming like an impossibility, these projects can somehow spark into life, like Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a project that took the filmmaker 30 years to get made.
Guillermo del Toro is clearly taking the long view when it comes to his own passion project, At The Mountains of Madness, an adaptation of the HP Lovecraft tale that the director spent years trying to get off the ground.
The filmmaker did come incredibly close before, with big names like Tom Cruise and James Cameron attached to collaborate, but Universal was spooked by the $150m price tag for an R-rated movie and pulled out. However, del Toro has reiterated that he still intends to get the film made, with the development of film technology and his status as an Oscar-winning filmmaker hopefully helping things along. Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of emerging platforms who are willing to shell out big money to secure talent of the calibre of del Toro.
However, the director acknowledges that he will have to make some changes to the script, saying “the thing with Mountains is the screenplay I co-wrote 15 years ago is not the screenplay I would do now, so I need to do a rewrite. Not only to scale it down somehow but because back then I was trying to bridge the scale of it with elements that would make it go through the studio machinery”.
“I can go to a far more esoteric, weirder, smaller version of it. You know, where I can go back to some of the scenes that were left out. Some of the big set pieces I designed, for example, I have no appetite for. Like, I’ve already done this or that giant set piece. I feel like going into a weirder direction.”
Less studio-mandated action and more del Toro weirdness is exactly what we’d like, thank you very much. The filmmaker also added that it is simply a lack of time that is preventing him from rewriting the script too.
It may be some way off, but like del Toro, we’re not giving up hope on this one. The filmmaker’s next movie, Nightmare Alley, releases on the 21st January, 2022.
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