There are many filmmakers who arrive at Comic-Con like conquering gladiators returning to Rome, and Guillermo Del Toro is absolutely one of them.
The veteran Hollywood director has Pacific Rim – a new sci-fi epic – hitting theaters next year on July 12, 2013, along with three billion other projects he’s trying to get up and running.
“To me, Comic Con has always been invaluable,” Del Toro told Deadline. “it doesn’t matter what project, I want to be here. Spiritually, it’s a beautiful place for me, I truly love Comic Con. I feel at home.”
As Deadline points out, Del Toro’s last film came out in 2008. Remember, he was gonna take over The Hobbit and had to leave, and most disappointing for horror fans like myself, his dream project of At the Mountains of Madness fell apart at Universal.
Del Toro told Deadline’s Mike Fleming he was working on The Hobbit for two years, and a year developing Mountains, during which he also worked on Pacific Rim, which was the one project that did work out.
”People ask me why I have four or five things in development,” Del Toro said. “Here’s the answer. Paraphrasing John Lennon, a career is what happens when you’re making other plans… Pacific Rim has given me an injection of life that I very much needed.”
Del Toro also told an amusing story about his love of the crazy old Japanese monster and robot flicks, which Pacific Rim may take a nod towards. He had to travel across town to see War of the Gargantuans in a run down theater, which you usually had to do to see B movies in those days, and someone hurled a cup of piss from the balcony on his head. But he loved the movie so much, he didn’t even care.
When putting together the designs for Pacific Rim, Del Toro wondered, what lucky director is going to play in this world with all these toys? Once the Hobbit and Mountains didn’t come together, he called the powers that be in charge of Pacific Rim and said, “I’ll come on board Monday. If you are really willing to really take the step into pre-production.”
And in spite of Pacific Rim being a huge sci-fi epic, Del Toro busted his ass and came in under budget and ahead of schedule, which is unheard of in today’s Hollywood. “Hellboy took 135 days, the sequel 132 days,” Del Toro said. “We did this in 103 days.”
As Entertainment Weekly also reported, Del Toro and Ron Perlman also took Comic Con as an opportunity to announce they’re trying to get a third Hellboy off the ground as well. “The [first] two movies were really set up to have this unbelievable resolve,” Perlman said. “Everything that was done in both movies was leading up to this destiny, written in stone, of what Hellboy has been summoned to Earth to do. To not do it, particularly in light of the scope that Guillermo is thinking of for the resolve, would be in my mind a little bit of a shame.”
Actually, it sounds like Hellboy’s going for what The Dark Knight’s been trying to do as a three-peat as well, which would be cool if Perlman and Del Toro would be able to finish things off with a last movie.
