Following revelations earlier in our exclusive Dinner and the Movies conversation with Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro that he’d passed up chances to direct movies like Se7en, The Chronicles of Riddick and Sleepy Hollow, the visionary director shared with RT another list of projects that have never made it to the big screen that he’s had to abandon over the years.
Among the projects del Toro has, at some point, spent time preparing are adaptations of Christopher Fowler’s Spanky, Mark Frost’s List of Seven, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo which, says del Toro he planned to turn into a “gothic Western.”
But one of the projects del Toro spent time on in 2003 was a Disney adaptation of Wind in the Willows that was to mix live action with CG animation, and the director explained why he had to leave the helm. “It was a beautiful book, and then I went to meet with the executives and they said, ‘Could you give Toad a skateboard and make him say, ‘radical dude’ things,’ and that’s when I said, ‘It’s been a pleasure…'”
One former project he is keen to return to is Mimic and del Toro also discussed his plans for a revival. “It’s not going to be the Director’s Cut to end all Director’s Cuts,” he told RT, “it’s just going to make a minute difference to a movie that is not a lost classic by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe the screenplay is really good.”
Click on over to our Dinner and the Movies conversation with del Toro for more on these topics in the recently-released parts 7, 8 and 9, and to catch up on the earlier parts of our ongoing hour-long discussion.
