The 45-year-old writer-director-producer is notorious in Hollywood for piling his career plate high. Any time you sit down with him, he talks about more than a dozen different projects as if each was at the very top of his to-do list. Last year, I wrote a cover story in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section about Del Toro's dizzying ambitions -- he wanted to make "Drood," a new Frankenstein film, an adaptation of "Slaughterhouse-Five," and of course, there was his old obsession with putting H.P. Lovecaft's "At the Mountains of Madness" on the silver screen. A few months after that story ran, Del Toro announced a deal for a new production company called Disney Double Dare You. He also has "The Strain," his trilogy of novels, now underway.
Clearly, this is a creator who is so restless -- and so enthused about his current career access to quality projects -- that he wants to cram as much as possible into his calendar. So you can imagine how he simmered as his interpretation of The Hobbit remained a prisoner of the pages of his screenplay instead of becoming an epic on its way to the editing room.
One thing I also have wondered about The Hobbit is how it ought to be made in the wake of The Lord of the Rings. The prequel and the trilogy are quite tonally different, and I imagine that it would be difficult to capture the more lighthearted nature of the story, given that even the non-sci-fi nerd contingent of the potential audience probably understands at this point that it's a prequel to the visually sweeping and emotionally and philosophically searching epic that preceded it to the silver screen.
And I do wonder how it might have been for del Toro to carry Peter Jackson's creative torch forward. The aesthetic vision of Lord of the Rings has some things in common with del Toro's Hellboy movies, but the latter are richer, more colorful, even more strange. There certainly would be, if not an obligation, an expectation that The Hobbit would look very much like Lord of the Rings. I'd just wonder if maybe del Toro is more interested in projects that will bring him fully out of Jackson's shadow for mainstream audiences. I can image I'd want that.