…and it’s not your fault. Even the new bus-stop poster has del Toro’s name as big as the title, even though he’s actually ‘just’ the co-writer and producer of the movie.
Somehow or other, Troy Nixey, a well-respected (if slightly cultish) comic book artists and director of the short film Latchkey’s Lament, has taken a back seat to the significant personality that is Mr. Del Toro, and from a marketing standpoint–to share the stage with the man who gave us Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and Mimi–that may not be such a bad thing.
But it is kind of odd. Del Toro’s out there giving more interviews and making more appearances than Nixey himself, as Don’t Be…is more his movie than anyone else’s. That may be the fact, too: in an interview that Nixey gave to Moviesonline.ca, it’s clearly a very close collaboration between the Mexican-born movie mogul and the first-time director. It was del Toro’s adaptation of the original 1973 screenplay (along with Matthew Robbins, who worked with him on Mimic); he was instrumental in casting, and he was a constant presence on the Melbourne set as well.
Still, this is not exactly Guillermo’s first time at the party as a producer, and he’s not always so front-and-center. Most folks are surprised to see his name (as producer, executive producer, or creative consultant) on a startling number of projects, from Biutiful and Megamind to Kung Fu Panda 2, and he’s rarely left quite as large a fingerprint as he’s made in DBAofD. Maybe it’s Nixey’s newness, or maybe it’s because this just feels like a good ol’ fashioned del Toro scary-picture project more than many other. He clearly cares a great deal about it; the video interview he gave to Dread Central shows just how close this project has been to his heart, as he talks about his sixteen-year-journey to build the right script and find the right director. Check out that interview here.
But del Toro insists this was still Nixey’s project. In the Moviesonline article, he says, “I think Troy made choices in the movie that would be completely against my instinct and that were entirely different than what I would do and they worked and they were teaching me the same way as when Antonio Bayona in The Orphanage made his own proposal of what a horror movie was. I would have never thought it would work.” He’s also just finished producing another horror movie, Julia’s Eyes, directed by Spanish director Guillem Morales, who shot it in Spain and in Spanish. Here, too, he said it was the director’s product, and not his. “I came back and said ‘But why this? Why that way?’ and then I see the movie and go ‘Wow, that’s why!’ I’m learning.”
The pre-release reviews have been mixed, but the horror and del Toro fans who have seen it are much more strongly in favor of the film. The casting–Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes–has generated a lot of talk, too, and we’ll all see how it fares when it opens wide on Friday, August 26, against a fairly weak crew of other premieres (Colombiana, Our Idiot Brother).
But remember: no matter how much you like it, it isn’t a Guillermo del Toro movie. Not exactly. No matter what the poster says.
