The answer is…well, basically everywhere…He’s a producer, a director, a writer, a novelist, and more…but who’d have thought the day would come when Hellboy would meet Hermione Granger?
Fifteen years ago—and for quite a while after that—it looked like Guillermo was content with making increasingly interesting and unusual horror movies: Cronos in ’95, then Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone, and Blade II. He broke through to the big time with Hellboy, and then broke the rules almost immediately by making the hypnotically beautiful Pan’s Labyrinth in Spanish.
But that, it turned out, was just the beginning. You might be surprised to see that del Toro has become a powerful producer as well; on movies you wouldn’t think were del Toro material, from the animated Puss in Boots (with a number of Latino voices, including, of course, Antonio Banderas) and Megamind to the award-winning Biutiful. And he’s got remakes of Pinocchio and another animated project with the voices of Jude Law and Hugh Jackman, among others, also in the works.
He’s also the reigning king of the almost-but-not-quite projects. Del Toro was the personal choice of Jackson to direct The Hobbit, the much-anticipate prequel to Jackson’s own Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the new Universal/Comcast mega conglomerate performed the first phase of is radical surgery when it cancel his $150 vision of the H.P. Lovecraft classic, In the Mountains of Madness. Not that any of that’s slowed him down: he’s in the midst of writing and directing the equally ambitious alien-robot-invasion project, Pacific Rim, scheduled for release in 2013. Production is scheduled to begin this year under a veil of super-secrecy.
And then, of course, he’s a novelist. In his copious spare time, he’s managed to complete two-third of a horror trilogy about modern-day vampires call The Strain; the second volume, The Fall, came out in paperback just a few weeks ago, and the hardcover of the third and final volume, Night Eternal, will hit the stores in October.
Now, as if he didn’t have enough to keep him busy, Guillermo del Toro has made another announcement—that he’ll be working with Emma Watson, the remarkable young woman who played Hermione in the Harry Potter, in a retelling of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. It’s not exactly the newest idea in town, but if anyone can breathe new life into an old concept, it’s Guillermo.
And that’s just what he’s up to this week. Next week is anybody’s guess. Not bad for a guy who’s only halfway through his thirties…and who had a major profile of his life so far in a recent issue of The New Yorker.
Pretty obviously: keep watching!
