Apparently, even having an Academy Award on your mantle doesn’t guarantee you will get what you want in Hollywood.
Guillermo del Toro–whose most recent film, The Shape of Water, won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director–still has had to struggle to get one of his pet projects on the Silver Screen, according to wegotthiscovered.com.
The acclaimed filmmaker has been embroiled in battles with studio honchos for years in his attempt to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s classic novella, At the Mountains of Madness.
The director took his first steps by co-writing a screenplay with Matthew Robbins based on the novella in 2016, but ran into trouble when Warner Bros. had issues with the financing. “The studio is very nervous about the cost,” del Toro wrote at the time, “and about it not having a love story or a happy ending, but it’s impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe.”
Then the frustrated del Toro came close in 2010, when he was ready to team with producer James Cameron and leading man Tom Cruise on a 3-D movie, but Universal Pictures balked at del Toro’s insistence on an R rating instead of PG-13.
And then, in 2012, Ridley Scott released Prometheus–another installment in his Alien franchise–and it was noted that the film bore a passing resemblance in some spots to del Toro’s proposed script. Another roadblock for the director’s dream.
But, if you listen carefully to what del Toro said during a recent interview, it’s obvious he won’t give up the fight anytime soon.
“This is why I wear this ring since the project was cancelled,” he said. “This is the fake ring about a fake university–the one that appears in the (novella), Miskatonic University–and I’m gonna wear it until I make the movie. They may bury me with it.”
Most filmmakers, del Toro added, exist “in a world that moves above our pay grade. Our career is a series of accidents happening, with your decisions on top. You don’t decide to do one movie instead of another.”
The original 1931 story by Lovecraft–published in Astounding Stories in serialized form–follows a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic continent in September 1930 and what was found by explorers led by Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. In the novella, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring other explorers who want to return to the continent.
Keep reading Horror News Network to keep abreast of del Toro’s quest to see At the Mountains of Madness up on the big screen…somewhere.
