It's been a busy week for Guillermo del Toro.
First the story on Ain't It Cool that his next movie after Hellboy II will not be the precious Hobbit(s) after all but a small, personal fantasy-drama entitled Saturn And The End OF Days, about "a kid named Saturn watching the Rapture and the Apocalypse while on the way back and forth from the grocery store."
And then the announcement, made last night, that GDT would officially direct The Hobbit and its sequel, due to hit multiplexes in late 2011 and 2012.
So what's the skinny, Guillermo? Big, small? Hobbit, Saturn?
"Every time I finish a big movie, I start developing a smaller one," he tells Total Film, clearing half an hour is his "crazy" schedule to clear things up. "What I find is, while you're waiting to get a greenlight on a big movie, it's best to not just be passive, to develop your own things.
Worst comes to worst, you can always go and do your small movie. And it's the best that can happen in a way because you reaffirm your independence, you know?"
Okay. So does that mean Saturn is coming after big movie Hellboy or big(ger) movies The Hobbits? The answer is, as Del Toro calls them, the "H movies".
He laughs. "I'll be in voluntary exile in new Zealand for four years! So Saturn wouldn't happen immediately. I'm gonna be almost 50 by the time I'm done!"
No screenplay(s) yet, but expect them to be scribbled by Guillermo in cahoots with Lord Of The Rings team Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
"The first story is The Hobbit and the second movie is a link, a story between," del Toro told Total Film a few weeks back. It's around half a century between The Hobbit and the first instalment of Rings, so it's more like a bridge movie."
So there you go. Hobbit, Hobbit sequel, Saturn And The End Of Days.
Mind you, he still has another gazillion (that's an approximate number.) projects in various stages of development, so don't be surprised if things change once the Hobbits have been put to bed.
"That's why I try to produce movies," he guffaws, admitting he'd need nine lifetimes to see all his reveries come to fruition.
"The way to do it is to feed out some movies that you'd like to direct but you cannot do. It's too early to announce, but a couple of movies I'm going to produce are to be based on screenplays I developed originally for myself."
As if we haven't got enough to be excited about already.
Source: ( Ain't it Cool )
