Well, inexplicably I’m up at 6:00am again after getting to sleep at 1:00am. Might as well have a cup of tea and blog a bit. I’ve a treat for you!
As you know, I love some of the interviews that show up on Daily Mayo. So many interesting guests, and Simon Mayo is such an excellent interviewer as well, gently steering the conversation along. Well, he had the excellent director Guillermo del Toro on, a couple of days ago. (Who? Oh, he’s the director of the stunning Pan’s Labyrinth, or as I love to say out loud in a corny accent: El Laberinto del Fauno.) He seems to have been busy, what with co-writing a new book (for those of you into vampire-lit, here’s a new series for you, perhaps a nice contrast to the Twilight series), developing a lot of screenplays, moving to New Zealand, and… yes… you know… working on the Hobbit!
After a while, he does indeed get around to talking about the Hobbit films, and although I much prefer to know nothing at all about these banner projects before I walk into the theatre (as I did with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings), I listened to the whole thing. (Even though I thought that the latter half of Hellboy II was a mess, I still trust him to do a good job on the Hobbit movies. Or, as he joked, the Hobbitses. (He said “Hobbitses” to pluralize… he gets it!))
There are several reassuring things. Several. One is that they seem to have understood a key point. The second Hobbit film does not need to be a “bridging” movie connecting the Hobbit film of the story to Peter Jackson’s films of the Lord of the Rings. There’s way enough material to do a good job on the Hobbit proper. The wonderful thing seems to be that they are mining all that wonderful material concerning what happened in Mirkwood, with Gandalf, and the Necromancer…. Oh my goodness, this is wonderful news! That is such a wonderful (and surprisingly little known) piece of the whole Lord of the Rings structure. I do hope that they stay on track with that. He’s working with the TLOR team Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, and they again have artists Alan Lee and John Howe (those guys who, whether we like it or not, helped form lots of the images in our heads of what so many things from TLOR looked like, which – due to their involvement in the films – contributed so much to why everyone was so stunned by how well the films fit the world in their heads), and so on and so forth. It is well worth listening to, not the least because he just seems like such an interesting guy.
I’ve gathered the audio here just for you to listen to, so you don’t have to go anywhere. Just press play and settle back. Browse some posts from the archives (pop up in a new window) while you listen. Here’s the interview:
[audio:http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/mayo/mayo_20090609-1729b.mp3]
It’s quite good. Check it out when you have the chance.
Ciao
Yeah, I had an Anne Rice moment too, also around just after school. Well, I liked the first two. By time I got to Queen of the Dammed I was so annoyed at the whole thing I almost torched the book. Thus ended my brief V-lit phase.
I have plans to see Let The Right One In. At some point. I heard it was good.
-cvj
The vampire novel sounds intriguing in this interview. Besides my post high school fascination with the entire Ann Rice series, vampire literature has not been on my radar. Twighlight excluded, I do however have a thing for vampire films such as last year’s Swedish haunt, Let the Right One In. I can imagine a Guillermo del Toro vampire flick will be very much worth seeing. Pan’s is a favorite.
I cant wait for the new movie… Someone needs to come out with a movie or animated movie of the rest of the series… oooh, another greedy little LOTR fan…never could get us satiated/
btw, speaking of Hobbitses… have you caught this one:
“The Hunt for Gollum”
It’s pretty well done for the price tag and people should watch it. I think people will appreciate it once they get past the first few minutes… especially, if you’re like me: a serial addict to the LOTR book(s) and movies, and can’t picture Aragorn or Gandalf in any other guise.