Talkin' Monsters, With Guillermo Del Toro

.

Total Film got the chance to talk to Guillermo Del Toro about the ongoing process of preparing his two-film adaptation of The Hobbit, and the most interesting bit to me - although the whole thing's worth reading - was this exchange on developing the bestiary of the book's universe (and it's totally long but I'm just plunking the whole thing down here because a) Total Film's site makes you load a thousand pages to get through the entire interview, and b) I wanna):

Total Film: You love creating your creatures and obviously The Hobbit offers some great opportunities. There’s the dragon Smaug, the spiders of Mirkwood, the Wargs, Beorn the bear-man…

Del Toro: The way I phrased it to Weta, I said we would keep the DNA in the same gene pool as the Rings trilogy, but that we would generate a different type of character. For example, in the trilogy most of the creatures are brutish or inarticulate.

In The Hobbit, the creatures speak: Smaug has beautiful lines of dialogue; the Great Goblin has beautiful lines of dialogue; many creatures do. So we had to design them with a different approach because you are not just designing things that are scary.

I also wanted some of the monsters in The Hobbit to be majestic.

I wanted the Wargs to have a certain beauty so that you don't have a massively clear definition: what is beautiful is good and what is ugly is not. Some of the monsters are absolutely gorgeous.

TF: Smaug won’t be like the dragons in Reign Of Fire, say. Was it a big challenge to communicate his character?

Del Toro: I think one of the designs I’m the proudest of is Smaug. Obviously he took the longest.

It’s actually still active: we’re finishing his colour palette and a little bit of the texture. But the bulk of the design took about a year, solid. It’s because of the unique features of the dragon.

Early in production I came up with a very strong idea that would separate Smaug from every other dragon ever made. The problem was implementing that idea. But I think we’ve nailed it.

TF: What was the idea?

Del Toro: I cannot tell you what it was because it would be a massive spoiler! But I’m 100 per cent happy with Smaug. If there is such as thing as 110 per cent, then I’m there!

TF: What about the spiders? How faithful are they to Shelob from Return Of The King?

Del Toro: Well, they are the progeny of Shelob, but Shelob was quite a promiscuous girl [laughs]. She mated with many partners. And insects and spiders are incredibly adaptable creatures. There will be spiders… [Laughs]

That sounds like a Paul Thomas Anderson sequel: There Will Be Spiders! But they are visually quite striking and in a different way to Shelob.

I wish I could tell you more but I would be spoiling it again. They are very different. They are more creatures of the shadow, more creatures of the deep forest. They are not earth nesting. They are nesting in the canopies so physically they have adapted to that environment.