Guillermo Del Toro’s Saturn and the End of Days

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 21, 2008

What an interesting title that is. Our buddy Peter over at /Film tells us that this is the title for an upcoming Guillermo Del Toro project. This project is in the very early stages as del Toro tell us that he has just begun to write the story. But it’s intriguing because the visionary director says that it has the same overlying theme as Pan’s Labyrinth: “one more, perhaps final, little movie about childhood and horror.” The story follows a boy named Saturn, who is witnessing the Apocalypse while walking back and forth from the supermarket.

“It’s like, what would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you [while] doing errands,” said Del Toro. “You go back and forth and nothing big happens except the entire world is being sucked into a vortex of fire. The small movies you have much more control. If I say this is the design of the fawn and the girl is going to do this or do that, that’s me. In Big Hollywood movies, you get a 50-page memo. It’s horrible. Independent filmmaking is like drawing a comic book, the Hollywood movie is like having five hands holding your hand while drawing the comic book.”

I love del Toro and have a lot of admiration for what he says. I recently watched the movie Ed Wood and I recall the bar scene where Mr. Wood meets Orson Welles. I remember Welles saying how he hated it when the producers wanted to control his movie and that Citizen Kane was the only film he made that was 100 percent his. And this has proven true for del Toro’s career. For instance, Hellboy was cool but not great and I expect nothing more from the sequel. But his indie masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, on the other hand, ranks among the five best films I’ve seen this decade. Although del Toro is expected to helm the massive budgeted Hobbit movies, let’s hope he finds some time in between to put his next potential masterpiece into production.

Sound Off: What do you think of Del Toro’s upcoming project?

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