We’re been waiting so very long to hear introvert and reclusive director Guillermo Del Toro talk about his… oh wait, Guillermo Del Toro isn’t reclusive or introverted – in fact, the guy runs his mouth more than Tarantino at a Kurosawa retrospective.  Well, lo and behold, the mouth that cannot quit spoke yet again at the Blu-ray release party for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.  Let me just preface what I’m about to drop on you with this: prepare to have your brain leak out of your ears.

The first subject Del Toro touched upon was the two Lord of the Rings prequels, known under the guise of the singular title – The Hobbit.  Del Toro tickled ComingSoon.net about some of his ideas for the creatures in the film – which any Del Toro fan knows is the director’s strong suit.  "We want to do muscle-driven, radio-controlled suits for a couple of things. I already started that with Wink in Hellboy II.  Wink was pushed as far as we could within the time limits and the budget limits of the movie and we're going to take what we learned and apply it. Smaug is the creature in The Hobbit. The way Tolkien wrote it, already, is magnificent. It's already a fantastic character. So, obviously, dragons, you ask every person what their best favorite dragon is, they will give you a different answer. In my mind, what we're going to attempt on the design of this creature and the creation of this creature needs to push the envelope beyond anything you've ever seen on that kind of creature.  There is some stuff that has been done with dragons that I find... there are very few landmarks created for me. One of the best and one of the strongest landmarks that almost nobody can overcome is Dragonslayer. The design of the Vermithrax Pejorative is perhaps one of the most perfect creature designs ever made. So, what you have to be careful is not to try to be distinctive just to be distinctive, but Smaug has certain characteristics that make him unique already. I am bursting at the seams about spilling the beans, but I won't because I would be shot."

Very interesting indeed.  Del Toro is definitely one of the most inventive genre helmers around, to me almost like a new generation of cinemagoers’ George Lucas, so it was no surprise that while talking to Sci-Fi Wire about his passion project – an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness – he expanded upon this idea of cinema technology and the creatures that the tech could assist him in bringing to life:  "Part of the arrangement with Universal – in being essentially there for now until 2017 – part of the arrangement was they would finance research and development for Mountains of Madness. And we are doing it. There are many technical tools in creating the monsters that don't exist, and we need to develop them. The creatures, Lovecraft's creatures, the tools that exist for CG and the materials that exist for makeup effects, you need to push them to get there and we're going to push them.  Well, the fact that the shape-shifting implicit in the novel and implicit in the creatures... if you think in technical terms, digitally, that means normally you generate, for example, one model per creature. If you talk about shape-shifting to the degree that these creatures do, then you're talking about, essentially – if you're using traditional tools – you're going to need to generate 30, 40 models fully rendered per creature. That's A, limiting and B, incredibly expensive. So what we are trying to do is we're developing sort of a Swiss Army Knife approach to modeling. The details are going to be evolving, but it's almost like a Chinese box approach to the models, where we can encase one model on another one and make them modular. And the tools that we need for that to be fluid don't exist. We're going to need to write digital code we need to develop, the way Peter [Jackson] had to develop software for Lord of the Rings."

Del Toro the fan (the alter ego of Del Toro the director) quickly added about the new technology:  “We are thinking of calling it The Howard. For Lovecraft."

Okay, so now that I’m sweating like a horny nun alone with the Pope… Del Toro then went on to discuss his vision of Frankenstein with Sci-Fi:  "The project I have at Universal is trying to approach the mythology from a different point of view. So you will see will be seeing the Frankenstein myth, but from a side, like an oblique way. If I told you exactly what it is, then it will be completely surpriseless by the time it is announced. But it won't be the straight Frankenstein, I don't think."

So with all the different incarnations of the Frankenstein story over the years which will Del Toro’s follow?  Apparently none.  "It's not exactly Mary Reilly. It's not Igor's diary. No, but it's an ancillary story."

All I gotta say about the above is this:  Good God, I love you Guillermo Del Toro.

What do you think?