Guillermo Del Toro is not prepared to give up on At The Mountains Of Madness. In an interview with the L.A. Times, the director reaffirmed his desire to get the film made, despite all the troubles that the project has gone through. According to Del Toro, Universal still wants to do it and he’s going to keep pursuing the film until it ends up on the silver screen.
“I’m not giving up, Mountains of Madness has been with me for 13, 14 years and I really don’t want to give up on it. Look, the movies I do, I stick with them when I think, well, if I don’t do it, nobody will. … ‘Hellboy,’ if I hadn’t done it, I don’t think anyone would have. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ same thing. ‘Mountains of Madness,’ the way I plan to do it is a very peculiar take, and I think if I don’t stick with it the version I would like to see would never get made.”
“I’m going to keep pursuing it. Universal is still really interested in doing it. Coming out of Pacific Rim, I intend to see if we can do it immediately. […] I knew Mountains was a long shot. In fact, it was a miracle we got that close to production.”
It’s going to take something close to a miracle to get the film completed at this point. While the rating was one of the issues, the bigger concern was the budget. Del Toro has said that he can likely work with a PG-13 rating and it’s really the budget that is going provide for some problems.
Speaking on Tom Cruise‘s involvement with the film, Guillermo Del Toro confirmed that Cruise is “definitely that interested and that happy where we were creatively. So we have good legs to travel on, if the time and the opportunity present itself. But we’re going to fight for that to happen.”
It seems that Del Toro has his work cut out for him with At The Mountains Of Madness and he’s going to have to put up quite a battle to get the film made. Hopefully Cruise’s star power and Del Toro’s creative vision will be enough to spring this one into production because it truly does sound like the perfect project for the director.
Currently, Guillermo is hard at work on Pacific Rim, which stars Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba. The film is aiming for a July 12, 2013 release.
