Guillermo del Toro’s greatest unmade movie: “I’ve been stuck on page 60 for 13 years”
It can be incredibly difficult for a director to break into the mainstream if their first language isn’t English. Films are hard enough to make as it is, but crafting one for an audience you are not a part of in a language that isn’t your own sounds damn-near impossible. There are some incredibly talented filmmakers out there who have become successful in both their mother tongue and a foreign one, including the great Guillermo del Toro.
Born in Mexico, del Toro has made just as many incredible movies in his native Spanish as he has English. Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone are groundbreaking fantasy horrors with passionate fanbases around the world, whilst he has been showered with praise and awards for his efforts in English, which include Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water, and his stop-motion version of Pinnochio.
Del Toro tends to write (or at least co-write) the scripts for his projects, regardless of the language they are in. He has been nominated for a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Oscar for both Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, a rare case of someone’s mastery of multiple dialects being acknowledged in this way. Between his various movie and TV gigs, it’s hard to imagine he has time for anything else, but there is one unmade project that has defeated him for a very long time.
Speaking to Ain’t It Cool News in 2006, the twisted genius revealed the great white whale of his career up to that point. “I’ve been stuck on page 60 of a screenplay called Silver for 13 years,” he said. “It’s essentially about an old masked wrestler who becomes a bodyguard to a group of politicians in Mexico. He is fat, he has a broken leg, he doesn’t wear the mask anymore. And he finds out they’re vampires, and now he has to kill them at age 60-something. He puts on the mask and goes out to kill them.”
If del Toro is to be believed, then he started working on Silver shortly after the release of his very first movie, Cronos. It would have then been derailed by Mimic, his disastrous first foray into English-language filmmaking, before getting shelved again in favour of other Hollywood projects like Blade II and Hellboy. Following this interview, rumours began to swell that Silver was finally being made. In 2014, he announced his intentions to direct a “black-and-white, low-budget project” in lieu of Pacific Rim 2, which he believed wasn’t going to be greenlit. Sadly for fans of monster-fighting luchadors everywhere, the sequel was greenlit, and del Toro directed that instead. Almost 20 years on from that original statement and over 30 years after he started writing the script, Silver has still yet to materialise.
This wouldn’t be the first time a del Toro idea was derailed by the real world. The director has made something of a habit of being hired for projects and then passing them on to someone else. He was originally going to helm the ‘Hobbit’ franchise before Peter Jackson took over, whilst he and disgraced writer Neil Gaiman pitched a ‘Doctor Strange’ movie almost a decade before Marvel actually made one.
Maybe Silver will eventually see the light of day, or maybe it will stay confined to del Toro’s brain forevermore. Either way, it sounds absolutely fantastic.
