The one movie Guillermo del Toro will always regret turning down: “Now and then I go, ‘Oh, fuck'”
Even though he’s worked almost exclusively in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, three genres that don’t typically find themselves drowning in awards season recognition, Guillermo del Toro has evolved into an Oscars darling, something that seemed unimaginable when he was directing Blade II and Pacific Rim.
As well as being the only person in history to win Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’, the filmmaker’s lifelong passion project, Frankenstein, gave him his seventh and eighth individual nominations, which have been split across five categories to underline his versatility.
He’s never been the kind of auteur to actively chase accolades, and he must have been more surprised than anyone that The Shape of Water notched 13 nominations in total, when he said that he “had no idea that anyone wanted to see the fish get funky.” They did, Guillermo, and so did the Academy, apparently.
Frankenstein was his 13th feature in the 32 years since he made his debut with 1992’s Cronos, and while averaging a new film every two and a half years or so isn’t a bad return, del Toro would have been a lot more prolific if he’d made even a fraction of the flicks he was announced to be directing that never happened.
At the Mountains of Madness is the most notable, but for various reasons, he’s also picked up and dropped The Hobbit, the concluding chapter in his Hellboy trilogy, The Wind in the Willows, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Haunted Mansion, and many, many, many more. He isn’t one for harbouring regrets, though, even if there is one exception, as there usually tends to be.
During an appearance at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, del Toro was asked if there were any movies he’d been offered that he regretted turning down. Surprisingly, given how many he’s flirted with over the decades, there was only a solitary answer: “The only one is Harry Potter,” he said. “Now and then, I go, ‘Oh, fuck.'”
He’d already explained his reasons before for rejecting the franchise’s third instalment, The Prisoner of Azkaban, explaining to MTV that he “saw them as deeper, more creaky, more corroded” stories, whereas Chris Columbus’ first two films “were so bright and happy and full of light that I wasn’t interested.”
Ironically, not only did one of his close friends and fellow member of the ‘Three Amigos’, Alfonso Cuarón, end up with the gig, but he contemplated turning it down until del Toro convinced him otherwise, with the latter recalling how the former called him “such a fucking arrogant bastard” for dismissing the offer without having read the books.
Had del Toro helmed The Prisoner of Azkaban, it may not have turned out too differently from Cuarón’s take on the material; after all, it’s widely regarded as the best in the eight-film series, and blending dark fantasy with lavish production design has become his signature, which is probably why it’s the only one he regrets.
