Sunday, April 27, 2008

Is del Toro right for The Hobbit?

I just posted recently the news about del Toro signing on for the film version of The Hobbit. This apparently is causing quite a ruckus in the industry however. Comments from Andrew O'Hehir over at salon.com are just a few of the comments that have been making their way around the interweb that have many people thinking he is less than ideal for the job. O'Hehir says,

First of all, hasn't anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn't like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading "The Lord of the Rings"? Here's what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: "I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits -- I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff."

Let's see, he doesn't like "little guys and dragons" or hairy-footed hobbits, and "The Hobbit" would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he's right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling.


So apparently del Toro doesn't like Hobbits...I say "so what!". Just because someone doesn't enjoy or even fully understand the subject matter doesn't mean they cannot make a great film. Michael Bay says he knew nothing really of Transformers before the project began and he managed to do a pretty rockin' job of the material. I stick behind del Toro as the director for The Hobbit and fully believe that he will do just fine. After all, he is working pretty closely with Jackson on the film and I don't think Jackson would allow it to be too far off. I also hope that del Toro does make the film his own and distance it slightly from the Lord of the Rings. If he is just going to imitate, then why bother do it in the first place?

The full article can be read here.
Posted by SX0T at 4:57 PM |  

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