At the Directors Guild of America last night Guillermo Del Toro discussed his plans for Smaug the Magnificent:
“All my life I’ve been fascinated by dragons. I was born under the Chinese sign of The Dragon. All my life I’m collecting dragons. It’s such a powerful symbol, and in the context of ‘The Hobbit’ it is used to cast its shadow through the entire narrative. Essentially, Smaug represents so many things: greed, pride he’s ‘the Magnificent,’ after all. The way his shadow is cast in the narrative you cannot then show it and have it be one thing, he has to be the embodiment of all those things. He’s one of the few dragons that will have enormous scenes with lines. He has some of the most beautiful dialogues in those scenes! The design, I’m pretty sure that will be the last design we will sign off on, and the first design we have attempted. It is certainly a matter of turning every stone before figuring out what he looks like, because what he looks like will tell you what he is.”
During a question and answers session he was quizzed by a Hobbit fan regarding his plans for the Wargs appearance and joked that he couldn’t say too much as Warner Bros. had a sniper in the building monitoring his every word.
“There will be different sensibilities involved in this movie than there were in the original trilogy. First of all, because we have the travelogues in ‘The Hobbit’ which goes to places and variations on races that were not addressed in the trilogy. My belief on the ‘Wargs’ issue is that the classical incarnation of the demonic wolf in Nordic mythology is not a hyena-shaped creature. It is a wolf. The archetype is a wolf, so we’re going to go back to the slender, archetypical wolf that is, I think, the inspiration for Tolkien. Listen if we were having a drink two years from now I would spill the beans, because I’m a pretty easy guy about spilling the beans, but I can’t in this instance I can’t because it’s three years from now… believe me, I am jumping up-and-down inside this fat body!”
The more he says, the more I like him!
Loading ...
