Guillermo Del Toro is one busy man. He’s developing a Hulk TV series for ABC, he’s putting the finishing touches on ‘Pacific Rim’, and there’s talk about him assembling DC’s “dark” characters in a team for a film called ‘Heaven Sent’. On top of that (and more that I’m probably forgetting), he’s adapting his novel series ‘The Strain’ into a television series. With all this stuff going on, it’s hard to keep track of where he is on what project, so in a new interview with MTV Geek, the ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ director gives us an update on his new FX show about vampires that infect New York City.
He starts off by telling us exactly where he is in the process of creation:
“Well Chuck Hogan and I are gonna write the pilot together, and we’re starting already to cast. In other words, we’re out to actors with the books and me meeting them and we’re starting to, with a little bit of luck, get a very interesting cast for the series. The pilot has been greenlit, which means that it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when,’ we’re gonna shoot it next year. It will shoot very likely in Toronto.”
Then, he went on with describing the tone and style of the series:
“Basically I’m trying to do what I do in my movies which is to show it as a reality, but as a reality that is stylized. It’s not like ‘CSI’ or ‘The Wire’, it’s real but it feels a little stylized. But the way the camera work will be is very realistic. We want to keep the camera very documentary even if the look of the show is not. The look of the show is very designed. The style of the camera and the storytelling will be very loose. It will evolve from that feel of reality, and little by little we want to evolve into more stylish, horror feel that requires smoother camera moves, more suspense and atmosphere-driven moments so it will be a mixture. I don’t think that mixture has been seen a lot on TV.”
Finally, Del Toro discusses the amount of gore and brutality that this new horror drama will contain:
“Well it will certainly be brutal. We are a TV show, we are restrained about how much human gore we can show, but we will be pretty brutal. If you read the novels and you read the comic, there are very, very harrowing human dynamics in the 3 books. Because the vampires in the books, the first people they want to kill are the people they love, so that’s gonna be pretty hardcore [laughs].”
He also discusses in the interview why ‘The Strain’ ended up in comic book form, how involved he is in all of his projects, and just how true those ‘Heaven Sent’ rumors are.
If you can’t wait for ‘The Strain’ to hit your television sets, the collected version of the comic written by David Lapham with art by Mike Huddleston hits shelves today, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
