Del Toro At the Mountains of Madness

We have already discussed Guillermo Del Toro’s thoughts on The Hobbit (here) and Frankenstein (here).

With regard to At the Mountains of Madness, I'd love to see you tackle H.P. Lovecraft in a way that hasn't been done.

Del Toro: Me too. Me too. ... Part of the arrangement with Universal--in being essentially there for now until 2017--part of the arrangement was they would finance research and development for Mountains of Madness. And we are doing it. There are many technical tools in creating the monsters that don't exist, and we need to develop them. The creatures, Lovecraft's creatures, the tools that exist for CG and the materials that exist for makeup effects, you need to push them to get there, and we're going to push them (Scifi Wire).

If you have read any of H. P. Lovecraft’s books, then it is easy to see what Del Toro is talking about.  All of Lovecraft’s creation are like anything that has ever been done in a film before.  If you have ever seen any of the films based on any of Lovecraft’s books, then you know how far from the originals they have gone away from the originals so they could make them producible for the big screen.

What is the effect you want to get?

Del Toro: Well, the fact that the shape-shifting implicit in the novel and implicit in the creatures, ... if you think in technical terms, digitally, that means normally you generate, for example, one model per creature. If you talk about shape-shifting to the degree that these creatures do, then you're talking about, essentially--if you're using traditional tools--you're going to need to generate 30, 40 models fully rendered per creature. That's, A, limiting and, B, incredibly expensive. So what we are trying to do is we're developing sort of a Swiss-army-knife approach to modeling. The details are going to be evolving, but it's almost like a Chinese box approach to the models, where we can encase one model on another one and make them modular. And the tools that we need for that to be fluid don't exist. We're going to need to write digital code we need to develop, the way Peter [Jackson] had to develop software for Lord of the Rings. ...

It took so many movies to develop intelligent fire software to the point where Peter could render the Balrog or to develop Massive software to do the crowds in Lord of the Rings. By the same token, we're going to need to develop a new tool that will be. We are thinking of calling it the Howard. For Lovecraft. ... (Scifi Wire)

I think they made major strides toward Lovecraft style creatures in Hellboy 2, but there is a long way to go before our rendering capacity catches up with his imagination.  If anyone can make this happen, it would be Del Toro.  He has the clout and the creativity to do it.