Guillermo del Toro Taking Break From Directing

Guillermo del Toro is Taking a Year Off From Directing

Published Oct 27, 2017

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With his Venice Film Festival Fantastic Voyage, a project that has already seen its share of delays and problems during a long period in development hell.

Del Toro's new film The Shape of Water is winning critical raves, with many hailing it as the director's best work since his masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth. Sally Hawkins stars as a mute janitor working at a secret government facility who strikes up an unusual relationship with a lonely sea creature being held there. Among other things, the film breaks new ground in depicting human-on-sea-creature sex.

During a round-table discussion in Morelia, Mexico, Guillermo del Toro talked at length about his plans beyond The Shape of Water, including his need to get away from the grind for awhile. Del Toro said via Variety:

“I’m taking a sabbatical for a year as a director. I was going to do ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ but after ‘The Shape of Water’ I need to take pause.”

Fantastic Voyage had already Shawn Levy.

Though he won't be getting behind the camera himself in 2018, Del Toro still has plenty of projects he'll be working on from behind-the-scenes. These include two projects he and long-time producing partner Bertha Navarro are "studying." Del Toro says one potential project would team him with Mexican director Patricia Riggen, whose mine-disaster film The 33 picked up some awards, and who is next slated to direct several episodes of Amazon's spy series Trollhunters.

Most interestingly if you're a hardcore del Toro fan, the director said he is committed to finishing the script for his long-gestating film Silver, about a Mexican wrestler who finds out all politicians are vampires and sets about slaying them. With a year off from directing, maybe del Toro will knuckle down and finishing writing Silver. Or perhaps he will draw up something new and wondrous from the depths of his prolific, visionary imagination. We do know he Hellboy film, as the franchise has been handed off to Neil Marshall for rebooting.