Guillermo del Toro Expects Good News On Pan's Labyrinth Musical

Guillermo del Toro has several upcoming movies in the works, including Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim 2 and a small independent movie he plans to make in between. He’s on television with FX’s series of The Strain, and he produced the animated film The Book of Life in theaters this week. That’s not all though, he’s still hard at work on a Pan’s Labyrinth stage musical, and he expects things to move forward soon.

“We are about to hopefully get very good news,” del Toro said at the Book of Life press conference. “We have a British producer that is financing it but we are about to, knock on wood, be able to get really good news on it in the next couple of weeks.”

The music is being writtne by Gustavo Santadolalla and Paul Williams. “What is great is that Gustavo and Paul already wrote a few songs,” del Toro said. “Listening to them is great because they are verbalizing the scenes of the movie in a beautiful way. For me, it always was a movie that was very inspired by theatricality. The sets, the costumes, everything.”

The musical is intended to be English language, but del Toro is already toying with the idea of multilingual translations. “It is English language but we are already thinking about teh translation of the lyrics. Gustavo and I talked about maybe writing half of the songs in English and half of the songs in Spanish and translating them, so that we don’t feel that everything was done in one language.”

International productions are a possibility too, as del Toro mentioned a British producer. West End anybody? “We’re talking about it. If the partnership we are seeking and about to announce happens, it may be a different country.”

Film-wise, del Toro is in the test screening process on Crimson Peak. “It’s looking good. We had a screening with 20% of the effects and temp music and that went great. Now I changed it a lot, we’re going to have another one.”

He had great things to say about his Crimson cast too. ”The cast experience doing Crimson Peak has been unique in my career honestly. I think that other than Pan’s Labyrinth, I haven’t enjoyed the entire cast as much as I did on Crimson. Those are the two movies where everybody delivered.”

Pacific Rim 2 has been announced as well, but it may be a while before he gets to work on the sequel. “We start on The Strain in November and then I’ll be shooting creature unit, action unit. I’m going to be shooting the Mexican luchador black and white footage that appears in the series. Then I shoot a little movie in April, a small one. Then I start prepping Pac Rim immediately in May and we start production in end of November, beginning of December.”

That indie movie he plans to shoot in between is the most secretive project of all. “It’s the only thing I’ve been able to keep secret and I’m going to keep it secret until I make it or not.”

Hellboy 3 remains an iffy proposition. Del Toro has no update since Comic-Con. “I ask the question at Comic-Con to Legendary. That’s the answer we should all await. That’s a movie that is so big compared to the other two, and the other two you have DVD and Blu-ray to make up for it. The first two movies were very successful on home video and that allowed them to recuperate. A third movie, that market is basically gone, so the studios are conservative about it.”

The Book of Life opens Friday.