Guillermo del Toro has a very good shot at earning his first Best Director nomination for his latest film The Shape of Water. However, after you walk out of that movie in a daze and hungry for his next picture, you’re going to have to exercise some patience. The filmmaker recently spoke with a group of journalists and Variety reports that he’s planning to take a year off from filmmaking.

During the discussion, del Toro revealed that his black-and-white film Silver remains in the scripting stage. The story follow a luchadore who discovers all politicians are vampires and sets out to slay them, but del Toro says he only got halfway through the screenplay before deciding to pursue The Shape of Water instead. The script is still unfinished and apparently his friend and fellow director Alfonso Cuaron is bugging him to complete it.

Del Toro’s next film after The Shape of Water was supposed to be a remake of Fantastic Voyage, but apparently that’s going on hiatus with him. “I’m taking a sabbatical for a year as a director,” says del Toro. “I was going to do Fantastic Voyage, but after The Shape of Water I need to take pause.”

However, he plans to still stay active as a producer. He promises that there will be new word on the second season of Trollhunters coming in the next month and he’s producing two projects. “I have two projects with Bertha Navarro which we’re studying,” says Del Toro. “We’re talking about producing a film by Patricia Riggen, I can’t say the title, but she’s a super solid director, very nice person. She is the type of writer-director who can benefit from a strong production structure which helps her to express what she’s interested in.”

The other project is a documentary that sounds fascinating but also has some grisly details:

The documentary “Ayotzinapa,” is a heart-shattering look at the tragic events of Sept. 26, 2014, when 43 students went missing and three more were killed in a highly controversial series of events. The Mexican government, drug cartels, military, the United Nations and a number of independent watch groups all have a different take on that night’s events, but the film is presented from the point of view of the families of the missing, and the students that survived the night.

So we’re not going to be without del Toro and he knows how to stay busy. If that means having to wait a little longer for his next directorial effort, so be it.

The Shape of Water opens December 1st.