So Is Anything Left, Look-wise, from Guillermo del Toro in ‘The Hobbit’?

Guillermo del Toro proved himself to be one of the most visually exciting filmmakers with Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies, and it was awesome news when he was announced to be directing The Hobbit films back in 2008.  However, because of the project’s delays cutting into his future projects, del Toro stepped down from directing the films after two years of preproduction and Peter Jackson took the director’s chair.  The news was met with some disappointment, but many were happy that Jackson would be returning to Middle-Earth.

del Toro remained involved with the project as a co-writer of the screenplay of at least the first two films (along with Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson, who wrote the screenplays for the Lord of the Rings), but fans have wondered how much of his visual designs will remain in the final three-part film series — especially since the trailers for the first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, were so similar in visual style to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

Jackson himself answered that question in an interview with io9:

[Guillermo] had designed a lot of the movie . . . I looked at his designs when he took over and a lot of his designs are very Guillermo . . . it was very much stuff that you would recognize from Pan’s Labyrinth or Hellboy. It was his artistic vision and I couldn’t make that movie. I looked at his designs and I said the only person who can make a Guillermo Del Toro movie is Guillermo. It shouldn’t be me. I can’t put my head into somebody else’s idea — I have to generate it from the beginning. So really I redesigned the film pretty much. Some of Guillermo’s DNA is in there — there were some things he did that I thought were pretty cool and I’ve taken bits of pieces of his stuff — kind of altering it and changing it as I saw it. But the film was largely redesigned.

While I certainly respect Jackson for not wanting to try to make del Toro’s movie, I hope we’ll get to see some of del Toro’s designs sometime down the road (like in a “The Art of The Hobbit” book).  He’s an incredible talent, and I’d hate to see his work get stuck in a vault somewhere.