Guillermo Del Toro is one of the best filmmakers working today, and if you didn’t support Pacific Rim then you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Charlie Kaufman is one of the most amazingly weird (in a good way) screenwriters alive today. The fact that a Guillermo Del Toro Charlie Kaufman collabortion was underway just about blew my mind.
To add icing to that cake, they are adapting a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, namely Slaughterhouse Five.
For those unfortunate readers who have never heard of Charlie Kaufman, he is the mastermind behind the scripts for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Synecdoche, NY. Of course, this genius writing something that Guillermo Del Toro could get his hands on is just too amazing for words.
Want to get more excited? If you don’t know anything about Slaughterhouse Five, check out this description:
Billy Pilgrim lives his life as one not-so random existance that blurs his past as a POW, his present as a middle-aged New York optometrist and his future as a zoo resident on the planet Tralfamadore.
Now imagine the man who wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind writing that script for the man who directed Pan’s Labyrinth to direct. Your mind has now been blown. Here is what Del Toro has to say about it:
Charlie [Kaufman] and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book. I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians [the aliens of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’] — to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do. It’s just a catch-22. The studio will make it when it”s my next movie, but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there’s a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer!
Universal, pony up the money. I don’t care if people were too stupid to watch Pacific Rim and killed brain cells with Grown Ups 2 instead. Don’t let the lowest common denominator ruin this for all of us.
