Talking Ghosts and Gore with Mama Producer Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro has written and/or directed his share of horror-tinged movies (I hesitate to just call them "horror" movies, as there's usually more to films like Cronos or The Devil's Backbone than just that). But he's also helped get other filmmakers' projects made in the genre as a producer, resulting in pictures like The Orphanage and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark… and now, Mama.

Mama comes from first-time feature director Andrés Muschietti, whose short film of the same name caught del Toro's eye and eventually a deal to adapt it. With GDT onboard as producer, Muschietti was able to make his movie in a studio environment -- the tale of a mother from beyond the grave and the children that she will do anything for, whether their adoptive parents (Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) like it or not.

I met up with del Toro in Manhattan this week to talk about Mama and, among other things, his process of cultivating new talent like Muschietti. Watch the full video right here (an index of conversation topics can be found beneath the embed):

• 0.01: Why director Andrés Muschietti's original "Mama" short film got GDT interested in producing the feature
• 0.45: How many shorts GDT watches a year when looking for new talent, and how he's noticing a trend of style over substance in such films lately
• 1.55: Working on Pacific Rim on soundstages next door to Mama, which enabled GDT to be very present for the latter film's creation
• 4.00: On his relationship with Universal and how he anticipated a battle with the studio over the ending of Mama
• 5.05: How Mama is a creature in the grand tradition of sympathetic monsters
• 6.45: Mama as a merging of GDT's "Hollywood" style with his smaller, more indie-minded Spanish-language films like Pan's Labyrinth
• 7.45: How one of the "great quests" of his life is to get people to see his 2001 ghost story The Devil's Backbone
• 8.50: The importance of fairy tales on his work, how he still reads them even as an adult, how they help him understand the horror genre, and why he thinks you need more than just gore to make a good horror film
• 9.45: The status of his next film, Crimson Peak, which is also a ghost story (and why he's not worried about repeating himself)

Also check out what del Toro told me about Dark Universe, the DC Comics movie he hopes to make featuring supernatural characters including John Constantine, Swamp Thing, The Spectre, Zatanna and more:

And here's an update on one of his dream projects, At the Mountains of Madness, which GDT still thinks will get made someday:

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.

Source : ign[dot]com