Guillermo Del Toro Teases Kazuo Ishiguro Adaptation At BFI Career Talk

Guillermo del Toro was awarded a BFI Fellowship, the British Film Institute’s highest honor, earlier this week in London. And to celebrate the award, the Mexican filmmaker has taken part in a series of talks and presentations across the British capital. This evening, he sat for an onstage career Q&A session with film historian and BFI executive Jason Wood. 

The talk was impassioned and wide-ranging, with Wood, a longtime del Toro interlocutor, quizzing the filmmaker on everything from his childhood in Guadalajara, Mexico, to his passion for design and scrapbooking. During the session, Del Toro also teased his next production, a stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant. 

Del Toro described the film as a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults” that is being produced “without any concession to a family audience.” 

The novel follows an elderly British couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one is able to retain long-term memories. 

Del Toro has adapted the novel with Matilda the Musical scribe Dennis Kelly, and he told the audience at the BFI Southbank in London that he decided the story had to be told in stop-motion, like his 2022 adaptation of Pinocchio, to protect the story’s authenticity

“If you do a live action Pinocchio and all of a sudden a puppet walks through it becomes uncanny valley, which is a horrible thing that doesn’t belong in the same world,” he said. “Just like if you do a live action movie about an old couple crossing a landscape full of trolls and fairies, and there are special effects and actors.” 

Del Toro added: “I want all the creatures to be of the same material. It’s gonna take us years. And it’s incredibly difficult.”

Del Toro also revealed that he is reuniting with his longtime collaborator Ron Perlman on The Buried Giant. The veteran filmmaker didn’t reveal what role Perlman will play in the film, but simply said: “He’s coming on the next movie.” The pair last worked together on Pinocchio, but their collaboration goes back to del Toro’s debut, Cronos.

Del Toro is making The Buried Giant over at Netflix, reuniting with the streamer after last year’s Frankenstein. Next, however, the filmmaker is due in Cannes, where he will present a 4k restoration of his modern classic Pan’s Labyrinth as part of the Cannes Classics lineup. The BFI has also struck a new 4k copy of Del Toro’s Cronos and will re-release the film this month.