James Gunn Says Guillermo del Toro Showed No Interest in Directing SWAMP THING
Guillermo del Toro has talked about his love for Swamp Thing over the years, and at one point he was even developing a Justice League Dark movie for DC, which would’ve featured Swamp Thing. I wondered why Del Toro wasn’t in the mix to direct the Swamp Thing movie that James Mangold is now attached to, and according to James Gunn, Del Toro never expressed any interest.
When asked by a fan on social media why he chose Mangold over Del Toro, Gunn said: “Well, for starters James actually expressed his interest to me (Guillermo, who I know and love, did not).”
So, that answers that! While I would’ve liked to have seen Del Toro make a Swamp Thing or Justice League Dark movie, things just didn’t work out that way. Regardless, I’m excited to see what Mangold does with his Swamp Thing movie, and he seems really excited about it!
Del Toro previously offered up some information on his unmade Justice League Dark project, saying: "I took a little bit of the opening of the Alan Moore Constantine. And I took the dynamics between [Abby Arcane] and Swamp Thing, and I took the sort of revelatory moments when Deadman gets into a body, how he would experience the consciousness of that being. And one of my all time favorites is the demon Etrigan. I love that character. You know, so you try to put them together ... Zatanna is really, for me, another character that is really effortlessly powerful and interesting. Trying to mix that with Klarion the Witch Boy ... I was a DC guy."
Mangold previously talked about approaching James Gunn and Peter Safran about the idea of making the movie, saying: “Basically, the second I heard DC was going through some leadership convulsion and James was taking over, I just saw it as an opportunity to throw my hat down in the most — I mean I just called them and I said, ‘In all the stuff you’re doing, if the idea of me making a gothic horror film, origin story of Swamp Thing fits in, tell me.
The filmmaker went on to say he has no agenda of building a cinematic universe for Swamp Thing, he just has a story that he wants to tell. He compares it to RoboCop: “It’s no different speech than anyone else gets with me; I don’t have any agenda for a universe, I’m not building towards someone joining in some future. Have at it, but I’d just be interested in telling, I’ve always been interested in doing a version of Frankenstein, basically, and, yet, I feel, ‘It’s alive!’ has been done enough, but Swamp Thing always occurred to me as this wonderful version of a Frankenstein story, much in the way one of my favorite pop films of growing up, RoboCop, the original one. This guy who just wakes up and he’s been turned into, he finds he’s become this machine, was also something I was fascinated with with Logan, obviously.”
Mangold also says that he likes the idea of making Swamp Thing a “noir, mystery, horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing.” He added: “There’s an amnesiac quality of, ‘How did I get here and who did this to me?’ So I’m envisioning a horror-noir film following a creature that can’t be seen, trying to piece together from fragments of memories, what happened and who did it. And none of this runs counter to the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and all the great work that went on...I’m just framing it up in a new movie context, but that’s all they were exploring in these comics and so beautifully.”
Are you excited for Mangold’s Swamp Thing, or would you have rather seen Del Toro make the movie?