LatinoReview scored a very nice interview with Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro and had a chance to chat Hellboy II: The Golden Army as it has now found a home a Universal Pictures after the first film was released by Columbia.
Here is a snippet from that interview in which del Toro does confirm that the plot posted over at AICN was only “off by very little… but it’s accurate in as much as that it’s sort of the magical world declaring war on the human world.”
Latino Review: Can you elaborate a little on ‘Hellboy II’ for the fans, like who is coming back, who’s not coming back?
Del Toro: We definitely have all the regulars – Hellboy, Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman are back. We have two characters from the F world, which are a prince and a princess that we will be casting very soon, but not coming back is John Myers. He’s not coming back. Kroenen is back in a very small sort of cameo appearance and Professor Broom, John Hurt, is not back. Evidently Kroenen took care of that.
Latino Review: What do you want to bring to ‘Hellboy II’ that you couldn’t bring on ‘Hellboy I?’
Del Toro: Well, I think that one of the drags for me on the first movie was having to introduce the characters. For example, I really enjoyed ‘Spider-Man II’ more than I did ‘Spider-Man I’ as a whole. And I enjoyed ‘X-Men II’ more than I enjoyed number one because you have all the drag of introducing the characters and the world and there is so much exposition that it gets in the way of the fun, I think. I believe that you can deal more with character situations and have more fun with those things on a second movie, more so than you can on a first one. So that freedom and the banter among the characters, I think, is better. And the world is completely different. The first one was dealing with a much more urban environment and the second one is more in a mythical type of environment, more magical. So hopefully it’s closer to some of the aspects of the comic book that we couldn’t portray in the first one.
Guillermo also mentions that if Hellboy II does well we can expect a number three which “would be Hellboy basically fulfilling the prophecy.” Get the rest of the interview here.
Hellboy II is expected to go into production late April or early May 2007 in Budapest, Hungary with an anticipated release summer 2008.
