del Toro's protage to direct HATER
Last December, before any deal was struck for THE HOBBIT... the masterful Guillermo del Toro was making deals left, right and center for potential directing projects. He must have raked up double figures by the end of 2007 but once Peter Jackson and Middle-Earth came calling, they were all thrown out of the window. And thrown out for a very long time as he won't be free to direct anything not related to hobbit's, for years. One such project was HATER, an adaptation of the David Moody novel setup at Universal which the otherwise engaged del Toro has decided to give to Juan Antonio Bayona, his Spanish directing protage who made the creepy chiller THE ORPHANAGE. The thriller novel revolves around an epidemic which sends ordinary people into violent ruptures and sounds a little bit like Stephen King's novel Cell. The movie will be Bayona's first English studio movie and the first shot in this language. Glen Mazzara, a writer on the t.v. show The Shield scribed. Bayona told Variety...
"I like the idea of a movie that talks about the state of fear we live in nowadays,Everytime I showcase THE ORPHANAGE to people outside of this website, they are convinced the movie was made by del Toro. Well it wasn't. It was certainly done in his style and tone but Bayona should get full credit for what he achieved with that film. Let's see if he can follow it up outside of his own language.