Guillermo del Toro has a famously busy schedule, as a director, writer and producer, with a seemingly endless string of recent projects that include the films Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water and the television series The Strain and Trollhunters, just for starters. But while he has commitments into the foreseeable future as a writer and producer, the filmmaker contends he’s going to take some time off from directing.
RELATED: Del Toro Insisted, The Shape of Water Is NOT An Abe Sapien Movie
“I’m taking a sabbatical for a year as a director,” he told a group of journalists, including Variety, at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico. “I was going to do Fantastic Voyage, but after The Shape of Water I need to take pause.”
The Shape of Water is, of course, is already-acclaimed fantasy-horror romance about an employee of top-secret U.S. government lab in the 1960s whose life is changed when she discovers one of the facility’s experiments, an amphibious humanoid creature.
Written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, the film stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg and Octavia Spencer. The Shape of Water opens Dec. 8 in North America.