Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is currently hard at work on his next film The Shape Of Water, which kicked off shooting in Canada in August/ September of last year. Well, we didn’t know a great deal about the film – until now, as actor Doug Jones has been spilling the beans on the project when he visited the Collider Nightmares studio.
“It’s a 1963 drama—it’s not a sci-fi [film], it’s not a genre film, but I am a creature in it,” Jones said.
“I’m a fish man that’s kind of a one-off. I’m an enigma, nobody knows where I came from; I’m the last of my species so I’m like a natural anomaly. And I’m being studied and tested in a U.S. government facility in 1963, so the Russian Cold War is on, the race for space is on, so there’s all that backdrop and that undercurrent. I’m being tested for how can they use me for advantages in military or space travel, or my technology—can we make this usable for humans? So they’re trying to keep me a secret from the Russians.”
Guillermo del Toro
Jones also delved a little further into the film’s plot and the involvement of its other cast members.
“Meanwhile, there’s a love story that brews out of it, and that would be the cleaning lady played by Sally Hawkins. She comes and finds me, has sympathy on me, and then that’s the story that you’re really gonna follow with this whole backdrop.”
“It is artfully and beautifully [made]—if this doesn’t end up with Guillermo back at the Oscars, I will be surprised. I will be very surprised,” he added.
Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer also star in the film, which we hope to see in cinemas later this year.
