Guillermo Del Toro And Charlie Kaufman Teaming For “Slaughterhouse Five” Adaptation

The pairing of director Guillermo Del Toro and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman may seem strange at first, but the pair have found a project that just may compliment their two unique sensibilities. According to the print version of the UK’s Daily Telegraph (and brought into the cyber realm by The Playlist), Kaufman will be handling the scripting duties on an adaptation of the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five that Del Toro intends to direct.

Speaking to the British paper Del Toro stated –

Charlie [Kaufman] and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book… I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians [the aliens of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’] — to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do. It’s just a catch-22. The studio will make it when it’s my next movie, but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there’s a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer!

Currently, Del Toro has a deal with Universal Studios that could include this project. But first, he has his haunted house film, Crimson Peak, set to shoot in January and if Pacific Rim opens big this Friday, I would suspect that Warner Brothers will want him to make working on a sequel a high priority. And Del Toro’s relationship with Universal has not always been positive. The studio has famously shot down two other projects that the director was developing – his hard-R adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s classic horror novel At The Mountains Of Madness and a darker-edged stop-motion animation adaptation of Pinocchio.