Cameron talks about Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness

There’s been a lot of attention given to this week’s James Cameron 3D imbroglio, but of more interest is his comments on the big-screen adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

A longtime pet project of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, MOUNTAINS was finally given thumbs/tentacles up recently as a big-budget 3D movie with Cameron producing. But what brought the AVATAR overlord to the world of terrifying god-beasts?

“In this particular case, I’m working with Guillermo because I enjoy his company, and a creative collaboration is something that we’ve talked about doing for a long time,” Cameron tells Wired. “It’s going to be an epically scaled horror film and we haven’t seen anything like that in a really long time — I guess since ALIENS.“

Lovecraft’s original story follows an Antarctic expedition’s discovery of a lost civilization, but as Cameron points out, the macabre author never got too detailed in his descriptions of creatures. But that shouldn’t be an issue thanks to the imagination of del Toro, as Cameron says: “Guillermo brings an eye for design that is so original and so quirky and so steeped in the lore of movie design and horror design, but always fresh and unexpected. Frankly, I just want to see what he comes up with and I want to enable the nuts and bolts of the production so he doesn’t have to worry about that. I want to help him how to work in 3-D.”