As most of you know, I recently did an epic hour-long video interview with director Guillermo del Toro, and over the past week I’ve been breaking it down into smaller segments. For today’s installment, del Toro talks about the status of Disney’s Haunted Mansion and his love of Harry Potter.  While it’s been awhile since we’ve heard anything on Haunted Mansion, del Toro said:

“I delivered my last draft five weeks ago. I have a meeting with them in three weeks.  I know they like the screenplay.  I need to meet with them in three weeks. That’s what I know. I know their reaction to the draft was good.  We have a bunch of conceptualist art, but you never know, to predict anything else is hard for me to know.”

He goes on to say that while he came on board as a writer and producer, he thinks Disney is waiting for him to say he wants to direct it.  But according to del Toro, “I’m in the middle of Pacific Rim and I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”  More after the jump.

At last year’s Comic-Con, Entertainment Weekly’s “The Visionaries” panel featured Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams waxing poetic on everything nerd. This year, Guillermo del Toro and Jon Favreau were present to have an earnest conversation between two directors about filmmaking. The topics of conversation ranged from Magic Kindom and Haunted Mansion, to Cowboys & Aliens and At the Mountains of Madness. Favreau even revealed that he has a cameo as a Thark in Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, a project which he previously developed. Hit the jump for my recap of The Visionaries panel.

Over the last few days I’ve posted different parts of my extended video interview with Guillermo del Toro that I recorded at the Toronto International Film Festival.  Del Toro was in Toronto to promote Julia’s Eyes – which he produced.  While he already talked about his soon to be announced DreamWorks Animation deal, TV projects, and his movie Julia’s Eyes, it’s time for the rest of the interview and it covers At the Mountains of Madness, Disney’s Haunted Mansion, and something not yet announced: he’s making video games!!  Here’s the bullet points:

• del Toro told me he has a video game deal that’s not yet announced.  He revealed it’s for 3 games to be made over 10 years with the goal of a new game every 3 years!

• Haunted Mansion: he said it will be PG-13 and it will be a “dark ride”.  Says they turned in the storyline last week to Disney along with the first few key concept drawings. Matthew Robbins is writing and he’ll start in about a month. Hopes to know if Disney will move forward on it in January. At that time he’ll figure out if he will direct it or if it will be someone else.

• At the Mountains of Madness:  del Toro gave me a scoop when he revealed Dennis Muren is designing the monsters! Muren told him “you’ve never seen monsters like this.”  If you don’t who Dennis Muren is…look over his resume and you’ll know when it’s so cool that he’s involved. He went on to say the film isn’t greenlit yet, he’ll be talking to some Lovecraft scholars to get their input on the script, hopes to make the movie without interference, explained how he got James Cameron involved, and says the film suffers from two big issues: it’s a hard core R rated movie and it’s a horror tentpole with a big budget.

So much more after the jump: