TotalFilm recently published a massive interview on Guillermo Del Toro and the Making of the Hobbit. The two Hobbit movies will be Del Toro’s career defining productions, which would explain why he has spent roughly a year planning out the two movies. Del Toro stated that it normally takes him a 1/3 of a year to do the planning for his films, so fans can rest assured that Del Toro is doing his best to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s magical book to life.

Del Toro states that the two Hobbit movies will focus on the events of Bilbo and the dwarves, but will also detail the doings of Gandalf. Throughout the Hobbit Gandalf is always leaving the band to perform untold deeds, and it is welcoming news that Del Toro is planning on including these deeds into the movie.

Later in the article the question of the differences between the animals and monsters of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit was brought up. In the Lord of the Rings all the animals and creatures didn’t talk or in the case of the orcs had a harsh language. In the Hobbit many animals and creatures talk, one of the most notable being Smaug.

The way I phrased it to Weta, I said we would keep the DNA in the same gene pool as the Rings trilogy, but that we would generate a different type of character. For example, in the trilogy most of the creatures are brutish or inarticulate.

In The Hobbit, the creatures speak: Smaug has beautiful lines of dialogue; the Great Goblin has beautiful lines of dialogue; many creatures do. So we had to design them with a different approach because you are not just designing things that are scary.

I also wanted some of the monsters in The Hobbit to be majestic.

I wanted the Wargs to have a certain beauty so that you have a massively clear definition: what is beautiful is good and what is ugly is not. Some of the monsters are absolutely gorgeous.

Del Toro then proceeds to talk more directly about Smaug, and the challenges that he posed.

I think one of the designs I’m the proudest of is Smaug. Obviously he took the longest.

It’s actually still active: we’re finishing his colour palette and a little bit of the texture. But the bulk of the design took about a year, solid. It’s because of the unique features of the dragon.

Early in production I came up with a very strong idea that would separate Smaug from every other dragon ever made. The problem was implementing that idea. But I think we’ve nailed it.

When asked whether he thought that the scenes featuring the monsters of the Hobbit would be genuinely scary, Del Toro was hopeful that they would be. He goes on to state that movie involving a dragon attacking a town or spiders cocooning  people, can not be made gentle.Moving on Del Toro hints that he has found the solution to translating the Battle of the Five armies into an epic battle on the big screen. He states that when the trilogy came out it was new and exciting to have two massive CG armies fighting it out, but since the trilogy has been released many movies like Troy and Narnia have done the same thing. Del Toro hopes that he has found a solution that will make the epic battle new and exciting, however he doesn’t give any hints to what that solution may be.

You can read the entire interview at TotalFilm!