Guillermo Del Toro is a busy man, but not too busy to talk about his latest line-up of work since The Hobbit dropped out of his diary. Asked about his slate at the Saturn Awards, he told Bloody Disgusting he wanted to be cracking something ready for next year:

"I want to be shooting something in May next year, so I need something that's ready to go into pre-production immediately," enthused the portly William of Bull. What that project will be is still unclear, although it might be his take on Frankenstein.

There's no script for the adaptation of Mary Shelley's legendary novel, but Del Toro's confident it's headed in the right direction: "There's been so many versions, and I really believe what we're doing is something new, without changing the novel." So confident is he, in fact, that they've already started with make-up tests on Doug Jones, who would play the monster ("The nuts are something to behold!")

Doug Jones, it seems, definitely won't be doing Hellboy 3 in the near future then. The problem for that one, which is still a few years away, again comes down to the writing: "The Hellboy screenplays are not quick to write. For whatever reason, they end up being very complicated."

Equally unlikely is Del Toro's cinematic version of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, for which he's having trouble getting studio backing. Although that isn't entirely surprising: "It's very difficult for the studios to take the step of doing a period-set, R-rated, tentpole movie with a tough ending and no love story." Despite Del Toro's adamant arguments for Lovecraft's continued popularity among readers (his works are now in the public domain), at the moment it's a no-go for the Pan's Labyrinth director. Which disappoints him quite a bit.

So what will the next project be? "Since it doesn't look like I can do Mountains of Madness, I have now [narrowed down] the projects that I am interested in to three." Not that he'll tell anyone what they are yet - probably because he doesn't yet know himself. Expect an announcement at Comic-Con next month.