Guillermo del Toro Has Spent ‘Roughly 16 Years’ Writing Screenplays That Never Got Filmed

For the next time you whine about your experience as a screenwriter.

And YOU think you’ve had it rough as a screenwriter! From Indiewire:

“By my count I have written or co-written around 33 screenplay features. Two to three made by others, 11 made by me (Pinocchio in progress) so- about 20 screenplays not filmed. Each takes 6–10 months of work, so, roughly 16 years gone. Just experience and skill improvement.”

Sixteen years spent writing projects which never got produced. Sixteen. Years.

The list of del Toro’s unmade film scripts include the following titles: “The Witches,” “Justice League Dark,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Fantastic Voyage,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Mephisto’s Bridge,” “Pacific Rim 2,” “Secret Project (Untitled),” “Superstitious,” “Nightmare Alley,” “Haunted Mansion,” “The Buried Giant,” “The Coffin,” “Drood,” “List of 7” (co-written with Mark Frost), and “Wind in the Willows.”

I’ve had four movies produced (one of which from which I removed my name), four other movies for which I didn’t receive writing credit, and over a dozen I wrote which did not get made, five of them green lit at some point, but for various reasons crashed and burned. Nothing compared to del Toro.

If I were to say these two words to you — “Hollywood screenwriter” — your mind would likely conjure up images of movie premieres, sports cars, cool pads in the Hollywood hills, tapping away on a screenplay by the pool, and so forth. The reality is screenwriting is a job. It’s not only extremely competitive, it’s also nearly impossible to get a movie produced. So many things have to go right … and so many more things can go wrong.

That’s why I tell my students: To be a screenwriter, you need an iron gut and a steel spine. Because it is a war of attrition.

So the next time you feel bad about how your screenwriting journey is going, think about Guillermo del Toro. If all the time he spent working on screenplays which never got produced were translated into an actual human being, it would probably be pissed off sixteen year-old adolescent.

To read the rest of the Indiewire article, go here.

Takeaway: Suck it up. Learn the craft. Do the work.