Charlie Kaufman set to write Slaughterhouse-Five?

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]averick director Guillermo del Toro returns to our screens this Friday with monster epic Pacific Rim, but he has also taken some time to shed a little light on his future projects. One said project will be an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and the director has stated Charlie Kaufman as his preferred screenwriter.

Kaufman, of course, is the genius behind the mind-boggling Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation. If del Toro gets his way Kaufman will be adapting Vonnegut’s time-travel novel which details the adventures of Billy Pilgrim. The novel is notoriously tough to translate but that should not pose much of a challenge for Kaufman who, when struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s non-fiction novel The Orchid Thief, inserted himself (and a fictional twin brother), and his troubles, into the script.

Del Toro told the telegraph “Charlie Kaufman and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book, I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do. It’s just a catch-22.” However, del Toro also made clear the difficulties of bringing his dream to life: “The studio will make it when it’s my next movie, but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there’s a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer!”

Del Toro’s next film will be “gothic romance/ghost story” Crimson Peak, which boasts the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessica Chastain in its cast. Cumberbatch will also be joining del Toro in his version of Frankenstein. Cumberbatch has previous with Mary Shelley’s gothic classic having played both the monster and doctor opposite Johnny Lee Miller in Danny Boyle’s National Theatre Production. Del Toro’s other projects include a stop-motion revision of Pinocchio and horror movie At the Mountains of Madness.

Fingers crossed these two can come together on this one, they certainly appear a match made in (a twisted Escherian) heaven.