Howard on Directing Lovecraft Graphic Novel Flick

Admitting he's in virgin territory, Ron Howard talked to Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times about his upcoming comic book adaptation, The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. "It very cleverly uses H.P. Lovecraft in a fictional way, but there's some loose biographical elements," Howard says. "But it certainly has the flavor and the tone of Lovecraft." This would not just be a new form of adaptation for Howard, who has directed 20 films in a little over 30 years, it would also be a significant tonal shift from the sort of stories we're used to him telling. The character in the comics is a younger Lovecraft, and he's sort of a man of action, which is not really how I've ever pictured him. Boucher describes him "not that far removed from the new-look detective in the Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes," so use that as your compass. In any case, this isn't a Lovecraft bio-pic, nor is it intended to be one. As it relates to Howard, did you ever think you'd read his description of an upcoming film as "psychologically interesting and scary"? Didn't think so. He points to important figures such as Sigmund Freud and Einstein as being plucked from history and thrown into a new fictional scenario. Funny, he didn't mention anyone in Night at the Museum... And it could be the beginning of a very busy and interesting time for Howard, who tells the Times that because the two Dan Brown movies and Frost/Nixon occupied so much of his past three years, he's got a backlog of projects that are on the cusp of development.

"I didn't have finished scripts ready to go, but I have a lot of things that are sort of two-thirds of the way through and a really wide variety of them, including this Lovecraft project. So I've got literally half-a-dozen projects where essentially I'm waiting for [script] drafts to come in, and there's something I love about all of these ideas. We'll just have to wait to see what comes to fruition. I sort of can't bear the thought of letting any of them go. So maybe I've got the next five years spoken for."

Lovecraft has a 2011 release date on IMDB, which really means nothing, but Howard says that it will probably be the next film he directs.