Just poking around the intertubes I'm seeing speculation on: Ron Howard (I could see that), Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
Howard or Spielberg is my guess. Which is probably not the ideal person for the project. The Rob Reiner that did Princess Bride, though, could work. Is that Rob Reiner still around?
I'm seeing that too, Hec. I'm also seeing people guessing it's a cine/director person.
I like your thinking, Jilli. The visuals we'd get with him!
Coen Brothers
Wouldn't that be interesting! In a way, it'd be very much their thing.
I'd love to see del Toro do it!
I keep wondering at the "many, many Oscars" quote I keep seeing... Spielberg has 3, Howard has 2. Curiouser and curiouser.
Gaiman says, "There is one cinematographer and director on board who has many, many Oscars and is, I think, a genius, and I love the fact that he fell in love with this about six or seven years ago and has not given up."
I suspect that the "many Oscars" stuff should be interpreted loosely, given that he wasn't consulting Wikipedia bios at the time. I do think he's describing a single person there, because I suspect that his subject-verb agreement is more reliable than his knowledge of Hollywood trivia.
Is there a cinematographer-turned-director who's won multiple Oscars for the former?
I was also looking for a director saying he'd like to do it 4 or 5 years ago.
I like Jilli's thinking. Of course I'm still mourning the del Toro version of The Hobbit, which we'll never see.
That said, it occurred to me recently that I might live long enough to see a second adaptation of Lord of the Rings, because the cost of effects just keeps going down, and at some point the animators are going to bridge the Uncanny Valley. We may yet see a fully-animated LOTR that looks real enough to work. Which could be interesting.