Attention overachievers: No matter how much you accomplish in a given day, month or year, Guillermo Del Toro probably still has you beat.

The prolific director and storyteller is on a mission to change how we create and consume media, so he keeps his hands in many varied projects. The way Del Toro sees it, soon we will download a comic about a movie the minute we walk out of the theater, and play a videogame that expands the story that same day.

"For big storytelling, the multiplatform [strategy] seems to be the way it's going to evolve," the Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy director told Wired.com. "You need to be able to say, 'Did you enjoy this videogame? There's a movie out right now!' Or 'Did you enjoy this movie? Then download these 10 more chapters that are interactive for you at home.'"

Now that he's finished his vampire book trilogy with writing partner Chuck Hogan -- the final installment, The Night Eternal, came out last month -- Del Toro's starting work on his next feature: the robots-versus-monsters epic Pacific Rim. He's also working on a creepy-sounding videogame called inSane, among other projects.

With the final book of The Strain Trilogy in stores, Wired.com got on the phones with Del Toro to talk about his favorite vampire stories (he's more into I Am Legend than Twilight), science versus religion, and what he calls the "story engine." (We also got Del Toro and Hogan to sign a complete set of their vampire apocalypse trilogy, which you can enter to win at the end of the interview.)

Wired.com: Now that The Night Eternal has been released, are you sad to be done with the trilogy or glad to have the project completed?

Guillermo Del Toro: We're very happy. We tried a lot of different things with these books. We're sad to let it go because we have so much involved in that world, you know? And Chuck and I are very much "helicopter parents" -- every time we send a manuscript, we would send 50 notes the next day, and then we would send a new chapter a week later. And even now I would love to have added a few chapters more. But there's nothing you can do -- at some point you have to stop writing.

Wired.com: What made you want to write an apocalyptic vampire tale?

Del Toro: Originally I wanted very much to try and present the origins of the vampire plague in very modern terms. And then little by little, with each book, go back to finding the spiritual in the biology and finding the biology in the myth.

I feel like science and religion are like a Möbius strip. When you dig deep enough into religion, you find science to explain it, and when you dig deep enough and long enough into science you find things that are unexplained.

And I wanted very much for the books to come full circle. There's a passage at the end of The Night Eternal where one of the characters, Mr. Q, says, "The language of God is biology." Essentially he says that god sends the letter, but he doesn't send the dictionary.

I agree with that idea. And that's what we started with. For example, if I was writing Dracula right now, how would I deal with the arrogance of science? Because science is very, very arrogant. And I thought, "Well, the best way to deal with that is with an epidemic."

Wired.com: You mentioned Dracula just now, but I'm curious, what were your other influences for this book in terms of vampire myths?

Del Toro: These are novels that I know all too well because the seminal novels of vampirism I read when I was a kid. We didn't revisit them, we didn't crack them open or consult them, except by memory. I know Dracula all too well. I think that we were just talking about the traits that were forgotten about Dracula. When it was written it was an eminently modern novel. It was a novel that was using cutting-edge technology and science. It was using voice recorders, blood transfusions and telegraphs. It was talking about modern marvels. It was saying, "In this modern London, this ancient myth is coming to be alive again." I thought it was really interesting to do that now. But we didn't crack any of them.

The great vampire books are I Am Legend, Dracula, 'Salem's Lot and I think you can then go to your own preference. I love a book called The Vampire Tapestry. Then there are really quirky books like Fevre Dream by Goerge R.R. Martin. A lot of people adore the Anne Rice books. I like the Vampire Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. But we didn't crack any book open. The only ones we did were traditional folklore tales about vampirism.

Wired.com: What folklore did you consult?

Del Toro: I am a very studious collector of these things. I have a healthy collection of original editions from the 1800s and 1700s that deal with vampirism and ghosts.

There are a few anthologies of folklore. There's a great one called Passport to the Supernatural that is still one of my favorites. There is also Montague Summers and his books and Antoine Augustin Calmet. And Calmet writes his books as a matter of fact. He doesn't do it from the folkloric point of view. He does it from an account of fact.

I find it really compelling the way these books deal with vampirism, in Eastern Europe especially. Because the way we understand vampirism is mostly the way it is conceived in Eastern Europe, but there are Chinese vampires, Malaysian vampires and Middle Eastern vampires. They're all very different from the Western myth.

Wired.com: What do you think of the Twilight phenomenon?

Del Toro: I haven't read them. I've never been a big fan of the romantic aspect of vampirism. But I don't fault the books -- I think that is a perfectly legitimate aspect of vampirism and if they make a lot of readers happy, that's fantastic. I think that the only thing is I am of the mind that no interpretation of vampires should be the only one you get.

Wired.com: At some point Twilight just becomes another iteration of a very robust vampire narrative that's always evolving.

Del Toro: A lot of people don't realize this, but the modern myth of the zombie was birthed out of vampirism. The original conception of the zombie was just a revived soulless creature. The modern idea of the zombie as a cannibal corpse was birthed out of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Romero has stated several times that he was just trying to do his own version of I Am Legend. And you can see evidence of that. They are now intrinsically connected in a strange way.

Wired.com: Now that these books are done, what are you working on now film-wise, book-wise, etc.?

Del Toro: We start shooting next Monday [Eds. note: Nov. 14] on Pacific Rim, which is a gigantic production for Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. We are wrapping production on a smaller, very powerful horror film called Mama, which I am producing. Chuck and I are working on a series of books that I can't talk too much about. But we started on that about two weeks ago. I'm still working on animation at DreamWorks. I'm keeping myself pretty busy.

Pacific Rim is 'a very, very beautiful poem to giant monsters.' Wired.com: What more can you tell us about Pacific Rim?

Del Toro: We are working with actors that I absolutely adore. Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman. It's really, it's a very, very beautiful poem to giant monsters. Giant monsters versus giant robots. Twenty-five-story-high robots beating the crap out of 25-story-high monsters. We're trying to create a world in which the characters are real and how it would affect our world politically, how it would affect the landscape if creatures like this really came out of the sea, etc.

Wired.com: Can you tell us what happened with the movie adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five? (Del Toro was attached to the project at one point.)

Del Toro: I hope you don't mind, but I'd prefer not to discuss projects that aren't active. We are turning in a screenplay for the TV pilot for The Hulk. We turned in a screenplay for Haunted Mansion at Disney. Those are things that are active. But otherwise [talking about non-active projects] it creates the impression of ... I am diverse, but I'm not that diverse.

Wired.com: Are you still working on inSane, the videogame?

Del Toro: Oh yeah! Up until the end of pre-production on Pacific Rim, we were still going up to Chicago, to Champaign, Illinois, to work with the developer. And every week we have a conference [call] where we exchange ideas about the design, the gameplay, about the models. I'm taking it little by little. I think it's going to be a fun, scary game. It's a maiden voyage into the medium for me. I'm learning a lot of stuff.

Wired.com: What are you learning in this process?

Del Toro: I came to videogame development with a lot of humility because I didn't want to come in with the attitude of, "Oh I know how to make movies, therefore I know how to make videogames," which is a big mistake. I came in trying to learn a new medium because I think it's going to be very useful for me as a storyteller.

With a videogame, you don't have to solve one screenplay, you have to solve 20 screenplays, because you are giving the player the illusion of free will. If the character kills another character or destroys a building, the game goes one way; if the character doesn't, it goes another. It keeps you very nimble.

I think that's the biggest, and the most fun, lesson I've been getting. We're being really, really nasty in the game. We're really trying a lot of stuff that I don't think would even fly in the movies. It's still two-and-a-half or three years away, though, because videogame development is so long.

Wired.com: When Wired interviewed you a couple of years ago, you were excited about this idea of the "story engine" as a multimedia platform. Are you still excited by that idea? And do you think we're getting closer to it becoming a reality?

Del Toro: We're very close. I think that we're moving closer and closer. The thing is that it is happening in a very graceless way. I think that instead of having the idea and the power to develop something in a multimedia platform in an organic way, we're still struggling with the old notion of ancillary markets in the movies. People still think of videogames, or novels, or comic books, or internet as things that support the movie or spin off of the movie, when in reality they are tools to create the universe of that particular movie. It's a single universe, and you need to think about it like that.

It's very hard to do it at a large scale. One of the few times it's succeeded remarkably was in the second Matrix, when the Wachowskis had the power to have an anime, and a presence on the internet, and comic books, and everything came out at the same time.

Let me put it this way: Comic books are now distributed electronically. Now you can download a comic. A lot of anime and movies are distributed directly to download, also. A big part of the videogame business now is downloadable content and movies are sort of stumbling towards day-and-date downloadable releases. There will be a confluence sooner rather than later. And I'm talking exclusively for the big-event movies. Independent movies are going to remain independent of this model. But for big storytelling, the multiplatform seems to be the way it's going to evolve.

There are still many obstacles that need to be resolved. I think that what you should do is release content the same day and date as the movie. You don't need to make the movie available for download, but you need to be able to say, "Did you enjoy this videogame? There's a movie out right now!" Or "Did you enjoy this movie? Then download these 10 more chapters that are interactive for you at home." That way you can enter into a world-creation that is really interesting.

Win a Strain Trilogy Prize Pack

Want your very own hardcover editions of The Strain Trilogy (The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal), signed by authors Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan? Enter for a chance to win Wired.com's prize pack by sending an e-mail to underwirecontests [@] gmail.com with the subject line "Guillermo del Toro" and we'll pick one random winner. Entries must be received by 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Nov. 18, 2011.