Going face to face writer/director Guillermo del Toro to find out what it’s like to finally create the film he has always wanted to make.
Ever since he was a child, Guillermo del Toro has been fascinated by Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. It is the story of a man who played God, and his complicated creation has remained a constant influence for the filmmaker. Indeed, for much of his career he has been vocal in his yearning to adapt the novel for the screen, and the kernel of his desire can be seen in films such as Cronos, Blade II, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Pinocchio. Finally, a dream 30 years in the making is being realised: del Toro’s operatic vision of Frankenstein brings together Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth for a tour de force fairy tale about the human need to reach beyond the possible, and what makes a heart beat and break.
LWLies: It must feel strange for you to finally be talking about having made this film, after talking about making it for many years.
Del Toro: It feels very strange. There’s a line in the movie that I wrote for me, and it has become true – ‘Having reached the end of the world, there was no horizon left, and the achievement felt unnatural.’ And I have had the most massive postpartum period with this film. I’ve never had anything like it. Normally you get a week, I’ve had almost a year. I’m good friends with David Cronenberg, and many years ago he said to me, ‘You have to scare yourself into being young again. When you do a movie that you feel concludes something, do something really different after.’ And I am trying to do that, but it still is disorienting. I remember when I was writing a script for ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, I tried to think, ‘How would revenge feel after Monte Cristo has been a prisoner for years and years?’ And I thought ‘Emptiness.’ He would not make sense of the world without the vengeance. I feel like that.
Which is, I imagine, bizarre to say to people.
I mean I am also excited, but the only thing I can compare it to – and it sounds unfair – but it’s when somebody in your family dies. It’s like somebody takes a scoop and takes a piece of the cosmos. That’s how it feels. When you lose somebody and you don’t want to erase the number from your cell phone. It feels like, how can I get hold of this and never let it go? The funny thing is the experience of making this film was as good or better than I ever imagined. There’s no disappointment. I think that actually contributes to the hollowness.
It’s interesting you mentioned Cronenberg because I spoke to him for the first time a few months ago, and we were talking about what you give away when you make a film, and the way it goes out into the world and you lose control of it a little bit. That’s because people are going to have their own reaction and they’re going to take ownership of it. He said, ‘It’s not worth worrying about that sort of thing, because you really don’t have control over it.’ I get the sense that, for you, it feels a bit more personal.
Up until a point. David said something very beautiful when I interviewed him once: ‘A filmmaker has to have two skins – a thin one for the art and a thick one for the promotion and destiny of the movie.’ And you know, if an audience or the critics at the moment don’t like your movie, I have learnt through the years that that’s not the end of it. The Devil’s Backbone came out almost secretly, and to many people now, myself included, it is one of their favourites. So you have time. There’s such a thing as a second chance.
The history of Frankenstein’s Creature is a history of being misunderstood or misrepresented. In James Whale’s film the Creature gets a rough deal and your Creature is much more tender.
I think that Boris Karloff had a lot of that stream of fragility – beauty came from Karloff and the way he played him. The famous anecdote is that, in the scene where the Creature kills Maria by the river, Karloff was horrified, and he tried to find a way to justify and pardon the monster. And that was a big disagreement he and Whale had. Bride of Frankenstein [Whale’s 1935 sequel] is a lot more satirical and sardonic and more Whale, but Karloff brought a lot of the pathos to the role.
Your films always show a lot of love for monsters of course.
Yes, the evolution of the way I think is that I used to make fables where the humans were the bad guys and the monsters were the good guys, incapable of anything but innocence. But since The Shape of Water, when the creature does kill Michael Shannon at the end, and then Nightmare Alley, where the hero is the villain, and now this one, where the hero is the villain… You know, the Monster does kill six sailors and a hunter. And a myriad of wolves.
He’s not perfect.
He’s not a frail, little, languishing creature. I thought, can we understand each other even when we do horrid acts? And can we find forgiveness in that? In order to do that, I dedicate the first half to Victor and the second half of the film to the Creature, and the two parts I try to infuse with a little bit of a fairytale element, including the fact that the monster is guided into the world by animals.
He’s like Snow White with all his animal friends.
He is guided into the world by ravens, which were on the battlefield with the corpses. Then the deer, then the mice, and then the wolves. They almost say to him, ‘Look, this is the world as it is. It’s a great place and it’s a terrible place all at the same time.’ Then to Victor, the Creature eventually says, ‘To you I am an abomination, but to me I simply am.’
It feels that, throughout your filmmaking career, ‘Frankenstein’ has been manifested in different ways: across Cronos; across Mimic; and obviously The Shape of Water. In Pinocchio, even. Hellboy as well. Do you feel that that was a help or a hindrance with making Frankenstein? The fact you’ve always been making tiny snippets of that story.
Well, when you adapt a novel, the people that love the novel have to feel the spirit of it is there, but at the same time you want to wow them with a new tale. In the first 10 minutes people have to say, "This is not the ‘Frankenstein’ I know. I’m going to stay and see what happens." We did that with Pinocchio, by setting it in Mussolini’s Italy. I could practise with [the character] Nomak in Blade II, an encounter between a monster and his father, saying, ‘Why did you make me like this? Why did you cast me aside?’ But this is the granddaddy, this the big opera. This is the Puccini version of those tales. I wanted it to be grand and beautiful and spectacular, not only in size or scope, but also in trying a performance with the Creature that had never been done. Jacob brings a purity.
He’s magnificent. There’s a childlike nature to the Creature in your version of the story, even when he has learnt more about the world. He maintains this sense of innocence and curiosity.
Yes. You know, the movie is constructed like a circle. It starts with a dawn behind the captain and ends with a dawn in front of the Creature. One has his back turned to the sun and one is facing it. That circle is in the visual motifs in the movie. There are circles in the windows, mirrors, pits, etc. And the ideal thing is that this actor that is going to play the creature has to take him from a baby to a man, to a human being, fully formed, making a decision that is unselfish. That’s what I found in Jacob.
The Creature’s innocence is very much mirrored in Elizabeth to me. The way that she completely accepts him upon the first meeting reminds me of the fact that, as a biological imperative, we actually don’t have that many fears built into us as human beings. Most of our fears are learnt and inherited from our experiences and from society. Do you feel the childlike nature of Elizabeth and the Creature is tied into the fact that this is a story you first encountered and responded to as a child?
I think the Creature in ‘Frankenstein’ is instantly attractive to children because he’s a giant and a misfit. He doesn’t fit in the world the way you don’t fit in the world when you’re a kid. You have instant empathy and sympathy for it. What I wanted was to make Elizabeth recognise herself immediately. A lot of people still cannot allow femininity to have any grotesqueries or any malfunctions, but in reality, it’s monstrous. Elizabeth is tired of feeling weird. When she talks about the butterfly, she’s of course talking about herself, what a poor creature she is, she has no will and she’s weird and beautiful at the same time. And I think that’s the sentiment many of us have in youth, but many also find twin souls. All of a sudden you recognise yourself in someone else’s art. She sees this creature and she goes, ‘This is pure.’ He has the same purity of essence as she does.
And you wrote the part with Mia in mind.
What is beautiful about Mia… I remember Kate Hawley, our wardrobe designer, came to me somewhat alarmed and she said, ‘We need to find someone to teach her to move in that dress like a Victorian person, because they never moved like that.’ And I said, ‘Don’t mention it to her. What I like is that she moves like a regular person in that dress.’
Also, it’s a fairy tale. You can get away with a certain lack of fidelity in a fairy tale that you can’t always with a period drama, because people will say, ‘No, that’s not accurate.’
Yes, we really wanted to evoke the idea of 1970s London too, with the new bohemians and the rhinestones, the dandies – I didn’t want you to feel like you were watching a Merchant Ivory version of ‘Frankenstein’, and I love Merchant Ivory. Oscar brings this Mick Jagger, Ziggy Stardust energy, he’s a superstar. I always see him as part of an ensemble. This is an actor that, when he carries a whole movie, like with Inside Llewyn Davis and Frankenstein, it’s such a blessing. But this modernity is the modern Prometheus. And there are hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of interpretations of ‘Frankenstein’, and if you go to the ancillaries even more, like Blade Runner.
I definitely see some Rutger Hauer in Jacob Elordi’s performance.
I think Jacob is one of the purest actors I’ve encountered. And everyone else was there from the beginning, the only person that came anew was Jacob. To me, at age 60, I have a rule – we prepare, prepare, prepare and then pray for an accident, because then the movie comes alive. When we lost the actor originally, I said, ‘We’re going to find someone perfect.’
Then you did.
We did. And it was because he has those eyes. The way he looks at things has disarming frailty. When we were recasting the creature, I spoke with several actors, and the moment they mentioned how long the make-up would take, I put a cross on their name.
How long did the make-up take?
Between four and a chunk hours, for the head and the face, 10 hours plus for the full body. When Jacob and I spoke in pre-production, I said, ‘Look, just like a priest puts on different garments in order to become a priest – there are undergarments, garments, then the outer ornaments – it’s a sacrament. You have to invoke the Creature.’
Bernie Wrightson’s illustrated ‘Frankenstein’ was a big influence on you, and your vision of Victor shares a lot with Bernie’s Victor. Yet the design of the Creature is very different. To me, he looked like a scientific model.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s two things. For the head, it was a phrenology model. For the body, we used anatomical diagrams, and a famous statue of a flayed saint [Saint Bartholomew Flayed by Marco d’Agrate] that is made in marble, and you see the muscle groups are very delineated. Then Mike [Hill, creature designer] and I were trying to figure out, if he’s made of pieces from corpses, how would you do it? We tried many things. We tried to make it even, uneven, symmetrical, not symmetrical. The main thing is, many of the other creatures in versions of ‘Frankenstein’ look like accident victims that are coming out of the ICU. There are gross stitches, and it looks more like a repaired man than a created one. And what do we want? I said, ‘There has to be no stitching, and it has to feel newly formed.’
A creation.
A creation, not a reconstruction. That’s why we went with oysters, alabasters, nicotine yellows – pale colours that are pearlescent sometimes, to make him look beautiful.
Like he’s carved out in marble.
If Victor has been trying to make him for 20 years or more, he has to be beautiful.
Do you identify with the idea of trying for 20 years to bring something to life?
Of course. One of the many readings I had of Victor is that he is a very egotistical film director, and Harlander, his benefactor, is the studio. Harlander says, ‘I’ll give you anything you want.’ And then says, ‘Except that. Oh, by the way, have I told you that I want to be the Creature?’
How did you think about approaching the task of making Frankenstein feel visually different from anything you’d done before? It’s identifiably a Guillermo del Toro film, but there’s something unique there as well.
Well the design sensibilities are in a very different channel. The sets are a lot more operatic on Frankenstein. Crimson Peak was detail upon detail upon detail upon detail, and the shapes were less important. But with Frankenstein, the lab, for example, it is made almost like a stage. It’s important to understand that if my dream was to put a man on the moon, which is this movie, Crimson Peak is the Apollo 11. I’m launching. I think The Shape of Water was a big rehearsal for Frankenstein as well. And for me, the key speech that unlocks Frankenstein is one Jessica Chastain has in Crimson Peak, where she says, ‘Love makes monsters of us all.’ The horror was for love.
Lord Byron has also been someone whose spirit flows through this film, and you close things with, ‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on,’ which is a line from ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. Why did you choose to end on this quote?
The poem was important, but more importantly, the place where I am as a human being is exactly that. I think that the world breaks your heart, but you carry on. Particularly in these times, when only monsters play God, I really love the humility the creature has at the end. There’s a painful beauty to the way Jacob lowers his head. You understand him. You understand that you must carry on.
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