Guillermo del Toro on building the world of Frankenstein

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. In the 30 years since I've known writer-director Guillermo del Toro, one thing has constantly come up, and though it's not just his bad taste in pop music, it's his devotion to what I think was being the most epic YA novel of all time. is known by some people as the modern Prometheus. I think he would call it Frankenstein. It's his newest film, which is now doing spectacularly well in theaters and garnering him almost 2 billion hits in social interaction. Guillermo del Toro has been away from this show for way too long. First of all, welcome back. Thank you.

0:49The thing that still stays in my head is how close you are to what's done in the novel, which is to say the evolution of the character. That evolution is not just the maturation of a person, of a being. but also really sort of being in the garden of earthly delights. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah, it is because it's Paradise Lost, which was a big influence with the romantics and is quoted in Shelley's book. And the idea to examine evil, the sort of inter-parental relationships, like the child and parent, which is implicit in the book somewhat, but I think it's explicit here. In reading Shelley's biography, or biographies, you know, you realize she had a very tense relationship with her father.

1:36So I said, well, this is oblique or between, there's a lot of the movie that takes things that were sort of lost in the book at first glance, you know, things like Victor thinking of his dead mother when he kisses Elizabeth in the book. That gave me the idea of the death of the mother, Elizabeth being described as an insect, which gave me the idea of giving her the interest in insects and so forth. But also Shelley's biography and how much she has in the rest of her life tension with the father figure gave me the idea that this could be a way for me to talk about fathers and sons, me and my father, me and my kids.

2:17But beyond that, even the Catholic idea of God and Jesus, which connects with the question you were asking. There's more of that in this. But it's also really, as much as anything, about—this happens in the biography, too—how adulthood equals corruption. Correct. As the monster matures in the book, he's murderous. I mean, he takes on really sort of the fabric of society. Yeah. And you do this thing I think is really interesting because I think it's in its way incredibly Catholic. Very Catholic. It's about forgiveness of self. Forgive yourself into existence is the line. And the beauty of it is it is very manifest Catholic.

3:00You know, first of all, I always felt immaculate conception, resurrection of the flesh, and stigmata were all in the book for me. And the idea in the movie, visually, obviously he raises to life the third day after the battle. Yes. You know, he has the wound of the spear on the right side of the chest. he is crucified, literally, with a crown of thorns, blah, blah, blah. So explicitly what I'm trying to say is the creature is here to wash our sins, you know, in a strange way. The movie is about the fight between the new world and the old world. Yeah, that's why the person that finances the entire enterprise is an arms dealer, you know, which happens with artists and scientists.

3:48I love that. And the Nobel Prize. And the Nobel Prize, okay, yes. because we forget where that fortune comes from. But the beauty of that for me is Victor is namely thinking he's doing this for life. And the rest of the movie, he basically serves death. You know, he discards the bodies with absolute abandon. He harvests them without any care. He's financed by an arms dealer. He has this regard for the creature or his emotional human state, et cetera, et cetera. and to see him fall deeper and deeper into some sort of tyranny and believe himself a victim like all tyrants do. By the way, it's the treatment.

4:29I guess we didn't take too long to bring up Barbara Cartland. Guillermo del Toro, his newest film, is his adaptation of Frankenstein, which is still in theaters. So much of the book is actually written, that's why I say YA2, is written like journal entries. It's a diary. It's somebody's beholding things. Robert Walton, yeah. Yes, rather than building things. And that's been what every other version has been about, is about this sort of building. But you give us a chance to see the world. That is interesting you bring that up because Dracula, obviously, is a completely epistolary novel. But Frankenstein has sort of the encapsulation of points of view, which was very interesting for me to do.

5:09It's not me watching the movie telling you one movie. is the captain's point of view, which is completely encapsulated in a passage where the camera work is very wide open, like photographs of Shackleton or Caspar David Friedrich paintings and is white, blue, and gold. Then Victor tells his story, and his childhood is this widely framed, very Lyndon-esque, white, black, and red, and the red continues. Then Victor's story, The camera work is super active because it's him remembering his prime. And the camera swoops and his conference to the school is filmed like a concert. It's also the way you stage him.

5:53Yeah. The way he's constantly in motion. Yeah. All the stuff from his point of view has that kind of hyperactivity to it. And the camera chases after him and in front of him. And then what you were saying about the oral quality of the movie, then the creature's tail is quiet. and it becomes this beautiful, mostly strings. He has a solo violin and it becomes a fairy tale made in moss, straw, wood, and nature. And it becomes almost like a fairy tale surrounded by animals that tell him what the world is. But also the way you stage this stuff with, and Oscar Isaac is so terrific as Victor, is that in his mind, he's a romantic hero.

6:35And when we first see him, especially in the medical theater, He's moving around like a Byronic hero. Like a Byronic. Or the way I instructed him is, I said, it's a concert. I'll shoot it like a concert. I said, look, this is the difficulty. Each of the episodes, like the creature is sedated, and the creature and the camera move in a beautiful, contemplative, fairytale, nature-observing way. Victor's chapter, I said to him, you're going to have to, your base is going to be Oliver Reed, which is already demanding too much of an actor. I said, because Oliver Reed was not a naturalistic actor, but it was very real emotionally.

7:14He was an oratorial actor. But he was honest in his way just because there's something feral about him. Yeah. Well, there's something always undomesticated. And the way the screenplay constructs Victor and the creature is a beautiful trick because, and again, the trick I used in the beginning with the creature was I start ferocious because Mary Shelley makes a point of the creature killing people. That's what I'm saying. It's important. He was a murderous character. He strangles a child in the novel. And there is a fascination with that. He actually says, I enjoyed it. And in the movie, you open with him killing six sailors in a row.

7:51And you have to do that. Because then it seems like you can never understand an act like that. And at the end of the movie, you are completely, at least in his point of view, understanding that. Because what you do, which we've never seen any version of it all, is making it not just about empathy for him, but also for Victor as well. Because you can't understand one without the other. You can't, and that's why constantly in the movie they are together in the same mirror. And we quote mirror circles, Medusa, which is a frozen monster in a mirror, essentially, and a misunderstood monster and so forth.

8:25But the way that the screenplay crafts those two characters, Victor starts with full certainty and full volume, telling anyone that will listen, why should we be quiet? We should pursue this and this. And ends quietly with Victor. And he loses things. He becomes humble. He becomes quiet. And the creature understands that they have a soul together, that they exist as a single person. Because Victor, if you watch the movie again, is alone in the mirrors, repeated by multiple mirrors. And then he gets the creature, and that becomes his mirror. And the creature's arc is completely the opposite. It starts pure heart and three words.

9:07He knows three words when he goes out into the world, right? And then he acquires consciousness, becomes a human, and does an incredibly unselfish act at the end of the movie. So he goes up into a grander scheme, and Victor goes quiet. That's why it's so moving to see these two actors working together for me. It is. We'll take a break and talk more about these less-than-heady ideas with my guest, Kierma Del Toro. His new film is an adaptation of Frankenstein, which is on Netflix and in select theaters around the country and around the world. It's the treat for this morning. Come, stay with us.

9:52We're talking about Alvaried with my guest, Kierma Del Toro. By the way, this is the treatment, if you want to know what this is. it's interesting to me just because the sort of physical kinship between Oscar and Jacob Elordi as the creature I mean there really is this sense of almost immediately that they're both aware of each other even though they're not looking at each other The cruelty of the screenplay which I see there are certain springs I wanted on the script I wanted people to be almost jolted in the theater when the creature speaks and says he has told you his story, now I will tell you mine.

10:28Revive the, you know, oh my God, I've never seen that part so voluntarily, willfully stated because it's a creature telling the story. It's his voice over, blah, blah, blah. But the beautiful thing in the script that I took a while to find is Victor creates a creature and his life quest ends right when the creature's life begins. And the beautiful thing about that is you're playing, you have Oscar Isaac playing at the same time, acceleration and the end of something, when he goes up the stairs and then collapses in the middle of the stairs. It's one of my favorite moments. And the creature, on the other hand, is almost like a toddler or a newborn, looking at everything with wonder and playing with the chains and looking at the water.

11:14And you realize these two are never going to be in sync. Because, you know, While the creature is completely alive, Victor is basically losing any purpose in life. So interesting, too, because you need somebody who is both towering and graceful. Yes. And there's never been a graceful version of the monster before. It's mostly lumbering. Sometimes beatifically void. But, yeah, I think Jacob's—the challenge on the design was I didn't want it to feel like a repair job, like an ICU victim that wandered into the street. I wanted it to feel newly minted. like a newly minted human soul. So we took the phrenology manual diagrams in the head.

11:56We took almost like futuristic line work following a statue of St. Bartholomew in Rome that is made in a labaster or marble. That has incorrect anatomical lines, but they are so graceful. It looks like somebody's designing a Lamborghini. It's funny because you talk about that, the arms are so big in that. Yes. And as you say that, I just think, oh, but it's the same thing, because we're really aware of Jacob's arms in that same way. And often in those kinds of statues, the arms have—they're not correct. Well, a lot of them were obviously proportioned to be seen from below. So the head was proportioned bigger, and the shoulders were proportioned bigger, because you were going to be looking up.

12:39But the beauty of the sculptural work on Jacob, I'm particularly in awe of what Mike Hill, the makeup designer, did with the face. because all the lines in the face are expressive. All the scars on the face are expressive, and they all direct to the eyes, which is wonderful. Because actually, that's what reminds me of Bernie Wrightson. Completely. We're talking about the DC, mostly DC Comics artists. And the magnum opus of him illustrating Frankenstein, which he did 51 plates, I think, and it took him about five years. And I'm fortunate to own a few. And there's not a single correction on those plates.

13:17There's no white... You never showed me those before. I didn't know you had those. No, I keep them in... You and Shillings are your friends. There's no correction. They were a lack, man. Come on. But there is no corrections in there. That's why there are so many of the plates in the market incomplete. Because if he made a mistake, he started over. Oh, gee whiz. Well, it's the treatment. I'm clearly not a friend of my guest, Guillermo del Toro. I'm going to treat him like a friend anyway. Your name is? Yeah. Immaterial is my name. We're talking about the name of his new film, which is, oh, yes, Frankenstein.

13:46but it's in theaters and on Netflix. We get a chance to see the grace of Jacob in the very beginning of the movie where it's this fearsome, graceful figure, which is the way Shelley depicted him. There's a fluidity to that and her fascination with that. I think there is an ambivalence that Shelley has with the monster because he says, the moment the creature comes alive, Victor says, I selected its parts for their beauty. Beauty. How could I think that? They barely covered the sinew and the muscle, blah, blah, blah. But there is a moment in the novel where you get that sense that he mixes charnel house animal parts with long-limbed large proportions because it makes them work easier.

14:28But he does talk about selecting them for their beauty. And you would think he would. The startling part is the scene that is in the movie that had never been depicted on any film, which is Victor waking up and the creature is at the foot of the bed looking at him, which is a very shocking, beautiful, uncanny scene. But that's also like Wrightson. I mean, that image to me is very much that. That is for me probably the best played in the entire Wrightson book. Because I just found myself thinking too about how rarely we got a chance to see a real threat in the creature's movement. I mean, because it's always been depicted this thing you can sort of get away from, but of course people are transfixed by it.

15:10But no, the efficiency of Victor's construction and design, the upper limbs are outsized in the same way that certainly Renaissance culture, but also the way Corbin depicted. I mean, there are massive shoulders, massive triceps. And Wrightson did it a few times. He did it with the arcane arc, the arcane character on the patchwork man, which was a rehearsal for Frankenstein. I guess. But the beauty of this design and the beauty of the way Lorley works, he came up with a lot of things himself. We watched the silent film. We watched The Last Man. We watched Ivan the Terrible, you know, Faust. The way the hands and the limbs sort of trail behind or are done in a very theatrical, compositional way.

15:59But then he took Butoh, the Japanese sort of art form. I wouldn't call it a dance, but it's sort of a dance. It's sort of a dance. Yeah, about resurrecting the flesh and about isolating elements and limbs from each other so he could move an arm separate from the rest of the body, a shoulder. And then he started doing his own method, which was beautiful. We talked about the developmental stages of a child, how a child exists in the moment and only in the moment. When the baby's crying, that baby has never been happy. And when the baby is happy, two seconds later, it has never been unhappy. And I said, the creature should transition like that.

16:37And he did a lot of work, a lot of work in about four or five weeks. He had to compress months and months of work. He came on to the movie late. Well, we had already sculpted all the prosthetics and everything for another actor who left nine weeks before we started shooting. So we had a week to cast, a week to start the sculpture. And then he had to finish a series, Jacob. But I had no doubt that he was a man. All the stages, not only of sort of infancy, but like sort of emotional development, there's a scene where the crucifixion scene, in effect. But all those stages, being in the moment, but also the dawning of recognition of, is this the end?

17:18I mean, that's basically almost entire life encapsulated in physical terms. Victor says, it is done. In the history of Frankenstein on film, there has never been as detailed and anatomical putting together of the body as we do. But also the body awakening, as you say, piece by piece. I mean, it's not the entire thing. No, no. And the reason I wanted to do that, there's two things. One, that construction is normally shot like a horror scene. And here is a waltz. And it's a joyous dance because it's what Victor has been looking for his whole life. So it's like him giving the final concert. So he's joyful, active, beautiful in a horrible and kind of humorous way.

17:59There's even the parallel to his small ivory anatomical figure. And he finally completed it with the creature. But the other thing that is important is there's a character that is war, which didn't prominently figure in the literature. Although there's echoes of the French Revolution in the novel of Shelley. Oh, yes. And her mother went to the French Revolution. But the Romantic movement is basically framed by the Napoleonic Wars. In the way you deal with the artifacts of war, you're saying that there are no clean resources. It's still so there's no clean money. Whatever resources you use that come from that.

18:37Are going to be tainted. Which is, again, the heart of Catholicism, which is the taint of original sin that runs through all of your movies. Well, it is also this idea that every character in the movie is pursuing their own quest, and they're all alone. Elizabeth is looking. She says, all of my life I look for something I cannot name. That's so funny, too, because the romantics were all about being on this quest together. But they wrote about so many of these figures who were lonely figures. From them, it's like even the romance of loneliness, which they couldn't live on their own. Particularly in Gothic romance, there's always a singular hero.

19:14You know, there's always the hero that is either immortal, like Melmoth, Melmoth the Wanderer, or you have somebody like the monk who is actually incapable of dying, and that's his curse. But that's also the curse, too, that runs through much of the romantics. I mean, it's the Garden of Earthly Delights again. It's going back to Paradise Lost. What is it when you can't die? I mean, that is the ultimate curse. That is the ultimate curse. And the movie for me is, I mean, it's full of things that are biographical for me, but particularly the last image, which I came to in a very dire occasion in my life where I said, you know, the sun rises without any care for my pain.

19:56And then I realized, no, my pain is there without any care for the sun rising. and accepting the grace of being alive, the grace of, as Victor says, while you are alive, what recourse do you have, what to live? It's, I think, a very beautiful moment of rescuing the fact that we can be there. The pain may be very, very young in you. When you're an adult, your pain is very young, but your solution should be an adult solution. We are going way too long here, so it means you've got to come back and maybe show me someone else's place. My guest is Guillermo del Toro, whose new film is an adaptation of The Modern Prometheus, is the way I like to think of it.

20:38The book is Frankenstein. The film is on Netflix streaming now, but also in theaters. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thank you, senor.

20:57Guillermo del Toro is an Oscar-winning writer, director, producer and comic book author. Our old friend's newest project is his long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein, now in theaters and on Netflix. Previous conversations with Del Toro and other creators have gone on to do well at the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment. You can also catch up with inspirations from creators at kcrw.com slash thetreat. and new additions drop every week, wherever you find your podcasts. This week, actor and old friend Greg Kinnear on the people who helped him get his start. The show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist.

21:47To better days, everyone, I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.

22:00Thank you.