The Oscar-winning filmmaker discusses his unique approach to visual design, color, and often delicate use of visual effects, where you shouldn’t use a shotgun to kill a fly, in his haunting new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s iconic 1818 novel, now streaming on Netflix.
Monster tales are excellent parables about the human condition, which is why Oscar-winning writer and director Guillermo del Toro has been drawn to them throughout his career. Like so many of his films, his latest passion project, Frankenstein, now streaming on Netflix, was years in the making. So, it’s no surprise his interpretation of Mary Shelley’s literary classic evolved a great deal over those years into an entirely different creation than the director first imagined. “It changed quite a bit,” del Toro reflects. “First of all, you spend the years of your professional life accumulating tools for that movie. Crimson Peak is a dress rehearsal for Frankenstein. So are many of the techniques that we ended up employing. You hone your cast and crew. Definitely, we have crewed up over decades to get Dan Laustsen [Cinematographer], Tamara Deverell [Production Designer], Dennis Berardi [Visual Effects Supervisor], and Kate Hawley [Costume Designer]. You refine that. And in terms of the story, I started thinking that I wanted to talk about me and my father as well as forgiveness, acceptance and stopping the pain from one generation to the next, Catholic dogma, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I ended up talking about all of that, and me as a father failing to be present and being able to apologize for it.”
In the center of del Toro’s worldbuilding and visual language sits his protagonist. “In terms of the visuals, you have to tailor the movie around the creature,” he states. “You have to tailor the environment to allow the exotic animal to exist there. When it comes to designing the creature, you design around the body and bone structure of the performer because it's a character. It's not a monster. Is not an amphibian Gill-man. It's a little bit like when you tailor Hellboy to Ron Perlman. The sculptural approach is very delicate, elegant, and subdued; it’s almost sculptural in nature.”
He continues, “Effective visual effects do not exist separate from all the other disciples of moviemaking. Visual effects should not be remedial. They should be designed to exist in the same medium as the other techniques; that's my relationship with visual effects. I adore them, but you don't want to use a shotgun to kill a fly. You want to use a shotgun for large game and visual effects is reserved for that large game. It can be used delicately, like when we do atmospherics or distant animals or the retinal kickback in the eye of the Creature. When there's no other way to do it efficiently. They're used when necessary. I find digital to be an advantage when you use it that way and a disadvantage when it’s a shortcut.”
Each chapter of Frankenstein uses a distinct camera style. “The camera starts in a forward motion in the Arctic and keeps the frame very wide,” explains del Toro. “We used a 24mm lens all through the movie because we wanted to include the environment. The only objective sequence in the film is the Arctic. Then Victor’s childhood is done in a Barry Lyndon style of color and cinematography. We color coded carefully to include the red for the only time in the movie; other than anything related to the mother and the resurrection of the bodies, that's when the red comes in. It’s the trauma of losing his mother that generates that quest. The camera then changes to him as a young man in Edinburgh. The camera is constantly moving and never stops in the film. There's not a single static shot because it's being narrated. If you imagine the lecture in the theater, the camera is swooping, swimming and coming down. It's like a concert. The style of the camera suits that need. Then with the Creature, it becomes a fairy tale. The creature is guided through the world with animals, mice, wolves, deer, ravens. It ends back in the Arctic, with the same style and scene as the beginning, with the sun rising on the horizon. But now, the creature is facing it. It's all about storytelling.”
Narration plays an integral part in sharing Victor Frankenstein and the Creature’s perspective and thoughts to the audience. “If you have a man standing on a corner and you say, ‘It was a snowy evening and I was standing on the corner,’” notes del Toro, “then, yes, that's a bad use of a voice over. But if somebody is standing in the corner and you say, ‘I had never felt so lonely in my life. I had never felt the city more remote,’ then you are actually supplementing information that is not in the frame. It may be in the frame compositionally, but now you're making sure that you're hitting something more. Voice over is not about repetition. It's about emotion, especially when somebody is telling their own story. Whether it's a Salieri in Amadeus or Victor telling his story, they’re telling you how they felt back then. You talk about longings, disappointments, emotions, and the passage of time.” The original novel featured narration. “When Mary Shelley did it, it was an epistolary novel. You have Captain Robert Walton's letters to his sister and then the Creature tells Victor what happened to him in the ice cave. Victor tells the Captain what happened to him in the ship. There are separate points of view in the novel, and I wanted to honor that.”
In the film, Victor Frankenstein presents the reanimated torso of a corpse before the Royal Society of Edinburg. “What I wanted to do was shoot it like a concert,” del Toro explains. “I said, ‘Victor is a superstar. Victor is like Mick Jagger or David Bowie to his students. He's a rebel. He's an iconoclast. The establishment doesn't want him. Everybody is seated much like a gladiatorial event or a concert, and Victor is moving everywhere. The camera is moving everywhere with him. It is the most active sequence in the film. The camera is going up on a crane, down on a crane, from a close-up to a wide shot. It's shot very much like a symphonic event. You want to go to places where you amaze the audience who has seen 120 Frankenstein movies. You want the audience to share the awe of that room when they see that body come to life, because nobody expects that body to come to life, much less catch that ball. It's shot with that sort of giddy excitement on the camera.”
A parking lot in Toronto was turned into the Arctic. “That's a perfect example where we go to great lengths not to have the ship be CG,” observes del Toro. “The ship is completely real. We build it on a mechanical gimbal that allowed it to move and shake. There's no stage big enough for that ship. Early on, we decided, ‘Let's shoot it as close to the winter as we can, and we snow the parking lot.’ We cover it in snow, both artificial and real. We had huge machines grinding ice that were helped by the fact that Toronto in the winter can be conducive to cold. The result is spectacular. Tamara Deverell came up with a great system for the icebergs, where she combined Styrofoam, vacuum forming, and fiberglass to give them the translucency of ice. It’s a remarkable production design feat to create the ice physically.” The torches were also real. “The fact that you're doing all this physically is rewarding for the audience. They may think it's a visual effect. You cannot teach them to discern, but it feels real and it is real.”
Sometime old techniques remain the best techniques. “There's a great shot where Victor is coming down the stairs, and that's the stuntman,” remarks del Toro. “We do a Texas Switch behind the battery and that's Victor because I couldn't have him come down in the rain on a spiral staircase. It’s skillfully done. That's the 30 years of craft. And then storyboards in the morning mean you now know your set, and actors. The most useful storyboards are the ones that you do and edit on paper that morning.”
Miniatures were shot for the destruction of the water tower. According to the director, “That is absolute planning. We are creating a 20-to-25-foot miniature to blow it up. You only get two takes, so you have to know exactly what’s what. But that’s the advantage of having been a working effects technician for more than a decade. And more than that, learning it. I can do stop-motion, rotoscope, opticals. makeup effects, sculpting and painting. You know where the boundaries of those exist, it’s not that hard to know what you can blow up on a full-scale set, and when you can blow it up on a miniature. You know what you can get away with without endangering cast or crew. We blew-up the full-size set partially, and the miniature two times.”
After his laboratory escape, Creature befriends some mice at a farmhouse. “The great animation on the mice was by ILM,” remarks del Toro. “The idea for me is the sort of fairy tale portion of the film. The Creature is birthed with the ravens and the deer, which are remarkable and show him the cruelty of the world. The mice became his friends and social club. I knew I wanted to have them constantly on top of him as he interacts with them. First, they are afraid of him. That's a very nice little piece of animation from ILM, where the mouse is cowering, but also curious. That’s a good piece of character animation. We went through quite an inventory of mice for the digital doubles used for the scene.”
An image that haunts Victor Frankenstein is that of a Dark Angel. “The mother is red and the archangel is supposedly guiding Victor into conquering death,” says del Toro. “We shot it with a real actor and a wind machine and the clothing. We used that as reference for a digital version. We basically used it almost like rotoscope animation. We follow the actor’s path carefully, where we have the flying fabric. Then the archangel reveals himself to be Death. You've been serving the wrong master. It was meant to be almost like a fever dream for the kid, so it never loses its haunting quality. It's nightmarish. The best way to work with red, I find, is digital, because you can uniform the reds. In real life, no matter how much you think you're close between a hard shell, fabric or fiberglass painted, the camera perceives the most minute variation in red. The best way to uniform the archangel was to do it digitally after the fact.”
Finding beauty in the grotesque is something that del Toro has mastered. “Before I start planning the movie, I never look at other movies,” he explains. “I start by researching. I have accumulated a library of medicine from the 1830s to be able to use the terms correctly. But I also got a working table, and 40 or 50 books of art by either painters contemporary to the story or people that do Gothic really well. Caspar David Friedrich, Henry Fuseli, all the Symbolists, Carlos, Schwabe, and Felician Rops. I pour through the images. John Atkinson Grimshaw, who painted moons and nocturnal landscapes beautifully. Those are the moons in the film. Caspar David Frederick’s ice paintings are the guides for the ship. You develop a language through fine arts that you find are executed beautifully in an academic way but can cross the line into something disturbing. Whether it's a William Blake engraving or a great painting by J.M.W. Turner, you can evoke violence, light, composition and have a shocking effect, but done with the right balance of beauty and horror; it's actually not an entirely unrewarding image!”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
