‘We have come to the point in civilisation where emotion seems to be something you hide or you have to be discreet about, or to be ashamed of.’
Mexican master filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has been obsessed with monsters and their stories ever since he was a child.
He has directed 13 features, most dealing with monsters and has won three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director trophies for The Shape of Water (2017).
But all those films (including Hellboy, 2004, Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006, and Crimson Peak, 2015) were prep work for the ultimate film he had been wanting to make since he was 11: Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1818).
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is now streaming on Netflix.
Frankenstein has already collected a number of awards in the current season, and is now nominated for five Golden Globes, including one in the directing category for Del Toro.
Last week, Del Toro attended the Marrakech International Film Festival where he was honored for his contribution to global cinema.
During an interview with Aseem Chhabra, Del Toro spoke about his passion project and how Frankenstein is as much his vision of a monster — the Creature (Jacob Elordi) and its maker Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Issac), as it is a tribute to Shelley’s book.
The interview with Del Toro took place at Marrakech’s historic La Mamounia Hotel where Alfred Hitchcock shot many scenes of his 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Guillermo, you have said that you wanted to make Frankenstein from the time you were 11. Didn’t you get scared when you first read Mary Shelley’s book as a child? Actually, the monsters you have created, the Creature in Frankenstein or those in other films, are not scary. Instead, they are lovable, tender. They cry and fall in love.
I was born in 1964. At that time, in the Japanese Kaiju movies, the Kaijus (giant monsters) were all adorable.
Godzilla started like the force of nature or the power of the atomic bomb.
But by the ’60s, Godzilla was already domesticated, he had become the good guy.
When I read Frankenstein in the ’70s, there was a whole different culture.
All the Universal Monsters — the films distributed by Universal Pictures — had been readapted by new generations as almost heroes. By the time I come into the culture, monsters were a lot more desirable and beautiful.
In the book, Mary Shelley takes an exception on one occasion for the monster to be utterly demonic, when he strangles little William, who is five years old, and he says, ‘I loved it.’
That is really an outsider rage that she has, but that’s rare in the book.
Mostly, the book is like the monolog of Caliban in The Tempest where he says, ‘Why did you make me like this? Why did you give me the world and not the understanding of it?’
So there’s a plea, a lot of pleading by the monster with God. It’s basically man interviewing God and saying, ‘Why did you throw me here?’
That was very moving to me.
I was raised Catholic. I am very lapsed now but the cosmology of it intrigued me.
Mary Shelley uses ‘Paradise Lost’ like a bouncing text to her novel. There’s a lot of philosophical depth to the book.
Can you talk more about your passion for this project? You created the Creature with a father and not with a mother. How did it start and how does it feel to finish it?
The first time I saw James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), I was seven.
On Sundays, we would go to church at 8 am and then the rest of the day, we would watch movies at home on TV.
I saw Boris Karloff (the Monster in the 1931 film) cross the threshold and turn around.
To me, that was religion, that was my church.
I immediately felt that it was what my grandmother used to feel about Jesus. I saw myself in him.
I was a very strange child at age seven.
I felt the Creature didn’t belong in the world the same way I didn’t belong in the world.
But I was incredibly curious about the world, so there was religious ecstasy.
I was really trembling, moved by that image.
When you are a Catholic, you talk about resurrection of the flesh, immaculate conception, stigmata. And I felt very Catholic with Boris Karloff.
Then at age 11, I went to a supermarket on my bicycle, and saw a paperback edition of Mary Shelley’s book. I read it in one sitting.
I felt I had read the best book in the world.
All those questions were in me, but I couldn’t name them.
Little did I know that the book had been written by somebody who was seven years older than me. It was written with the same urgency.
I was already making Super Eight movies at age of eight, so I felt I was going to make this movie.
I wanted to tell the story of the Creature, the religious and philosophical undertones in the novel. It took me 50 years to make it finally.
For 50 years, I read everything I could about the Godwins, the Shelleys (William Godwin was Mary Shelley’s father), the journey of her mother as a feminist.
I identified with Mary and her biography because of my mother.
My maternal grandmother died giving birth to my mother. My mother had miscarriages. I learned to grow with the fear of somebody being born because it would take away my mother. I started realising that I too was an 18-year-old Victorian girl.
The fact that the mother figure was absent was very telling.
How did I feel about it? It was simple to me.
I grew up in a world without mothers in fiction, like in every Walt Disney comic book.
Donald Duck was not married, but had three nephews. Mickey Mouse had a nephew.
There were no married couples in the imagination of the universe. And every fairy tale had a stepmother or a stepfather.
So I grew up in a mythology where the family nucleus was always broken, and so it is in Pinocchio and in Frankenstein.
I infused myself with the pre-Victorian sensibility.
You have the Romantic movement, both in music and in painting. I dived into (Swiss painter) Henri Fuseli, (German painter) Caspar David Friedrich and (English poet and painter) William Blake.
Finally, I decided I am going to do an intertextual adaptation, not only the text, but the subtext, the context, and the biography of myself and Mary Shelley is going to fuse.
That’s the movie that I made.
Imagine that for 50 years, you gather things, and you say, ‘I am going to do this, when I make Frankenstein. I am going to try this, when I do Frankenstein. I am going to work with this person, when I do Frankenstein.’
Then finally, you do Frankenstein, and there’s no future, you go, ‘Oh, wow, I did it.’
There is a line in the movie, ‘Having reached the ends of the earth, there was no more horizons left.’
That’s the achievement I felt.
There is influence of Lord Byron on the film, a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was Mary Shelley’s husband. You end the film with a quote from Lord Byron, ‘Thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.’
I think Byron is a very powerful figure.
I certainly tried to model Oscar Isaac after Lord Byron, but also John Keats because he studied medicine and became a poet at the end of the day.
When the creature is lost in the world, it is a little bit like the ‘Pathless Woods’ (from Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage).
There’s a lot of Byron breath in there.
The Pathless Woods reminds me of the creature walking through the woods. And the final quote is from that poem.
In my adaptation of the book, I didn’t want to do taxidermy of a text and say, ‘Oh, this is holy. Let’s just do that.’
I wanted to make it alive.
I wanted to provoke the same emotions that I felt when I was 11, reading the book. I wanted it to be a living animal rather than a pastel colour homage to a classic.
How did you know that Jacob Elordi would make a great monster?
His eyes. And the fact that in the first phone call, he said to me, ‘This creature is more me than me.’
I said, ‘I understand exactly what you mean.’
You see, Jacob is a person who exists in a world that judges him for how he looks.
It makes no difference if you look really good or bad, or as long as you are judged by your looks.
You understand the loneliness of existing within that body. That is the Creature I wanted to create for the film.
You have talked about Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by joining pieces back together and filling cracks), which is your inspiration for the way you built the Creature, a whole person made up of different people’s body parts. Had you thought about Kintsugi in the past — making a whole with cracks and imperfections?
I was reading about Wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of finding beauty in imperfection and asymmetry) somewhere in between Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Pacific Rim (2013).
I had talked briefly with George Lucas one day and he asked, ‘Why do you put autopsies in your movies?’
I said, ‘because, if something is dead, it was alive. The audience seeing the internal organs and think, ‘Oh, it’s a real creature.’ And somebody said to me, ‘Well, that’s very Wabi-sabi. If it’s decaying, it was alive.’
Part of the Wabi-sabi is Kintsugi.
I find it interesting that storytelling is Kintsugi, that we are broken as children, and then we put together ourselves with stories and that’s the golden lacquer what bids the pieces.
I found it really compelling. My monster is designed very much like in Kintsugi.
I want to ask you about Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Iñárritu and Michel Franco. All of you are almost the same age and have become famous and successful as filmmakers.
How would you explain that coming from the same country? And what is your relationship with them? Do you talk, ask for help and ideas?
I talk to Alfonso and Alejandro more than I talk to my family.
We talk every week, for sure, but sometimes we talk every day. We are from the same generation.
I don’t talk to (Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel) Lubezki that much, but Alfonso and Alejandro do.
I come from Guadalajara, which is like coming from the second city. I bonded very well with them because we were very undomesticated.
We were very rebellious as young filmmakers.
We wanted to do something that the generation before us had not done.
Technically, we tried to push for a better mix, a better cinematography, better construction of images, etc.
We were very interested in the creation of images.
Lubezki, for example, was originally going to be a director, but he landed in cinematography.
Alfonso, who was an assistant director, ended up directing.
I was doing optical effects, makeup effects, storyboards.
We were all getting good at one branch of the technical aspect, and landed in a very different way because we were able to tackle genre, a fairy tale or a horror movie or a drama, etc.
Michel Franco is one generation later. I was very happy to see him come through. We support each other.
Some from the generation before us were supportive of the young filmmakers, but some were not. At the end of the golden era of Mexican cinema, a lot of that generation closed the unions and said no more membership, to protect the work of the people who were already in the industry.
We were the opposite.
We come from a generation that opened the unions and help each other all the time. I have been in their editing rooms, and they have been in my editing room. I read their screenplays. They read my screenplays. So we are very close.
Now, success looks better from the outside.
Success also means being unemployed for three or four years, with nobody noticing.
We have gone through big gaps.
I have seen Alfonso and Alejandro really gamble.
We have seen each other go through the ringer critically or economically a few times in 30 years. People tend to think it’s a bump on the road, but for you, it is immediate.
You think you are never going to recuperate from that.
I have seen Alfonso fight vehemently for Gravity (2013), which eventually turned out to be a huge hit.
Can you talk about your views on AI? You said in interviews that you would rather die than use AI in your films.
I think it’s important to remember a few things. One of them is that it is not about artificial intelligence.
Intelligence is not the matter. It is the stupidity.
They want to foster stupidity. Do not be fooled by this.
They want you to relinquish your spirits and your emotion to an algorithm or an app that is going to create art, but it’s not. It’s illustration.
Natural stupidity is what pushes most of the world’s feature.
I would connect the character of Victor Frankenstein to the forefront of AI development. I did want Victor’s arrogance to be similar in some ways to the tech bros. He’s kind of blind, creating something without considering the consequences. I would have to take a pause and consider where we are going.
The main fight of the Romantic spirit was against the Industrial Revolution. It was said we should not relinquish everything to the machine.
It’s the same spirit we are in right now, and that’s why it feels urgent and alive, and that’s why I am glad I did not make Frankenstein 20 or 30 years ago, but I made it now.
I am very grateful to live in a world that needs a film you make.
Whether it’s understood or misunderstood, it doesn’t matter because you feel like you are in the moment. And it’s a moment to reevaluate the Romantics as a necessary notion and movement for the human spirit that we forget.
Do you ever watch films in other genres?
If you went to my house, you would be surprised that 60 percent of my film collections are comedies. The next genre after that is drama.
Listen, I am Mexican, so emotion is big for me.
I think emotion is very scarce right now.
We have come to the point in civilisation where emotion seems to be something you hide or you have to be discreet about, or to be ashamed of. I don’t agree with any of that. I wanted Frankenstein to feel emotional, like an opera.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
