Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Del Toro’s drawing of a stick bug from Notebook 4, Page 3B.

  And then, when I thought I could no longer be impressed by anything else, he showed me his notebooks and I began to marvel anew.

  Once it was all over (I do not, I admit, remember who took me away from that place or where I went), I could not entirely recall the contents of the notebooks. I remembered colors and faces and words and clockwork and insects and people and nothing more. The feeling of dreaming intensified. If ever anyone had brought anything back from the place where we dream, those notebooks were it.

  The next time that I spent really good, quality time with Guillermo, we were in Budapest, Hungary, a dreamlike place in its own right, and his daughters were ten years older and his wife had not aged a day. I stayed with him for many days, shadowing him on the set of Hellboy II. He let me listen when he talked to actors. He let me understand each decision he made. I learned so much about making movies and I learned so much about Guillermo del Toro: how he did what he did, why he does what he does. He told me of making monster TV shows in Mexico when he was young. He played the monsters. Of course he did, I thought.

  He showed me his notebooks, and this time I understood more of what I was seeing. He explained the way he chose a specific palette for each film. He would start with colors; the colors that would become the keynotes for the film. There were words. There were drawings and paintings, so haunting, so resonant. It was as if Guillermo had made a secret film, and that everything the audience would ever see was only the innocent, jutting-out top of an iceberg. They would never know how huge the Titanic-sinking world beneath was; the world of Guillermo’s imagination, filled with fairies and demons and insects and clockwork—always clockwork.

  Often I suspected that the true art, the place the real magic lived and lurked, was in those notebooks, because the stories in them seemed infinite, fragmentary, perfect. And if I was sure of anything, it was that nobody would ever see the notebooks, because the notebooks took you backstage, into another world. One of the world’s rarest and oddest books is the Codex Seraphinianus. I found a copy in a rare bookstore in Bologna in 2004, having looked for it for years. The Codex Seraphinianus is a strange book written in unreadable code-like writing, filled with pictures that almost make sense, and reading it is like dreaming while awake. Guillermo’s notebooks are stranger than that.

  My conversation with Guillermo feels like it began, in a dream, in Austin fifteen years ago and continues, in the manner of dreams, in strange places across the world. The last time we spoke, unless I dreamed it, we were in Wellington, New Zealand, in a café, and we talked about everything under the sun. We were older, and the food was not as good as the food that Guillermo’s wife cooks, but we were the same people as when we first met; even if, these days, I have had a secret pocket sewn into my jacket to allow me always to carry a notebook of my own.

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 16B

  –Use objects in the foreground to create black “wipes” for a continuous dolly shot and change the angle during the shot!!

  Brick archways painted white and black ironwork.

  Window is a CURVING SHAFT.

  “Window” is really a curved shaft.

  See EdTV in Austin with Robo.

  –1645 Mary Kings Close Bubonic Plague

  All residents are bricked in there and died of hunger and disease. No food. Local butchers were hired to quarter and dispose of the corpses. This happened on a street in Edinburgh (according to the frightful bartender upstairs) called “Mary Kings Close.” The residents of this street were infected with the bubonic plague. A decision was made to seal the street off with brick walls and let the people inside die from starvation and the cold. They weren’t given water or food

  18:43 seated p. EdTV in the Paramount.

  • GDT: This is me trying to find a look for the ghost in The Devil’s Backbone. And there were many, many different iterations of the story. There was an iteration where the ghost was the caretaker. It was an adult character. Because there was a version where they killed the caretaker halfway through the film with the lances, like a mammoth, and then he came back as a ghost. With many projects, you’re talking two or three years, and you go through many, many things that don’t make it. So this [above] was the rendering of the caretaker as a ghost, and it’s already veering away from a real corpse in that it’s really desiccated, and it has some of the features of the final ghost, with its black eyes and clear irises, but it is not yet porcelain.

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 13B

  The boy ghost from “The Devil’s Backbone” is semi-translucent.

  –Rasputin’s rules are: No more lives for nothing. Our sole purpose is to feed the gods. R. wears dark glasses

  –Throws something in the air and Hellboy catches it. When he looks back, he/she’s already gone.

  –Rasputin died in 1916: cyanide, gunshots with steel bullets. He froze to death.

  –I will not burn alone. . .”

  –R. doesn’t have eyes. They’re made of glass.

  –Art is always changing, the world just repeats itself. . .

  –Morgue filled with frogs. . .

  –Behind his “eyes,” R. has a web of tissue in constant motion. . .

  –We’ve bred a brand new world of couch potatoes.

  –He makes Liz angry so that she’ll explode.

  –Rasputin 30-meg 100 of square miles of pine forest: ball of fire, black clouds, black rain. Glowing clouds June 30 1908.

  • MSZ: So now, is this [above] The Devil’s Backbone? Because I noticed a similarity, but I wasn’t sure what you were illustrating.

  GDT: At this point, I didn’t know exactly what the story of The Devil’s Backbone was going to end up being. In one incarnation or another, it had been with me since the 1980s, when I first wrote it. And then I attempted it again in 1993, after Cronos. So it was something I had been working on for over a decade. This is just one attempt, then, at the ghost of The Devil’s Backbone.

  I had been toying with the idea of a translucent ghost for a long time. I wanted to do a heat distortion around the ghost, and I wanted to see the ribs, and the femur, and the pelvic bone. There was also this idea of it being framed by a door. I really don’t know if I was thinking of a teardrop shape, or a Gothic door that is out of whack in a crumbling building.

  MSZ: How did you eventually pull off that translucency?

  GDT: Ultimately we were able to do it fairly easily because by the time I shot the movie, CG was much more advanced. So what we did is we made the bones visible only when he crosses a haze of light, a little ray, a little beam of life. And they were able to animate a skeleton inside of the body.

  MSZ: And the blood coming out of the ghost in the final film, was that also CG?

  GDT: That came later. Originally I wanted the distortion in the air, like shimmering, and that’s what the drawing indicates. But a little later I came up with the idea that he had drowned with the injury to his head. The blood was easier to produce with particle effects.

  I really wanted him to look like porcelain. Here [opposite] he is still a corpse, but then one day I said, “Well, why doesn’t he look like a broken doll?” Because it doesn’t have to make sense. And DDT, the effects guys, they really, really resisted the idea. They wanted very much to do a rotting corpse, and I understood them, as sculptors and all that, I understood their impulse.

  MSZ: It goes back to an idea we’ve talked about previously, which is that every really great monster is beautiful. Grotesque and beautiful.

  BLUE NOTEBOOK PAGE 145

  * M.C. perhaps [?] with paint by HAND on the rock. Cave painting.

  * Rain of burning ash in slow motion.

  * Jose Maria Velazco’s slow journey through the sky until discovering the [?] there in the distance with a cloud of dust.

  * The apparition of little Joey.

  * Valley of Geysers/Holy waters in the desert M.C.

  * Pigeons/bats in the marina-cave, support with a very strong beam
of light.

  * M.C.’s cell slowly consumed by the dusk’s lengthening shadows.

  * “Raging sea” scenes after this shot EVERYTHING in slow motion.

  Close view of the sculpt of Santi’s face created by DDT, based on del Toro’s notebook illustration

  • MSZ: So here [opposite] is a drawing of Santi, a more elaborate one.

  GDT: You can see how it evolves. The first one featured a crumbling edifice, or another alternative was for there to be a curtain. But I wanted something that felt womblike, like the fetus in the jar, the baby in the womb, the kid in the pool, amniotic fluid, amber water, all that stuff.

  MSZ: So how did the design evolve from here?

  GDT: I sent this drawing to DDT. You can see now the eyes are black, the iris is white. Now he’s a porcelain doll. And DDT and I made a very long chain of emails, sending drawings and literally, literally counting the number of cracks. I would say, “Take this one out, put one over here.” We art directed exactly the number of cracks, exactly the position of the tear.

  You know, I say to people, “We deliberately made the ghost a figure that evokes things that are fragile.” And there are echoes in the movie: the shell of an egg, the broken porcelain of a childhood doll, and it has tears of rust. I mean, it’s a crying ghost. All those things are meant to evoke your sympathy rather than your terror. The ghost can function as a horrifying figure only very briefly in the beginning, but then, by repeatedly showing him, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is not a pernicious presence.

  And the heart at the bottom is from Blade II, which you can see only in the outtakes. Then, because it didn’t make it into the release of Blade II, I took it and put it in The Strain.

  But in another way, the jar ended up being the jar of tears in Hellboy. That’s exactly the design of the jar. I remember reading Raymond Chandler in his entirety and realizing that he cannibalized his stories. He would take a paragraph from his first detective, who was called John Dalmas, and he would reuse that paragraph, and make it better, like fifteen years later. He’d change one comma, or one adjective, and it was completely different. And I always think I have a similar way of cannibalizing ideas over and over.

  The ghost (Andreas Muñoz) as he appears in the film.

  NOTEBOOK PAGE 23

  Santi in The Devil’s Backbone

  Damaskinos keeps his heart preserved in a small glass urn. Sometimes he looks at it to remember what it was like to feel. He now lives in a stainless-steel funeral chamber kept at 0° centigrade

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 21A

  –Hellboy calls Liz to read her a letter he wrote. He goes for a coffee with Mayers.

  –The story’s basic triangle in Hellboy is that of the student who falls in love with his teacher’s wife. Hellboy is, above all, a noble and primitive guy.

  –How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his “black” hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy. Marisa, blonde, dressed in black, with two canes and yellow glasses. The children all in uniform, the school made up of arches, the empty, dead landscape. And God, like the sun, screws everything up, and completely burns everything He doesn’t.

  –I’ve found that simply being with my father is 200 times better than speaking with him. My mom, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent. She’s my soul mate. Even in her sins.

  The undetonated bomb, illustrated by del Toro in his notebook and as it appears in Jaime’s sketchbook.

  • MSZ: So now we come to this page [opposite] with the bomb from The Devil’s Backbone. You write, “How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his ‘black’ hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy.”

  GDT: What is funny is all that went away. I wanted Luppi, like Professor Aschenbach in Death in Venice, to have black hair that he put shoe polish on, because I wanted him to be bleeding black, and because I wanted him to be really fastidious about his appearance. And that’s in the movie. He’s very fastidious. He presses his ties with books. But we made a budget, and we made a schedule, and we started breaking it down, accounting for the cleanup time with bleeding hair versus not-bleeding hair. And it went away.

  The moment we started color-coding the movie, I realized Marisa’s hair needed to be red, not blonde, and that’s because the color of the school, the mosaic, and the doors, would look really, really narrow if you had a blonde. Then I said, “I’m gonna give her only one wooden leg, so I’ll give her one single cane.”

  Everything evolves. It was the same thing with the kids. We started thinking about school uniforms. But with the reality of the Civil War, we found that uniforms would exist only in a private school. So out they went. And the only thing that remains is God and the sun.

  The same with Hellboy. Here I wrote, “The story’s basic triangle in Hellboy is that of the student who falls in love with his teacher’s wife. Hellboy is, above all, a noble and primitive guy.” There was a time when there was a different story for Hellboy.

  MSZ: What about this great image of the little boy with the bomb?

  GDT: An earlier incarnation of the bomb was that I wanted it to be rotting in such a way that you could see the mechanism inside. And then you do research and realize that’s impossible, and you go, “Oh, all right.” The only thing that remains of that, which is a complete fantasy, is that it ticks.

  MSZ: So what was the research that proved that you couldn’t show the mechanism?

  GDT: We started doing the research, and the bombardment in the Civil War was done by the Condor Legion, which were German planes, and they were testing blanket bombing in Spain. And the bombs were very small. I mean, size-wise, they were very small. But I had this image in my head of the American blanket bombings and Dr. Strangelove, with a giant bomb and the dropper. So it’s inaccurate. The planes were not able to have that dropping system. And I said, “You know what? To hell with it. It’s a great image.”

  What I explained to the designer is that the bomb is the mother of the children. The bomb is like a fertility goddess, and that is the way the children see it. It’s huge. And they put little flower pots around it. In that way, it’s like the head of the pig in Lord of the Flies, something totemic. And it’s the size they’ll remember it. The bomb is the size they’ll remember it. But it’s entirely inaccurate. There were no bombs of that size. I always say, “You can break the reality as long as you know.” If somebody tells you, “There were no bombs that size,” you can’t go, “Holy shit!” But you can say, “I know,” and it’s fine.

  The opposite is true in Pan’s Labyrinth, where people say that the raids are inaccurate. But they are not. We did research that proves they were, and exactly at that time, and exactly in that area. The guy that gave us all the research had studied extensively. He was obsessed with Fascist campaigns. And he was not a guy on the left, with an agenda. He was a historian who was obsessed with the Spanish Civil War not from the side of the Republicans, but of the Fascists. And the fact is they won; the Republicans won some skirmishes in the north because they were using guerilla tactics, which were very, very new. It’s fascinating to me that some people say, “Oh, he took too many liberties” about Pan’s Labyrinth. But nobody has said that of The Devil’s Backbone, which took the most enormous liberties with history.

  BLADE II

  Concepts of Chupa’s death by Mike Mignola.

  Blade (Wesley Snipes) pursued by Reapers in the sewers.

  Concept of Nomak’s fight with the security guards by Mike Mignola.

  Concept of Blade, enshrouded in the mist of a disintegrated Reaper, by
Mike Mignola.

  Nomak (Luke Goss) scouts the sewers.

  “BLADE II WAS DONE, partially at least, to be able to do Hellboy,” Guillermo readily admits. “And then because I loved the idea of the bad vampires, the Reapers. I mean, literally, my agent at the time called me and said, ‘Do you want to make Blade II?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do Blade II.’ And he said, ‘Do you ever want to do Hellboy?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, if you want to do Hellboy, you gotta do Blade II, because no one’s going to hire you to do Hellboy based on Mimic or Cronos.’ And he was absolutely right.”

  Guillermo elaborates, “The way it happened was great because they wanted me to do Blade, but I never met with them. Then they called me for Blade II, and I liked Blade all the way, including the ending. Especially that phrase, ‘Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill!’”

  Guillermo knew he could not take on Blade II (2002) without finding a way to dive into it heart and soul. He needed to balance the demands of working on a studio film with his need to express himself artistically, to explore the images and ideas that ignite his passions. At his first meeting with executive producer and screenwriter David S. Goyer and star Wesley Snipes, Guillermo proposed his notion for the Reapers, a new group of voracious supervampires whose mouths would split wide open, revealing horrors within.

  This reflected Guillermo’s desire to present a vampire unlike anything seen before. He’d been mulling over this notion since his childhood in Mexico, watching films and reading about vampires in legends and folktales from around the world, including the strigoi of eastern Europe. From the first, Guillermo displayed a morbid fascination with the biological minutiae of how the vampire actually functioned—how it infects, how it feeds, how it survives—peering closely at what others might avoid or gloss over.