Makeup artist Steve Johnson created the final design, which revealed a nest of predatory organs accessible via a split in a Reaper’s jaw, here visible on Nomak (Luke Goss).
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE27 B
–Long lenses for the Sergio Leone–type moment in 27 and for bs c.up.
–Use wide-angle lenses (14 mm) for the deepest sets, hut with caution.
–Gabi suggests that the nights he amber and the days steel blue (confused?) and white. If we go ahead with this, how do we handle the flashback
–Reaper Design idea: avoid the lower teeth in the framing and the actor’s speech. Could we make the same micro tentacles that are on the tip of their tongues swell up or extend outward as if they were additional little tongues?
–Each time they shoot a pistol at point-blank range, we’ll use the flashes we create for the actors to wear inside their “vests.”
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 92
* Now that we have every reason to think otherwise, we hear a telephone conversation (only one side) and EVERYTHING has a double meaning (someone’s listening).
* Somebody always THINKS badly about the NATIVES of a certain country and about those of his own country.
* Tumor or parasitic heart that works opposite a normal heart. It has a modular or “NODULAR” structure
* With a dirty plan, “foul play” in mind, they tell the “don”: “It must be an error no doubt” and then after mulling it over for a long time, “. . . no doubt”
* Children playing in the waves, seen from behind.
* Somebody who knew ARTEAGA and made fun of him “REVEALS” to us his past.
* Object buried in his chest, when it’s pulled, it pulls his chest.
* Ernie is “given” (he inherits) the “key” with which everything in the M/M runs
* Ernie: Kiss and faint.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 90
* If you love “meee,” make ‘er bleed.”
* The A/B/C from the Quiroga plan.
* The needle’s thread —>CHRIST.
* Everybody talks about the Devil’s evil, God’s evil.
* He is: a man of God † / Goat’s leg and I’m the virgin devil, pure evil.
* She is the devil/of the devil.
* CITY IN FIRE 1912.
* SAMURAI (police story)
* “How to MASTER U’R V. GOMES” Finger exercises
* PROOF: Move earlier
* I. . . you . . . I love your . . . the way you dress the way . . . your hubcaps . . .
* Somebody who’s deeply in love tells his loved one: (who is interested only in “X”) I trust you and I want us to be together but I don’t “X” you (or something like that). (She—or he—says “Yes”). or “aha” very simply, casually.
(A) When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 91
(1) Extended arm
(2) Fist turns, arm shrinks.
Wrist changes position.
Natural “hinge” instead of a common human elbow.
(3) Pupil activates reptilian membrane in his eye
When the pupil dilates, a second eyelid slides up over the eye.
* Somebody tells him something tragic about his worst enemy and when he is alone: “THAT’S NICE”
• GDT: Now these pages [above, left, and opposite] are full of notes on vampirism that make it all the way to Blade II and The Strain. The stinger, the nictating membrane. It’s funny. These were done in ’93, years and years and years before. I write, “When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.” When I was a kid, I had a fascination with the origins of vampirism, and in eastern Europe, the vampire, the strigoi, have a stinger under the tongue.
MSZ: So you were actually designing your vampires back in 1993 in these drawings?
GDT: Yeah, yeah. These were ideas I couldn’t put in Cronos. I was making an inventory of vampiric stuff. Then this idea of the tumor, like a parasitic heart growing in the human heart, came to me at some point. My thought was, “Okay, how does it actually happen?” A vampire bites you, the virus spreads, parasitic organs grow next to your heart. They suffocate the heart. The patient dies, and then the vampiric heart starts beating and the vampire wakes up. That idea gave birth to The Strain.
Del Toro wanted Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), the vampire king, to have cracked, white-blue skin,
• MSZ: So then we come to this illustration [opposite] of Damaskinos, the vampire king.
GDT: The idea here with Damaskinos was an exploration in color. Back then, I wanted to evoke a guy that looks like he’s from a Bruegel painting—like an aristocrat from the Renaissance. And the idea of the skin being made of cracked white-blue marble? Like, see the striations of the marble? It’s a demonstration of how old he is, and it comes from Cronos. I tried it first in Cronos, but the makeup was not good enough. And I tried it again here, and guess what? The makeup was not good enough again. I tried it yet again in Hellboy II with Prince Nuada. I think that came out decent. It was not marble by then; it was ivory. I’m bound to try it again.
MSZ: And then there’s a halo, almost like a saint.
GDT: I was trying to evoke wall portraiture, so I wrote some fake Latin, too. Completely fake.
MSZ: And the notes you have along the periphery about 1930s motion detectors, a body that twitches and then appears to come alive, but that is really covered with squids. What was that for?
GDT: Well, that is all in Mountains. In a way. Not all of it, but some of it. The 1930s motion detectors are a good idea. [laughs]
an idea he had been toying with since Cronos.
– Cannibalistic squids in the whole torso of a victim. Animals are a part of a cave’s texture (walls).
– They see the body twitch and the think: ALIVE!! . . . but when they turn it, it’s covered with “squids”
– 1930’s motion detectors for the ice—
It is both sad, sad and very apparent that in this, the “age of communication” no one calls.
– Dead animals in a circle
– Under the ice chase w/ gun to take a breath
– In Hellboy, we’ll use grays, blues, greens, etc., and except for Chinatown, things Nazi, and Hellboy himself, we won’t use reds
– Diagonal beams ”a la” Piranesi.
– A man is dismembering a corpse. Someone knocks at the door. He wants to speak with the man’s wife to sell her a vacuum cleaner. NOT TODAY. NOT A GOOD DAY. DAMASKINOS ON THE BLADE II POST 1/21/02.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 33 B
HELLBOY
Page from Rasputin’s journal by Mike Mignola.
Storyboard panel of Sammael by Simeon Wilkins.
Drawing of Hellboy by Mike Mignola given to del Toro when wrapping Hellboy preproduction.
Sculpture depicting Hellboy’s confrontation with the Behemoth.
Rasputin (Karel Roden), flanked by Ilsa (Biddy Hodson) and Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).
Storyboard panel of Abe Sapien by Simeon Wilkins.
Concept of a young Hellboy by Wayne Barlowe.
Sammael sculpture by Spectral Motion.
“AT ONE POINT, I was going to do Mimic, and Jim Cameron said, ‘Aren’t you afraid people will pigeonhole you as a horror director?’” Guillermo recalls. “I said, ‘I’d love that!’”
Artist and writer Mike Mignola—the creator of the Hellboy comic book series—is a kindred spirit, someone who happily let his passion for horror tropes define his place in the world of comic books. “I’ve just always liked monsters,” Mignola said in a 2012 podcast interview with Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Since I was a little kid, it was always the thing I found interesting. It’s always what I wanted to draw. It’s always what I wanted to read.”
In the same interview, Mignola recalled how he came up with the comic’s eponymous character. “I’d made some noise about creating my own comic. I’d been working for Marvel and
DC for ten years, had done a little bit of everything. . . . The more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to draw just what I wanted to draw, and the only name I’d ever come up with was Hellboy.”
Mignola added, “For whatever reason, the comic . . . appealed to a broader audience maybe than a lot of the regular comics I was doing. And then certainly you’ve got to give a lot of credit to the movie. I got really lucky that a very, very talented director happened to be a fan of the comic.”
Harlan Ellison has said that everything a writer writes, whether fiction or nonfiction, is ultimately autobiography, and this is certainly true of Guillermo’s approach to writing and filmmaking. The reason he was drawn to Hellboy was that he saw himself in this ungainly, unlikely superhero, this extraordinary outsider, this child-man striving to find a place for himself in a world ill-suited to his dimensions and diversions. Not for Guillermo were Batman or Superman, those oddballs who nevertheless so successfully imitate normal men. Hellboy, on the other hand, someone who lacks that ability, was a perfect fit.
From the start, Guillermo brought Mignola in to work closely with him on the movie’s design and story elements, but nonetheless Guillermo felt free to deviate from Mignola’s comic book to explore issues that were personally important. “Even though they both arrived on Earth in the forties, somehow del Toro’s Hellboy is still a lovesick teenager,” Mignola explains. “My Hellboy is modeled on my father in some way, a guy who’s been in the Korean War, and he’s traveled and he’s done a lot of stuff, and he’s kind of got a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. He’s been in the world. And del Toro’s change was to have Hellboy bottled up in a room and mooning over the girl he can’t have. My Hellboy, there were just no girl problems. That element of the character was completely not in the comic.”
As with Blade II, Guillermo realized that he wanted to craft a film that would appeal to a particular aspect of himself: the eight-year-old boy inside. That meant that Hellboy would be excessive, he explains, “in the way that a gold-leaf-covered Baroque church in Mexico is excessive. The whole statement is excess. And if you know me, and you know my life, and you know my house, I’m not exactly going for the Zen stuff. So the two Hellboys are very excessive.”
Hellboy’s excessiveness extended in particular to the color palette, with no apologies. Visually, Guillermo notes, “the films I’m the proudest of are the Hellboys, because I don’t care if people like them or not, I just think they are absolutely beautiful to look at.”
Not every bold idea planned for Hellboy made it into the final 2004 film. “Originally, the idea for Hellboy was that the whole movie was going to be told with When Harry Met Sally–type of interviews,” Guillermo explains. “So people would be saying, ‘I saw Hellboy over here. I saw him jump,’ and a kid saying, ‘I saw him on the rooftop.’ Now everybody does it, but back then it was 1997, ’98, and I thought that was a great idea. That was the first thing we cut out of the shooting schedule because [the studio executives] didn’t understand it.”
Even after being narratively domesticated, Hellboy provided fertile ground to plant seeds from earlier unmade projects. In the notebook pages, we see Guillermo drawing heavily on design elements from his unrealized film adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness (from the novel by H. P. Lovecraft), Mephisto’s Bridge (from the novel Spanky by Christopher Fowler), and The Left Hand of Darkness (a version of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas).
In Hellboy’s villain Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), the steampunk aesthetic of The Left Hand of Darkness was given a Third Reich twist. The studies Guillermo created for Mephisto’s Bridge yielded Kroenen’s face, devoid of eyelids and lips. And from the nightmarish Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness, Hellboy’s demon Sammael (Brian Steele) was birthed.
Amid simulated blood splotches and arcane symbols reminiscent of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, Guillermo explored design elements for all Hellboy’s main characters. He was particularly intent on rendering both Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his sidekick Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) vivid and—for all their peculiarities—human. Most notably, Guillermo strove to evolve Hellboy from the creature Mignola devised into something Ron Perlman could play, drawing him as a hundred-year-old Victorian, an elegant creation in long pants, or cloaking him in a U.S. Civil War–style leather coat. He wrote in the notebook’s margin: “Hellboy has lots of cats running around everywhere.” All these embellishments, Guillermo relates, were “my ways of finding Ron in there.”
Many of the notebook’s concepts made it into the film, while others were abandoned due to budgetary concerns, production logistics, or in the interest of gaining a PG-13 rating. In one case, though, Guillermo jettisoned a fish mouth intended for Abe Sapien because a horrified Mignola offered to give him any four original Hellboy comic panels if he would abandon the notion.
In the end, Hellboy shares the signature trait of all Guillermo’s English-language, studio-sponsored films—Guillermo himself, who throws his entire self into every film wholeheartedly. “Everything about me is consistent,” he observes. “People have a saying in Mexico, ‘The way you eat is the way you dance, the way you dance is the way you fuck,’ and you continue like that.
“I haven’t made eight movies. I’m trying to make a single movie made of all those movies. To me, it’s like Bleak House. I’m building room by room, and you have to take it as a whole in a way. Does that mean that maybe Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth make Mimic a little less terrible? I think so. Or the echoes of those may make Blade II more interesting? I think so.
“The one thing I can say is that, inarguably, I may go three, four years without shooting a movie here or there, but everything I’ve done I’ve done on my own terms. I’ve never had to stray from what I believe is right.”
The notebook containing del Toro’s notes on Hellboy (Notebook 3), opened to pages 15A and 15B, which contain an early iteration of the demon Sammael with wings.
Basil Gogos’s portrait of Hellboy as a Victorian gentleman, commissioned by del Toro.
MSZ: And here [opposite], of course, we have this elderly Hellboy.
GDT: What is funny is that he is dressed like a nineteenth-century gentleman, and he is supposed to be a hundred years old. Mike plays with the universe of Hellboy, and I was fascinated by the fact that Hellboy can be in a samurai context, or he can be in a Victorian context, and there’s no explanation given. I just like the idea that his sideburns are like Victorian sideburns. There’s no explanation. I just wanted to do it. I also wanted to find a way to work with the stumps of the horns because Mike does them so quickly they are like goggles on top of his head. I was trying to figure out, “Are they jagged? Are they. . . ?” This was the first approach, where they are rolled, but that didn’t work. We ended up grabbing a piece of ivory, breaking it, and doing those surfaces.
MSZ: In the notes on the page, you mention Basil Gogos—that you had hoped he would do a painting of this.
GDT: He did. It’s upstairs at Bleak House. It’s a funny story. I had not met Basil or contacted him. It was the early days of the Internet, so I went through the white pages, and I just found, like, four Gogoses in New York. There was a “Gogos, B.,” and I called, and he picked up, and I said, “Are you Basil Gogos?” He said, “Yes.” And I commissioned the painting. At the time it was so expensive for me. I don’t know how I paid him.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 19B
Del Toro’s illustration of Hellboy at at advanced age.
–During the [?] they disconnect the phone, but she has the cell phone so he hears her whole plea. They cut the power off. They lock the windows and the doors, and open a window to blow out a candle.
–The tape is about the adults’ failure and absence
–Someone discovers one of them trapped in one of the mousetraps. It’s bleeding!!
When I made this portrait of Hellboy, I thought it would be used as the basis for an oil painting by Basil Gogos, but it looks as though this isn’t going to happen. Yesterday I thought t
hat Mignola might be able to do the Monte Cristo comic because his style lends itself very well to the Gothic. I think the mechanical hand might be very interesting visually. What would happen if I proposed to do Mephisto with Ted McKeever. I think it might be a good idea.
Señor HB at age of 101 yrs.
Del Toro thought to cloak the character in a duster that would hide the dissimilarity of square human shoulders to the sloping arms of Mike Mignola’s original character. Mike Mignola, Hellboy’s creator, endorsed the idea by drawing Hellboy in the long coat.
GDT: This drawing [opposite] is a variation on Mignola, because Mignola does the sloping gorilla shoulders [above]. The reason I drew this was I was already thinking of Ron Perlman in the role, which meant the shoulders needed to be human. I wanted to see how he would look. Some of the stuff that ends up in the movie is already there. You can see he’s wearing pants, whereas Mignola’s Hellboy wears shorts. This is already my way of finding Ron in there.
This drawing is also important in the sense that it was right at the time where I felt, “It’s going to happen.” So I drew Hellboy because I felt, “Well, I gotta learn to draw him before I make the movie or I won’t be able to understand him.” So this was an attempt.
The idea was implemented in the costuming for the film.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 30B
To help ensure an actor could play Hellboy,
Another version of Hellboy drawn just to kill time or so I don’t forget.
Agoura Hills on 25/11/2001
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 18A
One of the challenges del Toro faced on Hellboy was minimizing the ape-like qualities of his protagonist
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Page 14