NUMINOUS, INSCRUTIBLE, INDIFFERENT, MYSTERIOUS, RECONCILIATION, TRANSMUTATION.
–It is the power of art to reconcile us with life and to seduce us with mistery. Or perhaps the other way ’round
–“The decisive question for man is this: Is he related to something infinite or not?” Jung asked himself this in his writings and man combats the void and Cosmic indifference looking for the answer.
Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and del Toro in front of the final machine on the Troll Market set.
GDT: Here [opposite] I sketched an angel I saw in one of the castles in Budapest, where we shot a lot of Hellboy II. I came up with the idea of a circle behind the king like the halo of a saint, and I came up with this design for the grinding machine in the Troll Market, which I just love.
Above is Mike Mignola’s drawing from when he departed Hellboy II in preproduction. He left me this little illustration saying, “Good luck!”
Initially green like the elemental, the Troll Market took on more diverse colors in this keyframe by Francisco Ruiz Velasco (ABOVE), eventually becoming a riot of saturated colors in the final film.
General view of the Troll Market
GDT: Here [left] I’m trying to portray the Troll Market. I originally thought it would be these crooked places, and you could see small doorways next to giant doorways next to normal doorways, with little staircases next to normal staircases. I wanted to do it all in greens and golds.
MSZ: The market and the elemental [opposite] share the same palette. Originally, was there supposed to be a strong visual link between the two?
GDT: The original idea was that the other world was life, so I wanted to make it green, like nature, or red, like blood. But this is a very early idea. We still have a lot of green, but we eventually made it very lively with a lot of colors. What I did is I started evolving the movie toward a more controlled palette in the human world and an incredibly colorful palette in the fantasy world.
So Hellboy lives in the BPRD, which is essentially steel and concrete, straight lines. When you’re out on the street, everything is blue, greenish but with really cold lines. Then he sees the Troll Market and he goes, “Holy shit, you should see this.” He starts to understand where he belongs. Hellboy’s real life and his true nature are in these places.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 29B
What are you? No, better yet—What am I NOT??
Elemental
Blind
Soft Xenon spotlights at half power, sweeping past the stone columns in the T.M. the whole time.
–ETCHED plaques inscribed with “TROLL” letters on the walls in the T.M. tunnel for the FACELESS CAVE BERSERKER with a lantern.
–A scene in which the victim wakes up with the vampire sucking at his arm, suddenly, without prior warning, like a hold, blind leech.
–Window from Polanski’s The Tenant in the T.M.
–Scene in which the corpse is identified: When you look at it—him, Please forgive me but—have you ever assembled a J. Puzzle? You concentrate on a piece. A finger, lip, brow, beauty mark, Anything you can. Avoid looking at anything else. Concentrate in the particular things, ignore the rest.
–King Balor has a crown of antlers coming out of his own skin.
–The prosthesis should be limited to the upper part.
MSZ: What project was this imperial owl guard for?
GDT: We ended up discarding it [opposite page, top right]. But it was actually a great design for the guards who were guarding the king in Hellboy II.
And then here [opposite, bottom left] is an idea for layering the helmet for Johann to be invisible. Both Michael Elizalde, who was makeup designer on the film, and I are amateur magicians. I’m a terrible amateur magician. He is a great amateur magician. We were talking about creating the helmet as an optical illusion, so we slanted the helmet, creating a lid, raising the shoulders. It’s a really great illusion. It really is a very nice design.
MSZ: It’s amazing how much care you put into these things.
GDT: As you are making a movie, the easiest thing to forget is that it’s going to be viewed at a different speed. Like, the thing that you’ve labored on for months, which you’ve designed and constructed, is in the movie for two seconds. But sometimes an understanding develops, like with Star Wars. For a generation of kids, it takes Greedo nothing but a few minutes to live, enter, and die. Or my favorite creature, Hammerhead. He’s in one shot.
People talk about fantasy movies, and they say, “Well, this movie of yours was not loved by the critics,” or “It didn’t make money.” And I go, “It doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t matter. I assure you, there will be an eight-year-old kid in Milan, or Peru, or Mexico, who cherishes it as his favorite movie in the world because he saw it at age eight. Our generation worships movies that were critically savaged when they came out, and we enthrone people from Lucio Fulci to Mario Bava who were critically not well received or regarded at all.
MSZ: As you said, this appreciation all stems from love. Because, when you’re talking about Hammerhead, that was Ron Cobb who designed him. When he was drawing political cartoons, where he didn’t have to do it that well, he would really put thought and effort into it because he loved it. And George Lucas saw his illustrations and said, “Okay, I want to work with him.” I think there are kindred spirits within the arts—both behind the scenes and in the audience. The moment you connect, you just get it instantly.
GDT: Yes, there’s an imprint.
Del Toro’s early idea for King Balor’s royal guards gave them owl-like helmets. This idea was developed by Francisco Ruiz Velasco but eventually discarded in favor of the “butcher” design seen in the final film. (TOP) Del Toro, like many other filmmakers before him obsessed with their creatures, has a deep affection for his monsters.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 23B
GREEN LIQUID. GIANT
That your girlfriend left you, that bombs fell in Iraq, with a door in his/her/ my chest.
–Robby Scott: Miniature UK builder.
–Exploding tooth fairies for DDT
–DRAIN the miniature
–Fairies: EAT, POOP, REPRODUCE.
–Lordimar’s “r’s” have not been very good for PL. Unexpected. Painful.
–Neither loneliness nor love knows any bounds. Pain and pleasure are fleeting but intense.
–Judging a movie after only one viewing seems strange to me. The conscious mind absorbs every image, which took hours of work to create, in a matter of seconds. But if the image is powerful, if it speaks to the viewer’s soul in some deep way, then those few seconds are enough for love to take shape. Image transcends dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is Demagogy in the cinema
Jaw made of bone
IMPERIAL OWL GUARD.
–Human hair
The prince’s and princess’s clothes have a slightly oriental look to them. Chinese-style spear w/ shaft
WINK’S BOX.
Polished acrylic glass lens. 3 inches
Painted prosthesis with nylon over the foam
J’s helmet needs to be sculpted small so that the character doesn’t have a “BIG HEAD”—shoulder pads
Johan’s helmet HB II
–Why do we look for peace in consensus? Is there any peace to be found in the approval of others that doesn’t leave us feeling more helpless? Anything that is new either unsettles or seduces, a flautist nobody wants to pay.
The initial concept for the massive grinding machine in the Troll Market.
–Video Feed in the truck—
–“Heavy, heavy load” Tadpole V.
–Reverse the dialogue in a pair of scenes. Give Liz dialogue and share the “FOCUS”—H.B. and Johann.
Water Kick USE the CHI
–The water and the fire flow freely. They’re not any one type and they’re shapeless
Wink hits Abe.
–Wink uses the magic/hand to “bring” H.B. and Abe to him and then push them.
–Little bits of glass are scattered when Wink crushes hi
m. They’re scattered around his head like little pieces of TEXAray.
–Corkscrew turn around the same shot and break a 3-D patch on the Butcher Guard??
–I will kill everyone in this room.
Abe Sapien
and then lifts him off the ground, smacks him against the floor, the column, and the wall.
–Bolero in Wink’s hand.
“Abe vs Wink”
Vent.
If possible, the smoke should come out here.
Angle to hide his head. —
Black metal. Blue steel type
Design of Liz’s necklace
Johann
–I LOVE YOU SQUIRREL, you and my GIRLS.
GDT: Here [opposite, bottom] I designed the cross that Selma Blair wears in Hellboy II. I’m very proud of that design. I almost think it would sell. I mean, it’s a great piece of jewelry.
The idea of putting steel around columns is for the Troll Market, because we found this abandoned quarry, and that’s where we shot the Troll Market. I didn’t like how flat the columns were, so I said, “Let’s put iron clamps around them and have the iron bleed outside so that they look a little more textural.”
Then you see the final proportions of the helmet of Johann. We came up with the idea of a funnel so that the actor would have a little more leeway. Still, it was a killer. The first or second day, John Alexander, the actor, wore it; we removed the helmet, and it was like a crown of thorns. He had punctures with blood. He said, “I cannot wear it like this anymore.” We had to create some padding. And we had to hire a second actor because John could only wear it for so long.
Then, in the middle of the page, Wink is hitting Abe. I never filmed this particular moment. We tried to do it but couldn’t. It was going to be a big fight between Abe and Wink, but part of our budgeting process was losing it. So Abe never fought, really. We had Wink putting his hand on top of Abe’s head, when he says, “I’ll take care of this,” and then he goes, “Oh, dear,” and we cut.
Some of del Toro’s notebook pages include a critical mass of near-final designs. This page features strong concepts for Mr. Wink [Brian Steele], Johann’s helmet [John Alexander], and Liz’s necklace [Selma Blair, with Ron Perlman as Hellboy].
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 25A
(1) Closed
[?] the opening
(2) Open
The [?] below is the jaw
Contains eggs or a cocoon
The plates on its shoulders open.
They open like an egg toy.
–For the moment, as of today, we’re 99% in Rot.com with 73 positives and 1 negative, what joy for P.L.
–If Abe realizes that Liz is pregnant before even she does, then it would create a situation a little earlier
Princess c/c with set.
Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called “märchen.” These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the “Logic of the Fairy Tale.” In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are. What I’m trying to do is create a more complex moral dilemma. The faun’s ambiguity [continued page 231]
The plates express emotion
–Negative space in the ribs pops open
Red Hot gears and hot oil lubricate the insides
“Amber” column with interior illumination.
–Scene of the princess escaping when they discover about the tooth fairies and then, once they’re in the box, Abe touches her belly. That’s when he says that he knows. The trick is how to [?] HB.
NOTES FOR P.L.’s AUDIO commentary.
GDT: This [above] is my first sketch of the Golden Army, which fortunately was highly improved. I wanted them to have these golem-like proportions. I wanted them to be cute, and I wanted them to all be eggs that transformed into the open figure here.
On the right [opposite] is one of my favorite designs, which is Cathedral Head. It says, “The man with the city in his mind.” It was one of those designs that just came out fully formed in my head. I did a sketch, and it’s very similar to the way it came out in the movie.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 25B
would be unusual in “marchen.” These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as “types” in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these “types” can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story
In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe. Once man began to live in an organized way, with a “social contract,” an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man’s inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man’s soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by fauns and ogres and fairies
“The man with the city in his mind.” 11/1/06
* * *
MY DAYS WITH DEL TORO
MIKE MIGNOLA
An early sketch of Rasputin from del Toro’s third notebook, Page 10B.
I’M A LUCKY BOY. I first worked with del Toro on Blade II, sometime in late 2000. We’d met a few years earlier when he was first trying to get Hellboy up and running. We’d stayed in touch while he took all kinds of meetings—meetings he kept me out of because (as he told me later) I would not have survived them. He was almost certainly right. Anyway, when it became clear that this Hellboy thing was going to be a hard sell, he took on Blade II and brought me along. I’m pretty sure this was mostly to see if we could work together, on the off chance that Hellboy would actually happen. It certainly was not because I knew anything about being a preproduction artist. Though I served no real function (my title was “Visual Consultant”), he brought me with him to Prague to scout locations. It’s that trip that I’ll always remember: discovering the wilds of eastern Europe together for the first time; wandering through endless ruined (and yet somehow still functioning) factories; wondering if (or when) our very scary driver was going to pull over into the woods and shoot us; hunting for a really good Kafka puppet (I still maintain that he should be wearing a hat); descending into the Prague sewers (which we discovered are coated in semi-transparent living goo); and just laughing like crazy about a whole lot of stuff I can’t repeat here.
The less said about the actual design work I did on that film, the better. Although del Toro and I like a lot of the same things (art, books, movies, etc.), when it comes to design I am sort of a minimalist, a “less is more” guy. He is very much a “more is not enough” guy. Often I would start a design and then he would hand it over to one of the other designers (usually my genius officemate, TyRuben Ellingson) to add a whole lot of stuff that would light up and spin around. The running joke was that if you could get steam to spurt out of the thing (whatever it might be), del Toro would really like it. The great artifact I have from that time (along with a bug-eyed, green vampire puppet) is a particularly terrible drawing I did of an autopsy table. It was so pathetically simple that del Toro was actually at a loss for words. He gently took my pencil from me and drew in Elmo and Big Bird standing behind the table. The look on their Muppet faces spoke volumes. That was Blade II.
Of course, we did go on to work together on both Hellboy films. On those I got to be there from the beginning (Hellboy II literally started with the two of us sitting in a room having no idea what we were going to do), through preproduction (I contributed a bit more on these films), filming, postproduction, and all the strangeness that comes after. I not only got to have Guillermo del Toro adapt my comic book character to film (which in my world is pretty much like winning the lottery) but I got to watch him do it. It was an amazing experience. And if I never set foot in another p
roduction office or sit on another film set, it will be okay, because I’ve done it—and I got to do it with him.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 31B
Floor is white ash
The Temple of the Angel of Death.
BIGGER!
Jupiter. Machine Vox Von K.
The pendulum of G.A.
–[?] bottles in the eighteenth century
It was a handicraft similar to that of “ships in bottles” with scenes of daily life or religious motifs.
–Law Hand. Trained to write legal documents.
–UNUS MUNDUS. A unitary world (everything is everything).
–Every day is an opportunity to affect the world—
–The human species can he divided into two types: “the tragic man” (introverted) and “the conqueror man” (extroverted). Socially, each one has tools to ensure the continuity of his own type and survive. MARTYR/TYRANT
–“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” Hamlet.
VFX-BOOTS, BAGS, TRAINING, WARP GEARS, PROPS, JACKET. ROOF in the LOCKER ROOM
* * *
Pigeons or crows in the meeting—
* * *
–In April Navarro will pass through London. We talked about scouting in Ireland for the final scene
Gas comes out of J
GDT: Here [above], you can see Johann emptying himself, literally, on the floor of the locker room, next to a photo I bought of a dead baby. I bought a bunch of old photos in Budapest, and one of them was a dead baby. And it was really, really disturbing.
Also on this page is the entrance to the Angel of Death’s place, a detail of a mechanism of the Golden Army, and on the bottom right is a mechanical voice box created by Baron von Kempelen, who created the Turk, the mechanical chess player. There was an exhibition of his machines in Budapest, including a reproduction of the Turk.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Page 22