Cabinet of Curiosities

by Guillermo Del Toro

  MSZ: That raises a question I’ve had: Who are you writing these notebooks for?

  GDT: For my daughters. When they are grown-ups and they have lives of their own, children of their own, or whatever, they can look at the guy that was their father when he was young. I want them to understand that being a grown-up is not being boring. It’s being alive. I want them to know that grown-ups are people, too.

  MSZ: Have they seen the notebooks? Have they had a chance to look at them?

  GDT: You know, they look at them now and then, but they draw manga-style, so they find my drawings absolutely reprehensible and horrible. But it doesn’t matter. I told them, “I want you to enjoy them if you can."

  MSZ: There’s a wonderful playfulness in the notebooks. For example, you write about the need to fill empty space. Is that something that you still do with your notebooks? Do you sometimes just try to fill up the page, to make a beautiful page?

  GDT: I do. There are definitely moments when the writing becomes part of the design. I’m very glib about it. I’ll write things like, “This means nothing. It’s just to fill the space."

  MSZ: Well, you write, “No doubt the need to fill all available space is Freudian and very serious."

  GDT: Yeah, because I do it out of compulsion. Literally, I just say, “I need a line over here,” and I don’t want to wait for an idea to write the line, so I fill the space.

  MSZ: Speaking about the composition of the notebook pages: Do you ever sketch something in advance in pencil?

  The Handsome One, del Toro’s car, which he regards as a kind of talisman.

  A spread in del Toro’s fourth notebook (Notebook 4, Pages 37A and 37B) mixes ideas for Hellboy II with a more playful drawing for a series of illustrations del Toro calls “Children with Problems.” Frequently, del Toro skips from project to project in the notebooks, illustrating and writing about a variety of ideas that are at different stages in his creative process.

  Del Toro at work on his current notebook in the Comic Book Library at Bleak House.

  GDT: I do. I sketch, write notes in pencil, and then, if I do a drawing, I try to organize the notes around it.

  MSZ: So you’re typically writing in pencil, and then you fill it in with ink as it becomes a finished page?

  GDT: I draw faster than I write. Like, I might be five pages ahead of the writing with the drawing. So I write around the drawings, which means the images and text connect only tangentially.

  Sometimes I’ll even do a drawing just to try a new set of colors, which has become a lot easier. When I started the Blue Notebook after Cronos, for example, I had zero money, and I would draw with four Prismacolor pencils. If I wanted a purple, I needed to shade that purple by combining colors, and if I needed a certain hue of green, I would find a way to do it with the same four pencils. It was very time consuming, you see? But it actually made me appreciate and learn the value of each of the basic colors of the spectrum and now, when I do film color correction, I am fast and precise.

  Then, if you look at the Pan’s Labyrinth pages and some of the Hellboy II drawings, you’ll see I used acrylic. It’s a very heavy medium, and you need to put time aside for it, too.

  I now have these alcohol markers, and they’re very quick. They are my favorite medium. Not only can I do a drawing fast, but I can start a drawing, put it aside, and then come back to it.

  MSZ: Has that change in medium affected how you approach the notebooks?

  GDT: Yeah, because now, with the markers, I can do a drawing in thirty minutes, whereas before, with acrylic, I would need, like, an hour. I’m self-taught, so the way I figured out how to use acrylic was to start with the darker shade and then add highlights. But with markers, you start with the lightest shade, and then you start adding darker, and darker, and darker colors. At the end, if you need it, you can put a layer of highlights on. It’s much faster.

  MSZ: Besides experiments with color, how do you determine what you put in a notebook and what you don’t?

  GDT: Honestly, I don’t think about it. If I’ve already given instructions to a sculptor, or I’ve already talked to the designer about a concept, I don’t put it in the book because it’s not a journal, really.

  MSZ: What about the blood splotches and so forth, those elements that give the notebooks a sort of vintage quality?

  GDT: What I was trying to do in the third notebook, in particular, was make it feel like a found object. I was doing these long, drawn letters, with long bottoms and flourishes. But it became very tiresome, and after a number of pages, I said, “Oh, screw this.” But during that time, I found the right color for the blood, and I thought it looked good to have it, so that it started to look like a found grimoire.

  What is interesting is that I tried, most of the time, to do a little composition on each page. That’s why the blood helps now and then, or a little Lovecraftian symbol here and there.

  MSZ: So your composition is really localized to a single page.

  GDT: Yeah. And I actually try to do a composition across facing pages a lot of the time, although I’m often working with multiple projects at once. I don’t always succeed, but I try to make it coherent.

  I like to say that we make only one movie in our lifetime—a movie made of all the images of all our movies. I believe this is true of Hitchcock, for instance. Hitchcock made a single, giant, symphonic movie. You can see Hitchcock trying a thing in one movie and cannibalizing it later. I think this is true of many great filmmakers that I admire. But I also think it’s true of guys that are consistent with themselves. Not that they’re good or bad; they’re just consistent.

  I think these books are important to me because they narrate the story of that single movie I’m trying to make. So the composition in them, the colors, everything is important to me in the same way that Bleak House is. The house is in all of my movies—not only the ones I’ve done, but the ones I want to do if I’m lucky enough to survive a few years.

  MSZ: Looking at Bleak House, your notebooks, and your films is like walking through your head.

  GDT: Exactly. When you see a photo of Francis Bacon’s studio, for instance, the floor is thick with colors. You see not just the color, but the vigor of the brushstrokes. You go, “This is a single, forceful, incredibly precise beautiful brushstroke, or a passionate brushstroke.” In the case of Bacon, I think they should exhibit the studio and the paintings because you’re going to see just how much paint ended up on the floor. Or when you see a Van Gogh in person, the reason they are impressive is how thick with paint they are. You can imagine the guy almost unable to stop himself to get there with the next brushstroke full of paint.

  MSZ: To get back to the notion of the single film: I really love the juxtaposition of projects in your notebooks, where you migrate inspiration from one project into another, or you’ll find a motif for one that doesn’t show up in that movie, but then you use it later.

  GDT: Before I start shooting a movie, I read all the notebooks. They travel with me. I consider the notebooks a catalog, and that’s why I try to explain to people that these are not necessarily the organized notes of a linear thinker. They’re the opposite. The notebooks are a catalog—like a mail-order catalog of ideas that I turn to when I’m low on ideas.

  I’ve always got five projects because, statistically, if you have a number of projects, one eventually happens. When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked creatively. The mental promiscuity of having four or five things going at once in the notebooks makes them feed off one another. So I go, “That idea is great for Mountains of Madness! That idea is great for—” And I can keep the ideas and the projects alive that way.

  Del Toro embellished Notebook 3 (here open to Pages 22A and 22B) with splotches of fake blood and Lovecraftian symbols.

  Notebook 3, Pages 4A and 4B.

  Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when trying to find an American distributor for the film.

  Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) and Jesús Gris (Fede
rico Luppi) in Gris’s antique shop.

  The bottom of one of the original Cronos device props.

  A sketch of the aging Dieter de la Guardia by del Toro.

  Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) examines the statue of the angel while his granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath), looks on.

  CRONOS

  WATCHING A FILM in a theater holds a unique power. Guillermo del Toro works and has worked in many media, but he prefers movies because in the theater the image is vast, all-encompassing, inescapable—forming the totality of the viewer’s experience in that moment. In a theater, the audience is propelled along a time frame that the director dictates. Unlike at home or in other contexts, viewers can’t pause the story, step away for a few minutes, read a paper, call a friend, and then return at their convenience. Guillermo is a maestro who insists on full attention and immersion, and this is what the movie theater provides. In addition, film allows Guillermo to unite all his artistic proclivities in one singular vision, and so movies became his medium of choice.

  Cronos (1993) was Guillermo’s first foray into feature film. For many novice filmmakers, their first film is an embarrassment they want to put behind them. Commenting on Fear and Desire, his first feature, Stanley Kubrick once said that he didn’t want the film to be remembered or shown again because it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise . . . a completely inept oddity—boring and pretentious.”

  Not so with Guillermo and Cronos. This astonishing film reveals an already-mature visionary. It is a personal, profound philosophical rumination on the choices unconditional love demands when faced with the facets of our nature we cannot control—sexual obsession, hunger, mortality. It forces us to ask where we draw the line on our actions.

  A vampire film where the word vampire is never used, Cronos presents a merciless world where mercy survives in the face of uncontrollable appetite but only at a grave cost. The characters face hard choices and are pushed to ever more extreme actions. All of it unfolds in a fantasy realm that blends the Jalisco of Guillermo’s youth with the Grand Guignol world he soaked up from books and films.

  In the film, it’s initially easy for Aurora (Tamara Shanath), like any granddaughter, to love her gentle grandfather, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), who stays reassuringly the same. But what do you do when your grandfather inexplicably gets younger, more vigorous—and then, astonishingly, returns from the dead, growing ever more horrific looking? In Aurora’s case, you see the soul within and cherish it, regardless of outside appearances. You tuck him into your toy chest with your plush bear; you shield him from the light and witness his final moments of existence. As for Jesús Gris, who is transformed by the exquisite, monstrous Cronos device into a deathless addict, he chooses to destroy both himself and the device rather than sacrifice his granddaughter on the altar of his need.

  With these characters, their monstrous circumstances, and their difficult choices, Guillermo confronts his audience with an inescapable truth of life: that those we love, and we ourselves, will ultimately be made horrible by either accident or illness, and certainly by death. Constancy and devotion are possible only by virtue of love, which alone endures.

  Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) succumbs to the device in Cronos.

  In his first film, Guillermo announced his singular aesthetic: his desire to utilize classic horror tropes to strip away artifice and show us clear reality—albeit his reality, his world. With Cronos, Guillermo gave voice to the world inside himself.

  Guillermo took ten years building the makeup and special effects infrastructure (through his company Necropia) that would allow him to make this film, and its production was fraught with trouble. At one point, financing collapsed during shooting, and Guillermo had to tell star Ron Perlman, whose agent advised him to quit, “I can’t pay you now, but I promise you will get paid.” The time and attention to detail paid off. In Cronos, many of Guillermo’s major themes are on display, particularly child/parent and especially child/grandparent relationships, the fragility of innocence and its inevitable dance with corruption, and the sociopathic impulse that spoils for an excuse to let loose unbridled violence.

  While working on Cronos, and as he would do with all his films, Guillermo kept a detailed notebook full of his illustrations, concepts, and thoughts. These are suggested by the storyboards, sketches, and production stills that follow, but none of this artwork is from the notebook itself.

  For that, blame James Cameron.

  “When I was finishing Cronos, Jim and I went to an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica,” Guillermo explains, “and it was a very, very, very dire time. I was staying in a hotel that was three hundred dollars a month, so it was very, very economical. With that hotel, most of the time the plumbing did not work, so I had to go to another hotel every three days and rent a room just to take a shower—or I could have a hot dog at Pink’s. Those were my choices. The day I took the shower, I couldn’t eat lunch.

  “So when I met Jim Cameron, I was really filthy. I was a disaster. And he said, ‘Order what you want.’ And I thought, Oh my God, I’d better carve up for the whole week. I ordered like a madman, and wine kept pouring, and I got completely bloated and drunk. I said to Jim, ‘I want you to have my notebook for Cronos’, which was a Day Runner full of notes. I gave it to him, and Jim received it, and I think he was also not completely sober.

  “The end of the story is that the notebook—he says that he placed it somewhere. He still lives in the same house, so I have hopes, but he says that he hasn’t been able to find it since.”

  As a result, the pages that follow can only hint at what the Cronos notebook held, at what it still holds, like a snippet from a lost work of Sophocles quoted in a play by Aristophanes or snapshots of the Ark of the Covenant that is itself crated and buried in the closing-credits warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  What’s clear from the surviving Cronos storyboards and sketches is that, from the beginning, Guillermo possessed a bold creative vision and the ability to communicate it. In the years to come, Guillermo would make bigger films, more ambitious ones, but from the first he staked out a territory that was all his own.

  The top of one of the original scarab props.

  Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when looking for an American distributor for the film.

  GDT: I did this illustration of the Cronos device tearing into the skin [above] to show a possible idea for a poster for the film’s release. At the time, we were sending the movie out to American distributors, and I wanted to convey the idea that Cronos could be marketed. I was particularly happy with this image and the distributor, October Films, liked it, but they changed it for an image of a woman—like a girl having an orgasmic reaction to the device.

  And the storyboards here [right] are rare—very few storyboards for Cronos survived. These particular story-boards were for an original prologue that I discarded, which was to start in the dark and then show the alchemist harvesting the insects.

  MSZ: I know storyboarding is something you do on an ongoing basis while you’re working on your films. Can you talk a little bit about how you use them?

  GDT: I now just doodle because it serves the same function as a more elaborate drawing. Even if you’re just using shapes, you can still communicate how you want to organize the frame—you’re still able to share the composition. I’ll give my doodle to someone who can interpret it and make it useful for preproduction. For example, if it’s for a VFX shot or a makeup effects shot, they’ll do a better job rendering the scene for budgeting.

  I also use storyboards when I’m shooting. I call it the poor man’s Avid. Because I can edit on the page while I’m shooting. If I have sixteen or twenty setups I can put them all out on a sheet of paper and decide if I want to go from this one to that one, or if I have to skip one—you know, as time gets tighter. Storyboards are a great tool for making decisions like that.

  MSZ: But this particular storyboard seems much more detailed. Was there a time when you drew more elaborate storyboa
rds?

  GDT: This one is so detailed because we were trying to budget for the effects we needed. I wanted to show the insect moving in the foreground, but I didn’t want to show its shape. So the storyboard was important for communicating how much we really needed to reveal to my guys at Necropia.

  One of the few surviving storyboards for Cronos, this one for an unfilmed introduction to the film.

  Concept by del Toro of the scene where Jesús Gris bites Dieter de La Guardia and drinks his blood.

  MSZ: And what is this color piece over here [above]?

  GDT: That is a preproduction painting I did to show what I wanted to happen to de la Guardia when Gris bites him and drinks his blood. I wanted it to be all in blue and red, but I didn’t know how to do it with the budget we had.

  MSZ: The colors are reminiscent of the contrast of the red and the blue in Hellboy, of Hellboy and Abe Sapien.

  GDT: I normally mix a warm color with a cold color. I think red and blue is a color scheme that is a lot more 1990s at this point. But I also like to combine cyan with gold or amber, because there is a lot of gold in cyan. And if you use the right shade of amber, there’s some green in it, so they can be complementary colors.

  MSZ: Something I noticed in this artwork—in both the poster and the color pieces—is the signature.

  GDT: The signature is my take on Will Eisner’s signature. I’m a big Will Eisner fan, and I tried to combine his name with my name, because you know “Will” and “Guillermo” are the same name. And I used to add that little comic book bubble, too.

  Excerpt from the manual that describes how to operate the Cronos device.

  These pages, designed by Felipe Ehrenberg, influenced del Toro’s approach to his future notebooks.