I think the first del Toro film that I saw was Mimic. Although it’s well known that Guillermo’s vision for the film was compromised by studio interference, there are many images from the movie that have stayed with me over the years. The idea that the “villain” of the film is not driven by evil motivations but is simply a bug that has learned to look like a man is a stunning reveal. As an audience member, you always want to ascribe an intelligence to the villain; for there to be a reason for their villainy. The cruelest trick of the natural world is that there is often no motivation for a creature’s actions save for its biological impulses. In the animal kingdom, evil is truly banal. For me, this makes the villains in Mimic even scarier.
It’s a shame that Mimic was a disappointing experience for Guillermo, but his director’s cut of the film, released in 2011, went some way to reinstating his original vision. Having worked in the movie industry as a model maker, it’s so funny to me that Hollywood is an industry where they hire people specifically for their vision and then persistently interfere with it. Fortunately for all of us, Guillermo wasn’t cowed by the experience. Quite the opposite. He’s gone on to create a powerful and singular body of work.
We first met in 2010 when I was at San Diego Comic-Con promoting MythBusters. After a sixteen-hour day, my wife, Julia, and I pulled up at our hotel to find Ron Perlman standing outside. “Look, sweetie,” I said to her, “it’s Hellboy.” In 2008 I actually walked the floor at Comic-Con in a full Hellboy costume, complete with prosthetic makeup, so needless to say I am a bit of a fan of the movie (you could say rabid). Julia pointed out that another of my heroes was standing right next to Ron—Guillermo del Toro! To this day she makes fun of the fact that I (allegedly) clambered over her to get out the door to meet him. As I was approaching, he looked at me, his ever-present smile grew twice as big, and he greeted me like an old friend. “I love your show!” he said, and gave me the biggest bear hug I’ve ever experienced. We talked briefly but enthusiastically, and as we were parting ways, he said, “Come to my man cave.”
Sketches of the human brain and heart by del Toro from Notebook 3, Page 3A.
As anyone who has seen MythBusters is aware, I too am obsessed with collecting and re-creating esoteric ephemera from movies and elsewhere, so the chance to visit Bleak House was not to be missed. I discovered, however, that I am an amateur compared to Guillermo. Bleak House is a wonder. We spent hours walking around the various rooms, trading stories, and talking about our obsessions with props and the unobtainable treasures we hope to track down or build one day.
Like Guillermo, I have a strong belief in the talismanic power of objects. Collecting and making movie props is, on one level, a way to connect with the films that inspire me. There’s a power to those objects, and my weird passion for them and the films they’re from is the engine that drives me as a maker and as a man. Feeding those passions is the engine of everything I have. Like the innate drive of the Judas bugs in Mimic, it’s simply in my nature to behave this way.
I think it’s the same for Guillermo. He spends a lot of time at Bleak House painting models and assembling pieces to put on display. Just to have them around, feeding his creativity. For us, it’s an important meditative practice. I get asked, “Why are you doing this?” and all I can say is that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be nearly as happy. I also wouldn’t be me.
Sharing these passions with Guillermo has been a real joy. Since that first visit to Bleak House, we have ended up becoming patrons of each other’s collections. His enthusiasm and generosity are overwhelming and truly infectious to be around. I don’t think I’ve ever been around him when it hasn’t felt like he was having the time of his life.
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* Manny shining shoes in his apartment
* Someone appears by dissolve while walking along.
* Are you drunk? I—uh—oh (looks at the bottle) uh, yeah, this things, the glass is too thick.. . .
* I feel on the verge of tears, explain that 2 me. o/Could you explain to me then, why i—why I
* Shadows on paint puddle MIMIC
* Window shot droplets in FG. Foc.
* Track along a heavy textured wall “a la” nightmare
* MAGIC narrative about images without orig. AUDIO.
* Things that have been set in motion.
* Sometimes I think you don’t care . . . about anything. About image of someone who is totally distracted
* Chuy looks at a very rare and violent image (Saint Cecilia or Sacred Heart).
* Chinese man with glasses on
• MSZ: The grandfather figure in Mimic is interesting because there’s a resonance with the grandparent/grandchild relationship in Cronos.
GDT: I wanted Federico Luppi to play the character (you can see it in the art), but his English was not very good. When we talked with him, we realized he would have trouble with abundant dialogue. So we had to cut a lot of the vignettes between the grandfather and the grandson in the original screenplay. In one, he said, “This god cannot see,” and he cut his own throat. It was too much for him to see the kid that he loved sort of happily living with the insects. And the grandson didn’t react to the grandfather’s death in the script, which was doubly shocking. They were good ideas, but I don’t know if I would’ve gotten away with them even in the best of circumstances.
MSZ: That’s interesting, because in Cronos, I think of the relationship as the granddaughter observing the grandfather, as opposed to the grandfather watching the grandson.
GDT: I love the idea of somebody watching a loved one doing something unforgivable but still loving them. Or in Hellboy, I love the fact that Liz Sherman comes to terms with who she is by allowing Hellboy to be who he is. I think that’s a very beautiful love story, better than the “Beauty and the Beast” idea of the beast having to look like a prince. Instead, the princess has to accept her own bestiality so the love story can happen.
Jeremy Northam and del Toro on set. It was crucial to del Toro that Northam’s character, Dr. Peter Mann, wear glasses.
“God roach” concept by TyRuben Ellingson.
• GDT: A big, big win for me was that Jeremy [Northam] would wear glasses. The idea was that his character was a scientist—an arrogant guy who thought we could control everything. So then his glasses break, and he cannot go to the optometrist. There was a great line that we shot, when Mira Sorvino was putting the hormones all over Jeremy, and he says, “All I need is a pair of pliers.” And the problem is that they’re under the sink at home. And it just gives you an instant idea of how screwed they are. They are close to home, but the pair of pliers is just so far away. He might as well be in Moscow.
MSZ: Looking at your later work, a strong motif is the absence of eyes, including the covering up of eyes with lenses.
GDT: I like the idea, maybe because I wear glasses. But the most effective use of glasses is in Lord of the Flies, with Piggy and his broken glasses. And then you have Battleship Potemkin. Broken glasses are just a great image of downfall for me. I use it again and again. Or an aneurysm in a single eye—I love bloodshot eyes, but only on one side.
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* A counterfeiter quit. He couldn’t make enough money.
* LOTTIE watches Marty dance by himself.
* Martyn has an archive on LOTTIE.
* Sheets FLOAT in pool with Ray
* Ben Van Os: Orlando, Macon, Vince & Theo
* Dennis Gassner: B. Fink, Miller’s Crossing.
Jeremy’s broken glasses
* Blind, he gropes along the wall.
* No end to doubting.
* MUSIC OVER image in silence and slo-mo.
* There is no end to doubting Martyn
* Boot
* WATER drips through old planks.
* Bewitched, MARTYN watches his heater (or the hospital’s)
Electric resistance
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Del Toro wanted the human authorities that secure th
e subway to wear gas masks, rendering them disturbingly similar in appearance to the mimics.
Keyframe elaborating on this resemblance by TyRuben Ellingson.
• MSZ: What was this image of the crutch for [opposite, top]?
GDT: I’d been wanting to do an artificial limb since Cronos, to show the inhuman elements of a human character. I like the idea of showing how imperfect mankind is. The insects in Mimic were all organic, but mankind needed glasses, artificial limbs. The mimics are the perfect ones; not us.
That’s why I tried to populate the church with statues covered in plastic, almost cocooned, like the eggs of a cockroach, which are translucent. I work instinctively by finding elements that rhyme, and I just organize them in my movies as elements that echo each other, not necessarily intellectualizing the resemblances. I think that the whole of art can be summed up in the two concepts of symmetry and asymmetry. And I am very attracted to playing with both. I love symmetric images. But I also love the asymmetry of a design, like one broken glass, one bloodshot eye, one missing arm.
On Mimic, I was very into symmetry and wanted to have the guys who secure the place, the ones who wear the gas masks, look a little like the insects. So here you see me playing with that visual rhyme and the question of who is more human, the insects or the guys? Then there is this composition where I put Chuy between two insects. It’s like the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. I wanted to put Chuy in the middle and make it look like a religious icon of a holy family of the future.
Illustration from Jaime’s sketchbook by Tanja Wahlbeck.
The ghost Santi (Andreas Muñoz).
Sketch of Santi by del Toro.
Storyboard illustrations of Santi.
The undetonated bomb by Carlos Gimènez.
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE
“I WANT TO DO A FILM ABOUT SOME KIDS in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War—and oh yeah, one of them’s dead.” So Guillermo describes his studio pitch for The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and one would be hard-pressed to think up a synopsis less likely to enthuse a Hollywood executive. However, with The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo planted his flag, declaring himself something other than a Tinseltown work-for-hire—he was a true writer-director.
After the disappointment of Mimic, Guillermo felt certain such a distinction was a moot point for him. His career, he thought, was over. “Pedro Almodóvar resurrected me from the dead after Mimic,” Guillermo says. “He gave me a chance at life again.”
They had met some years earlier during the Miami International Film Festival. “I was standing on a balcony near the pool at the hotel, when I heard a voice from the next room over saying to me, ‘Are you Guillermo del Toro?’ I turned, and he said, ‘I’m Pedro Almodóvar. I love Cronos, and I would love to produce your next movie.’
“Years later, I called him to do The Devil’s Backbone, and the movie saved my life. Pedro Almodóvar gave me a second chance in film and in life. He was absolutely hands-off, protecting me, giving me everything I needed to make the movie I needed to make, and not having the least amount of ego.”
Guillermo had actually written a version of The Devil’s Backbone years earlier, before Cronos. He was in his early twenties, learning his craft from filmmaker Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, but Hermosillo destroyed the draft. At the time, Guillermo decided to pursue Cronos rather than re-create the lost screenplay.
In the end, the extended gestation of The Devil’s Backbone resulted in a wonderful film. “Depending on the week, I like it as much or more than Pan’s Labyrinth, never less,” notes Guillermo. “I seriously think it’s the best work I’ve ever done. It is not a visually flamboyant movie, but it’s incredibly minutely constructed visually. Pan’s Labyrinth is more like pageantry; it is very gorgeous to look at. But I think Devil’s Backbone is almost like a sepia illustration.”
In The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo explores his personal past and present, coming to conclusions about where he has been, who he has been, and who he chooses to be as an artist. Some of Guillermo’s core themes come to stark clarity in his third feature: heroes and villains defined by their actions, their choices, and how far they will go; restraint as a value held in high esteem, as in Cronos; and holding on to one’s sense of self in the face of evil, desperation, and despair, as later epitomized in Pan’s Labyrinth.
In addition, a fascinating breed of villain specific to Guillermo’s films emerges. “I love the character of the fallen prince. Jacinto, the villain in The Devil’s Backbone, is a fallen prince. I can completely relate to Nomak in Blade II, because he’s a fallen prince. In Hellboy II, the main villain is a fallen prince. And I think, to a certain degree, the captain in Pan’s Labyrinth is a fallen prince. He’s a guy that has the shadow of his father suffocating him.”
Exiled princesses also figure in Guillermo’s films, but as heroines, not villains. This figure is exemplified by Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, Nyssa in Blade II, and Princess Nuala in Hellboy II.
Guillermo’s ability to sympathize with his villains in no way mitigates or excuses their actions. “Because, the fact is, there are people in this world that are fragile inside, God knows, but 100 percent of their actions are antisocial,” Guillermo adds. “There are guys that truly may have a hurting child inside, but they’re stabbing, gouging, raping, and robbing everything that crosses their path. And whoever thinks that’s not true has probably encountered evil a lot less than I have.”
Guillermo’s notebook pages show him working through some of the most iconic images in The Devil’s Backbone, in particular the murdered ghost. This starts out as a dead caretaker who looks rather like Lurch in The Addams Family and ends up a sad child with white-irised black eyes and cracked porcelain skin—perhaps the most beautiful, disturbing ghost in all of cinema. We also find the unexploded bomb and the supersaturated gold and blue lights illuminating the long stone corridors.
These pages also reveal a rare personal note from Guillermo, who takes pains to point out that these notebooks are “not really diaries.” However, bits and pieces from his private life do creep in occasionally. Guillermo writes of his parents, “I’ve found that simply being with my father is two hundred times better than speaking with him. My mom, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent. She’s my soul mate. Even in her sins.”
And as usual, the notebook contains Guillermo’s ruminations on a number of other ongoing and future projects, most notably Hellboy. “People say, ‘You juggle too much stuff.’ I tell them, ‘It’s always been like that, except now it’s public.’ Back in the day I was doing Devil’s Backbone, I was preparing Hellboy, and I was working already on ideas for Blade II. At the same time I was trying to polish a screenplay called Mephisto’s Bridge, and I was writing The Left Hand of Darkness.”
Through all this juggling of images and notes, some destined for other projects and some left to dwell in the realm of private reverie, the notebook pages for The Devil’s Backbone chart Guillermo’s return to himself—to valuing his own beliefs, his aesthetic, his voice. With The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo moved beyond the removable pages of a Day Runner. He self-consciously recorded his thoughts in a more permanent fashion, turning them into works of art within the pages of a totemic book marked by his signature style.
Illustration from Jaime’s sketchbook by Tanja Wahlbeck.
Concept of Santi by Guy Davis for the Bleak House collection.
Jaime (Iñigo Garcès) caresses the unexploded bomb.
Storyboard illustrations by Carlos Gimènez.
Part of the set for Dr. Casares’s laboratory.
Storyboard illustration by Carlos Gimènez.
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G* He was a doddering, sickly old man. With the crisis he gets better and moves up in the world.
G* Someone is watching soap operas and reacts to everything he sees (it would be better if this character is a villain).
* A hand shaped like a crab’s claw.
G* Speak with the portra
it of their departed.
G* Where did I put my glasses? They’re on your forehead.
* THE OLD MAN WITH THE NEEDLE
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*The Scene of Christ
E* He who made an offering and merged with the tree saw the dead ones pass by as they returned.
E* In the middle of the night, he looks to one side and prays, whatever they do to you don’t turn around or answer them. (The one who’s listening is hidden)
E* Beings who are red from head to foot.
E* Hey! I bet Juan is there!
E* The warlocks remove their own eyes and then someone burns them.
E* That’s what people say; the story is over.
• GDT: The original Devil’s Backbone had this character that was this old man with a needle, which is really a terrifying character that one day I’ll do. And here [above] is essentially the operation of the ghost in Devil’s Backbone, at the end of a corridor, except in the original here it was Jesus Christ, which makes a big difference.
* * *
NOTEBOOK THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
NEIL GAIMAN
THE FIRST TIME I met Guillermo del Toro, I was in Austin, Texas, and he sent for me. I have no idea how he arranged it: It was, in truth, all rather dreamlike. I know that I was there to present a film, and suddenly I was in Guillermo’s house, and he and his wife were feeding me a magnificent lunch (she is a remarkable cook). Along with his wife I met his little daughters, and then, in the manner of dreams, he was showing me around his man cave, introducing me to the statues and the props, the pages of original art I knew from my childhood by Bernie Wrightson or Jack Kirby, the beautiful things and the grotesques and the things that inhabited the places where beauty and grotesquery collapse into something peculiar and singular and new. Guillermo delighted in pointing out all the strange and nightmarish treasures he had gathered and telling me their history.
Cabinet of Curiosities Page 11