Cabinet of Curiosities

by Guillermo Del Toro

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 42A

  Dust rearrange

  –The device HB uses to find the corpse. GEIGER.

  They move up and down like switchblades

  Long snout, skull with no skin on it

  His snout pulls back like a lion’s mane revealing the bone below

  Bladder

  Ear or not?

  Abe’s mouth hyperextends like a fish’s mouth.

  Fish mouth at rest.

  GDT: These pages [opposite] are from the same visit to Japan. While I was there, I tried to meet with my heroes: Katsuya Terada and Yasushi Nirasawa. I love their work, so we went to dinner at a sushi place that Nirasawa’s father owns, and he drew the three of us on a chopstick cover, and I glued it to the notebook [right].

  MSZ: So this is his drawing of you?

  GDT: Yeah. It’s really good! I look like a Miyazaki character.

  MSZ: This is the only time I’ve seen a page where your writing goes in this direction.

  GDT: That’s probably because I put in the chopstick-cover illustration. I didn’t start writing until after I put it there. And what I tried to do, in this particular notebook, was to finish all my thoughts at one time on a single page. I didn’t want anything continuing on the next page. I knew that if I did it vertically, I would run out of space, so I did it like that.

  MSZ: So each page is self-contained?

  GDT: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I mean, there may be an exception. That’s why facing pages have their own subjects. On the left [opposite], for example, there are multiple ideas for Hellboy, but none of them bleed over to the next page.

  Here, I was thinking of an amulet that Hellboy could have to awaken the corpse, which affects the dust particles in the air.

  Then I came up with an idea that was too expensive, which was to have Rasputin frozen in a statue like in the comic, and then to have a series of mirrors that were clockwork-operated, which would beam the light into him.

  Then, at the bottom, I wanted Abe to have an articulated mouth like a fish. You can still see the old Abe, which is a bit like Moebius’s Silver Surfer. The mouth was going to project out like a fish mouth. And Mignola was so horrified by this idea. He said, “That’s the worst idea!” He was so horrified by the idea of the mouth that he said to me, “If you don’t do that, I’ll give you four pages of any of my stories you like.” And I have the four pages upstairs. I’m a cheap man.

  Then you see Sammael, again, attempting the same thing. This drawing is a little more similar to what we ended up with. And the claw—I wanted it to look like a lobster claw in the air. That didn’t make it.

  MSZ: Now, as we’re going through these pages and seeing the designs of Sammael, it’s becoming refined. Were you working with your design team at this point?

  GDT: I was already talking to Mike at this point. I think Wayne Barlowe was already on board, and I started to send him these things, but these were still my own musings.

  MSZ: What’s this bladder?

  GDT: The idea was that the neck would inflate like a bladder, and the tentacles around his mouth would do a “Brrrr!” and expand to reveal his teeth.

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 42B

  Terna © Terada san Katsuya Terada © chopsticks for sushi.

  Drawing of Terada, Nirazawa, and Hellboy with me below them. 5/29/02 Tokyo

  MASTERPIECE

  SOLD OUT

  Ton of pus!

  Masterpiece!! Dinner with two Japanese buddies, both very friendly and talkative.

  –Floor and murals on the walls

  –[?] digital lines for punch

  –Vibrating shine in the eye a la ANIME

  –Medieval architecture mixed with industrial

  –Blue set, blue character, blue days

  –The eggs shine, acrylic nest

  –The [?] for the tentacle BW.

  –Build the outside space (eye).

  –Dry leaves around him (a la O).

  –Cloud from above, see tentacles

  –Nest with eggs made from acrylic.

  –Theatrical effects for water [?].

  –No baby [?] to No Abe injured.

  –Tongue design should be bigger than the mouthspace visible outside (7 feet).

  –Steadicam guy should be Varomia. Tell Patrick ASAP.

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 44A

  –clak clacks clikty-clack, clack clack, then grows silent. The mouth smiles.

  Try to keep Sammael changing his silhouette whenever possible.

  His bones dislocate. This helps

  –Broom’s autopsy: “a piece of nail split his spine in two, the impact pulverized two vertebrae.

  –The idol on the altar should be a highly stylized Behemoth

  octopus’s

  pupil

  –When we film Sammael, we should vary the speed and perhaps use a long lens for detail.

  Lower teeth are bigger than upper.

  Backlit Fog

  –Hair implants for one of the agents.

  –[?]

  –The “little hand” establishes the episode CBL.

  –The “Marita” establishes the episode CBL.

  –Wax cylinder for the recordings of memories in a journal, in AMOM.

  –Use ribbons or climbing ropes to come and go in the areas of temporal distortion. Movement sensors.

  Hellboy’s jaw, with its distinct under bite, was a mixture of Mike Mignola’s original character.

  Ron Perlman’s bone structure.

  GDT: The eye here [opposite, top] is me exploring the idea that Sammael would have an egg-shaped pupil that would dilate. And I thought, “One of the eyes could have flies on it,” which is very disgusting.

  At the bottom of the page is me reflecting on how to fit vertical information in a 1:85 frame.

  The next idea was to give Ron Perlman longer lower teeth than upper teeth, which ended up in the movie. He has huge fake teeth in the movie, but the lower ones are bigger than the top ones. Now, why did I want the lower teeth bigger? Hellboy has a really extreme lantern jaw in the comics [above left], and one of the ways Mike does it is by doing the lower teeth the way Jack Kirby did. Kirby used to have his bottom teeth come up above the lip in a straight line.

  Sergio Sandoval at DDT elaborated on del Toro’s idea of a stitched-together, cadaverous being.

  GDT: You can see [opposite], as strange as it is, I’m already trying to draw Hellboy like Ron Perlman. I’m trying to find a way. And there is a nick in the flesh of his cheek, which I wanted to be very, very deep. I couldn’t do it. But it’s the nick that Kroenen gives him in the final fight.

  And I wanted Hellboy jumping between buildings with the moon silhouetting him. I didn’t do that.

  This is pretty accurate to the way he looks in the Apocalypse, though—at the top of a mountain of debris, with the horns.

  Then, in the center are Kroenen’s skin grafts. DDT was using these sketches, and they were becoming a little extreme. I was thinking, strangely enough, that Kroenen needed to be sexy. And I know an eyeless, lipless guy is not sexy, but I thought, “There needs to exist some kind of really, really, really twisted girl that is going to get off on Kroenen.” So I said, “For that, my minuscule audience, we have to make him sexy.”

  Then there is the lock on the safe that needed a triangular key. It ended up being different in the movie, but it’s similar, and the key is triangular.

  Then Mignola has Hellboy with sort of a ponytail. And in 2001, ponytails were, like, really for porn producers. So I gave Hellboy a Japanese sumo wrestler haircut that kind of indicated he had some fighter training. And, also, Mike has Hellboy with male pattern baldness, and I felt that was not very sexy, so I gave him the scalp shaving of a Japanese warrior. He shaves his head. So, all in all, I wanted Hellboy to keep to the comic but to be a little sexier.

  MSZ: You’re dealing with so many design elements from the film right here in this one little compact area. As well as different parts of the film.

  GDT: And there’s t
hings from Mountains of Madness, too. Now, in Mountains of Madness, they wake up and time has been altered. A potato has sprouted. That’s in the movie. Cthulhu in the fog. It’s always more than two projects.

  MSZ: That’s something you’ve alluded to—that when you’re working on a multitude of projects, if anything falls through on one, you’re, in a way, somewhat insulated because you’re working on multiple things.

  GDT: When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked. What I find—and I’m not saying this works for everyone—is that the promiscuity of having four or five things online actually makes them feed each other. And you go, “Aha! That idea is great for Madness. That idea is great for. . .” And you keep them alive. It’s a dialogue.

  Del Toro tried to place Hellboy’s ponytail in a warrior tradition by giving the character a sumo wrestler haircut.

  NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 44B

  –IN AMOM, they wake up to find time altered. Potato, etc. without realizing it

  WOUND

  CAUSED

  BY

  KROENEN

  Follows Liz.

  Hellboy door lock

  Apocalypse

  Kroenen

  Toshiro hairstyle

  –Cthulhu in the mist. Above it, rising like an Everest of pale, corrupt flesh.

  –How long has it been? Hours—days.

  –Pulsating vein CGI in HB’s neck.

  –She is dead, her power depleted.

  –Your love for the girl. How could we have foreseen that??

  Vidal (Sergi López) threatens Ofelia (Ivana Baquero).

  An illuminated drawing depicting the Faun, the princess, and the labyrinth.

  Concept of the Pale Man by Raúl Monge.

  Ofelia (Baquero) in the forest.

  Concept of the main monolith by Monge.

  Study for one of the frescoes in the Pale Man’s lair by Carlos Jimenez.

  Concept of the subterranean city where Ofelia’s parents reign by Raúl Villares.

  PAN’S LABYRINTH

  PAN’S LABYRINTH REPRESENTS Guillermo at the crossroads, “trying to redefine my life, creatively,” and choosing the right path—one of his own devising that led to a movie he needed to make. At this point in his career, he was turning down many top Hollywood offers, films that would have netted him millions of dollars. Instead, he chose financial struggle and artistic triumph.

  In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), everything Guillermo had been working toward came together in a grand panoply that is by turns brutal, gentle, intimate, and majestic. The notebooks he kept during this period reveal his consuming passion for the project. As he evolved the storyline and visual world of Pan’s Labyrinth in the notebooks, he laid bare all the specifics of the film, like a photograph emerging in a developing tray. He reflected on casting, historical background, specific shots, dialogue, sets, characters, costumes, and creatures. In these pages, Pan’s Labyrinth comes alive in glorious detail.

  As Guillermo notes, paraphrasing and building on Heraclitus, “One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice.” He considered possible variations of every element of Pan’s Labyrinth and struggled to determine “which would the public understand more readily?” In this, Guillermo clearly grasps the difference between presenting mysteries that intrigue and beguile and simply failing to communicate one’s intent and confounding an audience.

  “It’s only through art that you’re able to glimpse otherness,” Guillermo wrote, and everything we see in these detailed sketches and notations serves the goal of helping us see the alien as personal, familiar, and meaningful. In our daily lives we often insulate ourselves from what is unlike us, viewing otherness as threatening and ultimately rejecting it. But safe in our homes and theater seats, Guillermo’s art encourages us to consider the repulsive and the rejected with compassion and empathy—to expand our definitions of ourselves by encompassing the range of human (and even inhuman) experience.

  In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo ruminated on plot motifs drawn from folk and fairy tales and classic children’s literature—enduring rites of passage that help children make sense of strange and unfamiliar things. Some of the imagery this evoked, such as the mandrake root that comes alive, remained virtually unchanged from notebook to film. On the other hand, the loathsome, terrifying Pale Man morphed from a wooden doll in a tree to an old man with eyes floating queasily in liquefied flesh, to the figure’s final, unforgettable state as a visionless face with eyeballs snatched off a plate and inserted into stigmata wounds in its palms.

  Lost along the way, but captured in these pages, are such tidbits as children “that the well swallowed up,” a changeling brought by elves to replace the baby they’ve stolen, gold rather than food arrayed on a tabletop to lure Ofelia, and perhaps most disturbing of all, “the dead children who eat fairies.” Any of these items might have worked individually, but the totality would have presented a storyline that was “ungainly,” as Guillermo puts it. His goal was to craft a film of elegance and inevitability.

  Even in his marginalia we see his concern over making “the other” intelligible, as Guillermo grappled with translating the title of the film into English. He strove for more recognizable and compelling wording for an American audience and eventually settled on Pan’s Labyrinth—although Pan is nowhere to be found in the film.

  Everything in Pan’s Labyrinth is rich with multiple shades and layers of meaning, including the main character’s name, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), which hearkens back both to Hamlet’s dreamy, doomed lover and to the daughter of Roald Dahl, one of Guillermo’s favorite writers. Taking shape in these pages are such iconic images as the ominous dead tree with its “fallopian nature”; Ofelia’s dress, like Alice’s “but with different colors”; and the Faun, who at first looks like a muscular, goatish variation on Hellboy before becoming the lean and lyrical being in the film. Indeed, throughout these pages, Guillermo was also hashing out Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which he was writing at the same time, while “working on deadlines, juggling projects.”

  When jotting these notes, Guillermo continually reminded himself to take courage, to stand for exactly what he wanted in all things. This included selecting American actor Doug Jones, previously Abe Sapien in Hellboy, as “the only guy to play the Faun” (Jones also played the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth with equal brilliance). Only their collaboration could have created the Faun, but that decision meant paying more than a Spanish actor would have cost and dubbing all Jones’s lines in Spanish with another performer’s voice. When Jones was offered and turned down films in the X-Men and Men in Black franchises, choosing instead to complete Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo triumphantly wrote: “2007 . . . It’s my year: Guillermo del Toro.”

  Even the briefest notations in these pages lends a deeper insight into the finished work, as in the passage, “Faun has a flute made from a thigh bone.” Again, here is the beautiful and the grotesque in a danse macabre, blurring together, becoming one and the same. Elsewhere he jotted one of his finest epigrams: “I believe in two things: God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind.”

  Guillermo’s obsessions and grand themes are rendered in his notebook with masterful control and consideration. As in Cronos and later in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, clockwork mechanisms figure prominently, in this case the workings of a pocket watch mirrored in the oversize gears of a mill. “We ended up using them in the mill to represent the captain being trapped in his father’s watch,” Guillermo observes of this man obsessed with remembrance. “But I find gears really fascinating,” he adds. “They represent, I think, the mechanism of the universe, cyclical nature, the inexorable.”

  In Pan’s Labyrinth, as everywhere in his oeuvre, Guillermo’s villains appear in vivid detail—evil, real, dreadful. No detail is too small to escape his scrutiny, including a description of what the villainous captain wears: “coat on his shoulders, gloves, glasses. . . hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes.” F
inally, the watch, the glass of which he shatters to preserve his time of death so that he can be remembered by his son—an action that ultimately proves futile. Taking pains to show us his villains’ longings and their scars, both emotional and physical, Guillermo does not mean to excuse their terrible actions, but rather to reveal the human in the monster and the monstrous in the human.

  Disrupting expectations, juxtaposing opposites, contrasting the fantastical with taken-for-granted reality: This effort to illuminate both what we refuse to see and what we blindly look past drives Guillermo’s work. The most profound juxtaposition in Pan’s Labyrinth is between the very notions of fantasy and reality. Guillermo took great pains to design visual metaphors that differentiate these two worlds. He noted in his journal: “The real world is made of straight lines, and the world of fantasy is curved. Reality is cold. Fantasy is warm. The fantasy world should feel UTERINE, INTERIOR, like the subconscious of the girl. . . .” Guillermo’s film gives audiences intimate contact with an interior life—the world that must be believed to be seen.

  The Pan’s Labyrinth journal entries also include another startling juxtaposition—the presence of someone else’s handwriting in these most personal pages. This guest contributor provided Guillermo with the film’s first review, letting him know how the great gamble of Pan’s Labyrinth had turned out. Written when the film was completed, on the day Guillermo screened Pan’s Labyrinth for his favorite living writer and that man’s son (another writer of note), the note says simply: “WE HAD A BLAST!! Steve King.”

  Mr. King and his son were not alone. Pan’s Labyrinth was lauded far and wide, both within the industry and among audiences. The film won Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and makeup, netted an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and became the highest-grossing Spanish-language film ever released in the United States. Most satisfying of all, this acclaim rewarded Guillermo’s fidelity to his own values and aesthetic, or as he concludes: “I didn’t have to do a serious piece about Edwardian drama to be nominated for an Oscar.”