Cabinet of Curiosities

by Guillermo Del Toro

  And then I wanted to carve the face of the Faun everywhere we could. If you watch the movie again, that face is in the banister, and that face is in every doorframe in the whole movie, but it’s very, very subtle.

  GDT: At the top of this page [opposite], it says, “In the labyrinth, gigantic gears grind someone to pieces.” We abandoned that idea, with good reason. But we ended up using them in the mill to represent the captain being trapped in his father’s watch. We made it more pertinent.

  You can see the fallopian nature of the tree and the reference to the Alice dress for Ofelia, but with different colors. And a note for the eye of the Pale Man, which we ultimately didn’t follow.

  There’s a note that says the Faun has a flute made of thigh bone, which he does. You don’t see him use it, though.

  The tree as depicted in the final film.

  The ruined tree as developed by Raúl Monge.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 16B

  The ruined tree and the Alice in Wonderland-like dress Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) wears were other strong images that originated in del Toro’s notebook.

  –In the labyrinth, gigantic gears grind someone to pieces.

  –“Please forgive me,” the princess says to Abe Sapien.

  –He/she can make his/ her skin as hard as steel whenever he/she wants.

  –Johann is a “gizmo guy.” HB hates him because he’s German.

  –You get these in the third-century black market. Tooth fairies, illegal, very hungry and not very nice.

  –Liz and HB go to Brooklyn, Abe & Kate go X.

  –HB pulls the head off a stone idol.

  –Faun has a flute made from a thigh bone.

  –Abe rescues the princess from the prince’s bloodhounds and falls in love with her while she’s in a coma

  –The first time that Abe sees the princess it’s nothing more than a look, there’s no physical contact between them.

  –They fight to obtain the third piece of the crown and the fairies, who are nothing more than dilettantes, help them.

  –The prince can turn into different animals.

  –They obtain the crown and lose the princess. Abe steals the crown by himself to free the princess from her prison. Manning wants to arrest him.

  –Dye Ofelia’s dress for the funeral.

  –Pale Man’s eye: Red

  –After finding an empty lot where we could build our main sets in Navarra, the humble old man who told us about it calls his nephew, a rich jerk from Donosti, who charges us a quarter million (€250,000) to use the lot for four months. This sets our preps back 2 out of 10 weeks

  –Silence for the soundtrack. Then one or two notes.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 17B

  From an early age, del Toro has been obsessed with mandrakes, a mythological creature he was finally able to bring to screen in Pan’s Labyrinth.

  –The army goes crazy and indiscriminately kills [?].

  –Please. Let’s stop fighting. We can work it out.

  –She has him. He looks at her. HB at his hack/it goes right through him.

  –Abe is furious with HB because of what happens to the princess.

  –It is in the nature of a warrior to wage war. Is it not??

  –The cabin could be connected to a system of mines in which a mineral that gives them light and energy is extracted.

  –Hut with gear system that needs to be passed through to reach the underground world in HB II

  IXX Mandrake root [?] harvested in 1944

  Mouth for food

  with blood.

  Deformed limbs.

  XVII Partial movement in the “fingers” if possible.

  Exposed roots resemble human limbs.

  XVI See illustration in code V

  –The dwarf in charge has created a series of automatons to keep him company. The army he created, he admits, has no Achilles heel at all.

  –HB is given an object as a gift to use in the final duel. It gives him the advantage over the prince—

  Storyboards of Ofelia nurturing the mandrake by Raúl Monge.

  MSZ: Tell me a little more about the image of the mandrake [opposite], which seems to bring together a couple of themes that run through your work—fetuses, artificial life.

  GDT: The mandrake root is something that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a kid. I don’t know where I read about it, or where I heard about it, but before I was seven years old, I was asking for a mandrake root for Christmas. There is a tape recording of me asking in a tiny child voice, “Can I get a mandrake for Christmas?” Because I wanted to turn it into a living being.

  It’s one of the legends: that you can nourish the mandrake into becoming a baby, like a living, small person, like a homunculus. I really obsessed about the mandrake. I obsessed about the fetal, baby-like quality of it. I thought it would be really disturbing for it to have a tongue.

  Ivana Baquero (Ofelia) posing with the mandrake root prop in a publicity photo for the film.

  A page from The Book of Crossroads, rendered in the style of a medieval manuscript and echoed by del Toro with an illuminated drop cap on a page in his notebook.

  This page also houses del Toro’s first drawing of another important prop–Vidal’s phonograph, which was developed by Raúl Villares in this concept of the captain’s office.

  MSZ: So this page [opposite] is from the beginning of the notebook that covers Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II. What was it like starting a new book?

  GDT: I was starting a new notebook and I remember where I began. It was in a little hotel near the Gran Vía in Madrid. I remember exactly how full of hope and joy I was.

  The movies would change rapidly through the notebooks. Some of the stuff survived—like the little phonograph at the bottom for the Fascist captain. But you see the elements that didn’t, too. For example, this little “nerve ghost,” which is what I call this little ghost with all the nerves exposed. They ate the fairies, which eventually the Pale Man does. I had this idea, which is on the next page about a wooden puppet that lives in the roots of the tree, which holds a chestnut that contains the key. Eventually that became two separate tasks for Ofelia, and he became the Pale Man instead of the wooden doll. I just thought it was really creepy to have a wooden doll coming to life.

  MSZ: Here you say to use the stick bug instead of the fairies to guide Ofelia to the labyrinth at the beginning, and you mention a blind man. Blindness seems to be an issue that you deal with in a lot of your work, even with the Pale Man, for instance, where you’re obliterating the eyes.

  GDT: The idea was there was a blind man who can traverse the labyrinth by knowing it, but not by sight. It was sort of a silly metaphor about real knowledge or faith, like faith being blind, and the girl believing in herself. At the beginning of Pan’s Labyrinth there were a lot of good ideas, but not necessarily in a shape that I found “gainly.” It was very ungainly.

  MSZ: These places where you seem to be struggling to get things to cohere, and seeing which things to retain and which things should be jettisoned, are very interesting. You also mention them hanging the grandfather instead of the granddaughter. There seems to be a grandfather character in this, as well, hearkening back to Cronos and Mimic.

  GDT: I decided that the blind man was the grandfather to the housekeeper, and then I decided I liked the housekeeper better with a brother than a grandfather. I thought she needed to be more active and less passive.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 2B

  In “The Labyrinth” use the stick hug instead of the fairies at the beginning. Use it as a “guide” to lead the girl to the labyrinth. The blind man tells her the story while putting out bird traps.

  –They hang the grandfather instead of the granddaughter

  –Create a man made of wood instead of a toad.

  –In L.M.L. use a voice-over, as if it were an instrument.

  –In H.B.2., the burly agent is the troll brother.

  –The grandfather was left blind from gunshot wounds, but what side was he on??
Vidal, what does he make of him?

  –The doll with the nut licks up a drop a blood

  –The trials are: (1) The nut, the one found in the hollow tree at the edge of the labyrinth. (2) There is a key inside the nut that unlocks the secret room in the Library. It opens the door where the dead children who eat fairies appear to her. (3) Using the tools she has gathered up, she “harvests” the mandrake root and hides it under her mother’s bed. (4) Kill the little one.

  –If I switch 2 and 3 around, I achieve a bit more visual variety and can make use of the little phials filled with sleeping medicine

  –Look at this drawing. The contrast between the blue and the intense reds is a bit risky.

  –What key could be more interesting than the insect (??) and how could it be found?

  –Will the wooden doll have a nut (??) Will his voice (the doll’s) be heard through a gramophone?? If so, make it a cylinder gramophone.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 2A

  The Pale Man was originally associated with both the tree (where the frog dwells in the final film) and the color gold, representing temptation.

  –Starting a new notebook. I met Steven Spielberg and he told me how much he liked “Hellboy.” Unreal.

  –Flexibility defeats rigidity

  –Bulbs.

  –Seeds.

  Inside the chestnut are 5 seeds that need to be planted beneath the branches of the ancient tree when the moon is full. Gifts to [?] The wooden doll with the secret key.

  –Gold plays an extremely vital role in European fairy tales. In our tale, I would put gold and not food on the table of temptations. Which of the two would the public understand more easily? (??)

  –8/9/04

  We found a flat near El Retiro on J.J. street

  –Watch Walter Murch’s Return to Oz again for its sound effects

  Red food replaced gold, and the Pale Man (Doug Jones) was given a more disturbing lair for Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to visit.

  MSZ: You have a note here [opposite] about gold playing an extremely vital role in European fairy tales, and you were playing with the notion of putting gold instead of food on the table as a temptation, which of course was an idea you abandoned.

  GDT: Yeah, I abandoned it and, unfortunately for me, I cut a phrase in the editing room. That is the only phrase I regret cutting in Pan’s where you are reminded that the girl, no matter how strong her convictions, has not eaten in more than a day because she was sent to bed without supper. Then her mother bleeds, she’s horrified, she doesn’t eat. The line I cut was where the maid tells her, “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  But the way I brought together the two ideas of the food and the gold was to make everything in the banquet red. I thought, “If gold has a uniformity of color, then it would be great to give that uniformity to the food by making everything red—the gelatin, the grapes.”

  MSZ: Stylistically, in previous notebooks, it looks as if you were dealing with calligraphic elements, with typography. Here it looks more as if you’re throwing stuff down. There’s not as much of the tricks and musings. There’s more of a sense of, not haste, but of definitely getting on with business.

  GDT: Yeah, yeah. I think that more and more the books became more and more practical. So there was less of a sense of design. Curiously, I like these pages more than the old ones, because they’re complete—they’re not looking for anything. They’re just me looking through myself, in a way.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 11A

  An early drawing in del Toro’s notebook depicted the Pale Man with eyes in his head.

  The comics, like the pulps before them, didn’t speak for the social elite. Their point of view was that of the man in the street. Perhaps for that reason, their hatred of Nazis or “foreign enemies” foreshadows the U.S.’s posture toward WWII. The 30’s and 40’s see an explosion of heroes of all sorts: The Spider, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Captain America, Superman, The Avengers, etc. etc. Hellboy is a child of the pulps, Kirby and Sgt. Rock (1959, Kanigher).

  –Charles Fort (1874–1932, New York) Blind, like J. L. Borges.

  –From the moment we’re born, we begin a long journey toward death. It’s called life, and you catch on in the end.

  –Go from the last piece of the crown to the auction.

  –A piece of the sword breaks off inside H.B. It “moves” if they touch it and will kill him when the “bad guy” returns at the end

  –One eye, One arm!!

  –There’s no hope left. There never was any. I know.

  –Relic/Auction

  –I pity the fool.

  –It’s like walking in on yourself.

  6 wings for the fairies. —

  –Hellboy fights with “Iron Shoes” at some point in the film.

  –The point of the spear reveals Hellboy’s location

  –Tim Curry for the role of one of the U.M. professors.

  –Hellboy finds the Golem in Prague and Johan reanimates it with his ectoplasm.

  GDT: Here [opposite] we have a possibility for the Pale Man.

  MSZ: This one still had eyes in its head.

  GDT: The idea was that the eyes were in like a liquid space. Like, the flesh was moving, so the eyes would gently float in the sea of flesh, and they would never be at the same height.

  MSZ: They’re reminiscent of some of the portraits by symbolist painters.

  GDT: Proto-symbolist, actually. It’s older, but it’s a very strong influence on that. Eyes are very important in fairy tales, and there’s a great story called “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes,” about three sisters. One of them is born with one eye, one is born with two eyes, and one is born with three eyes. And they think that the one with the two eyes is the freak, the ugly-looking one. When you go back to Greek mythology, too, there are so many images of eyes being absent or singular—the cyclops, the gorgons, for example.

  Here I wrote about comics for some reason. “The comics, like the pulps before them, didn’t speak for the social elite. Their point of view was that of the man in the street. Perhaps for that reason, their hatred of Nazis or ‘foreign enemies’ foreshadows the U.S.’s posture toward World War II.” These are notes about Hellboy II, or just notes to myself. I remember clearly that Marvel and the pulps and the comics were using Nazis as villains before it was a popular posture.

  Displacing them to the creature’s hands created a much more disturbing being, seen in these storyboards by Raúl Monge.

  The final performance by Doug Jones.

  NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 17A

  Occasioned a change of course with DDT while it was in the middle of sculpting the creature according to an approved concept that included more of a human visage.

  –Blue dolphin to Big Red, Yes, Abe? Not Abe, Blue Dolphin, abide by the security code, Brother Red. Procedure comes first.

  –These days, whenever people talk about a “good screenplay,” they’re thinking about plot. They assume that the actors are the ones who create the characters, who improve the action and dialogue.

  –Does the prince have a double agent?

  –When he’s going to scold Hellboy, he asks everyone to step out of the room.

  –And you stole a six-pack!!

  –6/1/05 Today I’m getting the email from AA offering me XB, along with HPB and MIB and C of N, decisions that will follow me for the rest of my life.

  5/30/05 Based on DDT sculpture.

  * * *

  Read: Connor McPherson.

  * * *

  –I’ll create a sword for you.

  –SMOKE for light columns.

  On the plate: eyes that fit in his palm.

  Ofelia puts her hands on her head and walks BACKWARD, I talking with Mercedes.

  2007/41 It’s my year: Guillermo del Toro.

  –Broken mirror. Created by a tiny demon. When it was shattered, it launched shards into the air that got lodged in the eyes and hearts of human beings

  –Why does the BPRD airplane crash? Because dozens of harpies attack it

/>   –Double Load bullets. DRILL

  –An enormous library at BPRD to which only Abe has access

  –The book contains every possible destiny, every possible future, which your decisions could create. It was made just for you, written in your father’s blood, and will reveal its secrets to your eyes alone. Infinite and limited

  –Your role in this story will be determined tonight.

  –He closes the book and taps on the cover 3 times. Open it and your fate, and yours alone, will be revealed to you. It will show you only what you need to know at that particular moment, that time.

  Concepts by Raúl Monge show that, up until very close to production, the Pale Man was more of an elderly figure with eyes in a humanoid face.

  The final concept first came to del Toro while working in the notebooks.

  GDT: This [opposite] is a very important page for me. This is where the movie starts to take more shape. On the left, there is a drawing of the Pale Man, and what I did is, originally that figure had a human face, and it was sculpted by DDT. This was my drawing of that sculpture with the face removed. I did a rougher drawing of this and I mailed it, faxed it, to DDT.

  It’s one of the two times we’ve had a disagreement, because they had worked so hard doing that sculpture. It was an old man sculpture. And they loved it, and they said to me, “Oh, this is really ruthless. We were doing this.” I said, “Listen, trust me, it’s going to be worth it.”

  The reason I insisted on changing it was because I was having dinner with my wife, and I had seen the sculpture, and it was great. It was a great sculpture of an old man. I had a picture with me, which was more or less the picture as it is in the drawing here but with a face. I was looking at the picture and I was telling my wife, “I have two options. One of them is you have this old man with stumps for a hand, and then in front of him there’s a plate with two wooden hands that he puts on and they move. Or, I take off the face and I put two eyes on the plate, and he puts the eyes on the face.” And she said, “I like the plate with the eyes better.” Then I thought, why don’t we do the stigmata, since he’s supposed to be the church. And it just all fit together.