From Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro comes Frankenstein, the definitive retelling of Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel of life and death — an epic drama about what it means to be human, to crave love, and seek understanding.
Golden Globe-winner Oscar Isaac plays the brilliant but tortured scientist Victor Frankenstein, who embarks on an ego-driven quest to bring new life into this world, resulting in the Creature (Jacob Elordi), whose very existence provokes questions about what it means to be a human and what it really means to be a monster. This sprawling epic takes audiences from the remote reaches of the Arctic to the bloody battlefields of 19th-century Europe, as Frankenstein and his Creature go on their own search for meaning in a world that can seem quite mad.
Pinocchio and Frankenstein were defining stories for you, and you’ve now made these two films in immediate succession. What does that represent for you both on a personal level and as an artist?
DEL TORO: Certain books and stories become part of your DNA. Two of the closest things to me are Pinocchio and Frankenstein. This movie, I wanted to do before I even had a camera, before I even knew how to direct. When I saw Boris Karloff crossing the threshold as a kid [in Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein], to me, it was a religious moment because everything I thought about Catholic imagery made sense. I thought, “This is a supernatural thing, and that’s me. That is who I am. That’s why I don’t fit.” I ended up making them basically back-to-back at a time when I lost my father and I lost my mother, and I really had to wonder about who I am because you become nobody’s child. The fact that that happened made them both deeper.
In adapting Mary Shelley’s novel, were there specific elements of the text you wanted to hone in on? How did you approach writing the script?
DEL TORO: The book has a lot of anxiety, the anxiety that you get when you’re an adolescent and you don’t understand why everybody lies about the world. The book has that fidgety sort of energy. It wants to question capitalism. It wants to question, “Who am I? Why am I here? What did God send me? What is my purpose? What is the world?” I wanted to capture that anxiety. I tried to absorb the style of dialogue and the themes. A lot of the dialogue [in the film] is entirely original, but it has the patois and the rhythms of Mary Shelley. When English is your second language, you are trained very acutely to the melody and the rhythms of a language. It has a particular rhythm, the dialogue in the book. I tried to make the dialogue be like that without sounding archaic.
Mary Shelley, when she wrote Frankenstein, it was not a period piece. It was a modern book, so I didn’t want you to see a pastel-colored period piece. I wanted Victor to be dressed like Mick Jagger in Soho in 1970. I wanted the wardrobe to be luscious and full of colour, and the sets to be a little too colourful and to colour-code everything very carefully. Adapting, I say, is like marrying a widow, right? You have to respect the memory of the late husband, but on Saturdays, you’ve got to get some action. So, you have to take the book and make it yours. Otherwise, why are you doing it?
How did you approach the character of Victor? He’s far from a conventional hero.
DEL TORO: If you look at my movies all the way to Nightmare Alley, I have very distinct villains and heroes. Like all tyrants, Victor believes himself to be a victim. Everybody who is a tyrant loves being a victim: “Poor me,” and in the meantime, they’re destroying everybody’s life. That’s Victor. But everybody in the movie has a failing and a lack. I love that. They all need love, because that’s the only answer, right? I think it’s a very tender movie. For me, it’s a melodrama and a drama. I don’t see it in terms of a horror movie.
You mentioned that you carefully colour-coded the movie. Could you explain some of the symbolism we see on screen?
DEL TORO: The idea for me is that childhood is black and white and red — the mother and the home are red. So if Victor loses that, that’s the colour that should haunt him. The rest of the movie, he’s the only character that wears red — red gloves, red scarf. His childhood is lacking colour. Was his childhood like that? I don’t think it was. I don’t think his father came in with a billowing cape, like a villain out of a horror
movie, but that’s the way he remembers it. The childhood is shot the way he remembers because he’s telling the story — and he lies. He lies to himself and the audience.
I start [work on the colour palette] before the movie [goes into production]. I hire a few people, and we take a deep dive into the shapes and colours. We do a huge mood board. We say, “These are the colours that are coding the movie.”
Directing is directing all those elements to tell the same story, so you don’t feel wardrobe pulling one way and architecture pulling another. These are not isolated ideas that occur at the same time. This is a symphony. You are directing an opera, and you are leading to the same emotional point.
You went to great lengths to build sprawling physical sets and to visit real-world locations, to capture as much in-camera as possible. Why?
DEL TORO: I wanted the movie to test the capabilities of every single craft in moviemaking. There are huge sets, huge props, and a complex wardrobe. I wanted it to feel like an old movie that was made in the heyday of Hollywood. I want it to be luscious and beautiful and operatic. I said, “I’m not going to do VFX on the ship. I want a real ship and when the Creature moves it, I want the Creature to move it.” So we mounted it on a mechanical gimbal. That ship is a huge feat.
Most people would now build 20 feet of the ship, and the rest would be digital, but we wanted to make it a very dramatic, romantic declaration of an image. You open with that, you’re in the movie. You’re in the spirit of Mary Shelley.
The one thing you know in this movie is that everything was created, and most of it was handmade. You have real puppets, real giant ships moving, real sets, real locations. We travelled a caravan of people for hours and hours to find one room that looked the right way. Everything has a curation and a dedication and a passion that is very uncommon in films these days. We wanted to make an old-fashioned, beautiful production of operatic scale made by humans.
How did that philosophy apply to the design of the Creature overseen by designer and prosthetics expert Mike Hill? The two of you share a deep and abiding love for this character.
DEL TORO: Mike and I are Frankenstein heads. I have a whole room [in my home] dedicated to Frankenstein, and Mike builds the things that are in my room for Frankenstein. We are groupies. We know every scar, every hair, every wrinkle. We started many, many months, years [in advance] to plan it. We knew we wanted it to be beautiful and otherworldly. I wanted it to be like a marble statue; I wanted the head to remind the people of those phrenology heads. Mike started sculpting, and I would come in and draw over the sculpture.
I think the creature is remarkable because the makeup needs to tell you that he’s made of pieces. Why is he made of pieces? That’s one thing I wanted to know. Because really, if you are Victor Frankenstein and you go to a cemetery, you grab a body, you grab a head. That’s it. But if they give you the pieces of a battlefield, then that explains why he’s putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle. He’s working with a bunch of mutilated corpses — that’s why I wanted to bring the war into it. This is a resurrected soldier out of a mass grave, basically. The makeup needed to reflect that but have a beauty. He needs to feel like a baby, and then he needs to feel like a philosopher, like a man. The growth of the Creature is one of the salient things that Mary Shelley did in the book and this movie does. We track the growth of the Creature into a man.
Having longed to make this film for so much of your life, what does it mean to you now to have completed your Frankenstein?
DEL TORO: Frankenstein is the end of something. What it is, I don’t know. I didn’t plan it to be that… I was talking to [the late illustrator] Bernie Wrightson over dinner one day, and I [commented on] how his style changed after [the release of a 1983 edition of ] Frankenstein [featuring 47 of his images]. He said, when he finished that book, “I never wanted to draw another monster. I did many times, but my style didn’t have the hunger that led to Frankenstein.”
I feel that. I feel it very acutely. There are elements of Frankenstein in Cronos, in The Shape of Water. Blade II is basically a Frankenstein story to me. This culminates a cycle — operatic, ornamental, camera moving very precisely — all those things [are] out the window from now on a little bit, at least is how it feels.
