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Visionary director Guillermo del Toro, creator of such magical delights as Pan’s Labyrinth, Mimic and Cronos, chats about his latest Hellboy fairy tale, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, in this exclusive sit-down with one of cinema’s most imaginative and fun guys:
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How do you feel now you are almost at the end of the process with Hellboy II?
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Very tired… Originally, the movie was going to come out on 4th August, but in a beautiful vote of confidence they moved us to be a sandwich between Will Smith (Hancock) and The Dark Knight, which is great because we are right in the middle of it, but my nights and weekends were instantly eliminated. We are working 24 hours, 7 days a week and I’m becoming fatter and paler than I’ve ever been!
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How do you feel when Hellboy II is compared to the other big summer comic-book movies such as The Hulk and Iron Man. How do you think Hellboy stands out?
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I think it’s very, very different from those and I hope that proves to be for the good. Frankly, I made it to be its own creature. I try not to craft it for an audience. I try to craft it to make me happy. The movie is very quirky and much more insane and beautiful than perhaps a summer movie has the right to be. I think the world lends itself to so much experimentation, to creating crazy creatures, crazy worlds. [Hellboy] has much more beautiful and intimate character dynamics than the first one, so we went for it.
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Do you think that Hellboy II being slightly unusual will be one of its strengths as it offers something more different than the usual summer fare?
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You know, I really don’t know! You know, movies and audiences are really like blind dates - you have no idea how it’s going to go! All you can do is spray some mint spray in your mouth and go out and order dessert - always order dessert (!)
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Can you talk about the process of making the crazy creatures?
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Like in the first movie, we favour a physical approach. There are a lot of creatures that are created that are animatronics. The ones that are too big or too small can be either animatronic enhanced or repeated or fully CGI, but there are many more creatures. The first movie had five creatures in all and this one has 32 designs, and in some instants there are hundreds, if not thousands of those creatures at the same time. We have been struggling to allow those creatures to have an individual personality…If you look at the instances where we have lots of creatures you catch them doing something different every time. There is an obscene one, a lewd one, a funny one, a dirty one, a prudish one - we tried to really create character in the animation with little details. It’s been about making quirky use of the resources that we have.
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What kind of team do you work with?
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I work with the guys I worked with in the first one who I think are some of the best, included DDT Effects who worked with me on Pan’s Labyrinth, Spectral Motion that worked with me on the first Hellboy. In the UK I worked with two or three special effects houses, such as CFX and Nigel Booth. In Hungary, I worked with a Hungarian company. I also worked with people from the Hansen Shop, who founded their own company, and who are highly, highly successfully, technically. They came in and created real wonders for us.
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Talking about personalities of monsters, we’re not going to see it this time around, but I bet you’ve got something in mind for Hellboy’s baby…
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Yes. I do have something in mind.
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The romance [in Hellboy] came more from you than it did from Mignola, so have the two of you collaborated on what the baby might be?
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I know what I want but if I told you I would spoil the entire movie because it doesn’t get resolved, but it kind of does at the end of the movie. I won’t spoil it for you, but I have a definite, definite plan. That is a sketch in the last third of the movie, you will get an inkling of what the third movie, if it happens, will be like.
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How involved was Mike (Mignola) this time around because when it was announced he said that we wasn’t going to be quite so involved because he said he wanted to let you get on with stuff…
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I think that in a strange way he was more involved but in a different way. He was there from the beginning. We fleshed out the pitch for the film, whilst hunting for used paperbacks - he got all the Dennis Wheatley novels and I tried to punch him in the face. I got all the Doug Savage soft covers. We spent three days driving around used bookstores. Then a week or two pasted and he spent a couple of afternoons in my backyard, drinking lemonade and just chatting, and then we went and pitched to the studio. A month past, I called him up and we spent two or three hours on the phone in my car, and then I came back with a crazy screenplay. When I shooting Pan’s, I was writing Hellboy, and when I finally returned to the screenplay there were many surprises for him and he came onboard with many more notes. He designed a bunch of puppets for the opening scene and I wanted him to design the look of this and the puppets etc. He was very, very involved with the design than the first one. In the end we had quite a blast seeing the effects and it all coming together. I think he has as much involvement, if not more.
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You said that Hellboy II is going to be based much more on fairy tales than the first one which was much more pulp. How much of it is drawn form the comics as apposed to your own creativity?
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This one is definitely more what we created than based on the comic books. The main difference between the two Hellboys is the Hellboy in the comic is beautifully stoic, nothing fazes him. However, Hellboy in the movie, nothing fazes him but for very different reasons - he’s not stoic at all. The direction with the fantasy and the folklore element in the comic has less of a fairy-tale feel. It has more of a hardcore, prophetical strength to it. In the movie it’s more fun, slightly more insane, is trippier than in the comic. Mike and I now expect something that I didn’t believe at the beginning. When we did the first movie I thought I was doing more of the comic book, and then I realised I was doing my variation on the character. So in the second movie I accept this and say this is Hellboy the movie. However, it [Hellboy II] has more to do with, as Mike assures me, where the comic book is going, in terms of the fairy universe. We did not talk about it in those terms. He said ‘you can up with it. I was coming up. The comic will go towards certain parts that you are already exploring’. We’ll have to wait and see if he really does that.
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Pan’s Labyrinth is obviously a fairy tale. How do you think Hellboy would have dealt with Pan?
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I don’t know! He would either have him making cappuccinos for everyone, or he would have punched him in the head.
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There is a cool moment in the film where Hellboy shoots at the camera at a tooth fairy and the blood goes over the camera. How much of that is in your head before you make the film, or is that something that comes up in post-production?
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I have been doing that since Mimic. If you watch Mimic carefully, there are a couple of moments where there are drops of water on the lens. We were, if not the first, then exploring it very early, doing mistakes with the camerawork work, splattering the lens, having the camera shake at an inopportune moment. Now, it’s pretty much more common. It gives it a sense of immediacy, so we plan the shots like that.
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What was the biggest technical challenge you faced during the production?
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We had many. One example, which will sound completely geeky, was the rigging and construction of the Golden Army was so immensely difficult because you, essentially, have hard-shelled creatures - there are no flexible parts. Three designers spent in total about eight months just solving, mechanically, the golden Army. What you see is not a cheat once they open up. We created every articulation, every nut, very bolt - that was a pain in the arse to rig and a pain in the arse to construct. We wanted them to have a very clean silhouette. As we were doing the movie, Transformers came out during the shoot and I was very happy that our creature that evolved from an egg to become a soldier and they have a very beautiful, very clean silhouette. You have a sense of how they move and how they work. I always thought of them as the Golden Gollums [as from Lord of the Rings] as they move very slowly but are very precise and are not in a hurry. I remember in Goodfellas they say Paulie moves for no-one and that gives him real power. I thought these guys [the Golden Army] are like that, just like Paulie. You can come kick them, shoot them, destroy them, but they are going to get you! We also created a control system for one of the facial controls in the monsters that was quite revolutionary, that is we had a monster that is almost seven-and-a-half feet tall that was operated by one guy by remote control. It looks CG but is not CG and is really a guy in a suit.
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You have said before that you make film for the studio and one for yourself. Since Pan’s Labyrinth was a massive critical success, have you been able to combine the two and not only make Hellboy II for a studio but for yourself?
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I’ve never really said that. I’ve always made a big one and a small one. Even Blade, I loved the first one. It’s my belief that Norrington planted the flag with that one and the way it was made, and it kind of popped the cherry for many, many movies. I wanted to play in that universe. I did not understand Blade that much, but I sure understood the reapers and I wanted to create the reapers. I’ve never done a movie where I’ve not woken up and their no thrill. If you have to go out and do that job everyday that destroys your personal life, you have to go do something you love. Hellboy is definitely a guy I love. I love the Hellboy in the comic. I love the Hellboy in the movies. And I love Ron Perlman!
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