As a kid, Guillermo del Toro drew pictures of the creature from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”; as a young filmmaker, he dreamed of making his own version of the tale that had been spawning classic horror films for much of the past century. And now, at the age of 61, the director who’s won Oscars for “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio” and been nominated for “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Nightmare Alley” has finally made his “Frankenstein.”
His vision is a monumental Gothic tale that downplays the horror and emphasizes the yearning and anguish of the creature — the creature, not the monster — fashioned and brought to life by Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
“It’s very heightened and operatic,” said costume designer Kate Hawley, and that’s an accurate description of the look, feel and sound of “Frankenstein.” It’s also gloriously romantic and the product of a wildly international group of artists and artisans, from del Toro (Mexico) to actors Oscar Isaac (Guatemala), Jacob Elordi (Australia) and Christoph Waltz (Austria), along with Hawley (New Zealand), production designer Tamara Deverell (Canada), cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Denmark), makeup artist Mike Hill (United Kingdom) and composer Alexandre Desplat (France).
Visually, the film is staggering. While the familiar “Frankenstein” iconography comes largely from James Whale’s classic 1930s movies “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein,” del Toro has drawn from Shelley, Whale, his own imagination and the creativity of his collaborators.
“I reread Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ and we watched the old movies,” Deverell said. “But really, I approached it like I was making a Guillermo movie. To me, it’s a period movie. Some people have said, ‘No, it’s a fantasy.’ But it’s both, really. Guillermo pushes the fantastical, but the push is reality-based.
“And it’s a collective vision. Kate Hawley brings her design ideas for the costumes, and Dan has ideas for how he’s going to light it, and Guillermo is pushing and pulling all of us. All of his department heads understand what his vision is from the get-go.”
For Deverell, key designs included the lavish Frankenstein family estate, put together from five different locations; the boat trapped in an arctic ice field where the film’s climax takes place, originally designed with dark wood but changed to a white interior, which del Toro sees as the color of death; and the tower laboratory where Victor Frankenstein brings his creature to life in one of the film’s showpiece sequences.
“I tried to educate myself on the science of the time and the steam engines of the time,” Deverell said. “Could those huge battery towers exist in some possible realm? Not really, but I found inspiration in (Nikola) Tesla experiments and galvanization experiments with the human body. And I was affected by those early movies, for sure.”
This scene was a centerpiece for others, too. “That sequence was very complicated,” said cinematographer Laustsen, who lit the film mostly through outside windows. “The scene starts as the sun is disappearing, becoming the magic hour, and they’re running to the rooftop in the rain and lightning.
“But then we come back into the lab, and we’re changing from smoke to steam, which is much more organic. So the smoke is disappearing from the room, the steam is coming in and the lightning strikes are giving us the key lights.
“The beauty of it is that that’s the only key light we have in the scene. When Victor looks up, for example, the lightning strike hits and he’s blown out (visually), and then he’s down to a silhouette again. It was fantastic to do it, but very complicated and kind of a headache in the beginning.”
Composer Desplat had chosen a plaintive violin to serve as the creature’s signature instrument, emphasizing his fragility and delicacy rather than the brute strength that comes across on screen. But for the creation scene, he embraced a deep, thundering sound that he had avoided until the lightning starts flashing and the reanimation machines power up.
“I didn’t want the film to sound gothic,” he said. “But that sensibility does come in at a specific moment in the tower. It’s the ultimate romantic moment of the film, and the organ doing arpeggios adds to this twister of madness that’s going on with Victor Frankenstein.”
Still, he stayed away from overly horrific music. “That would be too hard, too dark, too gory,” he said. “So by switching the point of view from the audience to Victor, the artist who dreamed of the moment he can finally make his masterpiece, you can capture his exhilarating excitement, his joy.”
The creature that reanimates in that scene is a far cry from the standard-issue version that came to be incorrectly labeled “Frankenstein.” (That’s the name of the creator, not the creation.) Unlike the original creature played by Boris Karloff so memorably, here there were no bolts in the neck, no heavy stitches.
“If you saw any number of these cinematic Frankenstein creatures before, you’d think, ‘Boy, this guy’s been in an accident and somebody’s patched him up,’” makeup artist Hill said. “We wanted you to look at him and go, ‘No, this is freshly minted. Somebody made this.’”
Hill created geometric patterns to suggest that pieces of skin had been sewn together in a pattern rather than after an accident, and then came up with ways to have the creature mature as the film went on, mostly through his hair growing longer. Hill also consulted medical books from the 1850s and worked with del Toro to determine the color of the creature’s skin.
“With Guillermo, I can use a rainbow of pastel colors and he gets it, because he likes beauty mixed with ugliness,” he said. “Guillermo was interested in making the skin look like alabaster, so we used pink and blue hues that show through on certain burnished areas.”
A total of 42 prosthetic pieces were designed to cover Elordi’s entire body but still allow him to control his facial expressions, necessitating a 10-hour application and a midnight call time for the actor on some days.
The makeup artist also added an Easter egg of sorts on Elordi’s forehead: a single blue-gray patch of skin. “That’s a Boris Karloff homage, because his skin was blue Max Factor,” he said. “I paid homage to my hero.”
When it was time to dress the creature, Hawley avoided the James Whale version, too. “What we did comes from the text, where he has very deliberate stages of development,” she said. “The religious imagery was very strong in the creation scene, and that and the idea of birth dictated the early stages of the creature. His body’s taken from the battlefield of Crimea, and so is his coat, so we allude to the feeling of another man’s skin on top of him.
“And then we studied how Jacob was moving, working from the inside out so my clothes don’t come off as an external layer.”
For Isaac’s attire as Victor, Hawley focused on him not as a mad scientist but as an artist and a 19th-century dandy, with touches of 20th-century peacocks like Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie.
“There’s a narcissistic quality to him, and an obsession with his mother,” she said. “There’s a lot going on there.”
And there is a lot going on with the clothes as Victor’s money runs out and his work gets more feverish. “My textiles team would add the stains of his work — the blood, the battery-acid spills, the wear and tear on those garments.”
All of the madness was captured on large-format Arri Alexa 65 cameras. “Guillermo said to me, ‘I’d like to do a classic movie, but in a modern way,’” Laustsen said. “Guillermo’s vision is always very strong. For me, the movie is about love and forgiveness, and that is a very powerful thing right now.”
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
