Published on 02/1/2008

Devin goes to Prague to talk to the master of modern fantasy.

SEMI-EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: GUILLERMO DEL TORO (HELLBOY 2 SET VISIT) PART 1

First, a word on 'semi-exclusive.' You're going to see other sites with set visit reports from Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and interviews with Guillermo and the cast. But only two sites will have the interview you'll read below: CHUD and Latino Review. We were the only sites on set at the amazing Troll Market cave last fall, and we were the only people who sat down with Guillermo that day.

Guillermo gave us incredible access to his set, which was built into a real limestone cave (click here to read my original report). After watching an exciting, live action (no green screen or CGI here!) battle between Hellboy and a big, angry troll, we joined Guillermo in his trailer for a long-delayed lunch. I felt bad, though, as his lunch remained untouched while we talked about the movie he had not been sure he would be able to make, fantasy worlds and his future as a filmmaker.

Was there ever a time where you didn't think there was going to be a 'Hellboy 2'?

I really think that the problem with this is that we knew we wanted to make a much bigger movie, but nowadays the movies that are of real size – when we were making the first one, a big movie was about 96, 97, 100, 105 and we did the first one for $60 something million. Now a big movie is what? Over $200 million. If you see any of the big franchises they're over $200 million and so forth and the problem that we have is that we have truly tragic international and we did very, very well on DVD which was our saving grace, but we knew that the range wasn't as wide to make it. So there were many times that I doubted, and the scope of the screenplay kept changing. It started with my letter to Santa Claus with all the action and all the set pieces and everything and it was a pretty long letter. Then you get to go through the process and I kept the key elements and lost a couple that I really, really liked. But it was nothing mortal. I doubted it many times though, yeah.

Was there anything that you want to show in this film that you couldn't in the first one?

Yeah. I think it's easier. On second movies I think you can have more fun with the characters and dedicate more time to them and a different world than the world that's established and the rules. All of those things are things that encumber the first movie. I think the scope – I don't think it'll ever be the comic in the same way that I never thought…I thought I was doing the comic on the first movie, and then when I saw the movie [Mike] Mingola and I realized, 'Well, it's not the comic.' Even if we tried to do the comic, I don't think the cartoon is the comic. I don't think the game is the comic. I don't think that the animated Screw On Head is the Screw On Head in the comic, but they're variations on that. One of the variations of that universe and the Mingola world was monsters, monsters and fantasy or fantastical worlds and creatures. We didn't get much of that in the first movie. It was more pulp. Nazis and catacombs and sewers and this and that. I wanted to show that other side.

This time Hellboy is married?

Well, he's living with her.

Right. He's living with Liz. Are you approaching the character differently this time or the same? How does that work?

Well, the idea that I was attracted was just seeing a relationship. In superhero movies and the same in comics, every time the hero gets a girlfriend she gets killed. There is never a more normal process to those relationships and I was curious about it. You can do it quite nicely on long arc TV with things like 'Firefly' or 'Buffy' or any series. You can do that type of thing there, but not on movies. I was curious to see that if the first movie ended with a kiss and flames what's their life together like a year later. We don't go into the depth of what you can do in long arc form, but you do get to feel that the characters have changed over that year and they're different than they were in the first movie. Hellboy is different. Abe is very different. Liz is different. Manning has changed a lot. So you show that so that you don't come back to the same set of characters in the same set of circumstances.

You used the Giant's Causeway which has real world mythical elements and you're using the Troll Market. What sort of mythologies are you using or are you making your own mythologies up?

If a purist checks the names they're obviously taken from Celtic lore, but they're completely changed. For example, Nuada [Luke Goss] has a silver hand. Here his father, Balor, who's not his father in Celtic mythology, has a silver arm, but having read as much as I read on Celtic mythology growing up and so forth, I just felt that it needed that resonance. I'm not referring though to them completely. I never call them elves. I'm referring though to some patterns and it's very different because I'm trying to do a variation where, for example, we take the normal Celtic motifs and we give them a Hindu twist or a Japanese twist. I'm trying to not do any suits of armor or anything that looks remotely like 'Lord of the Rings' or things like that. I'm trying to go with another type of aesthetic. When you go to the Troll Market it's a mixture of Eastern Europe and Moorish bazaar. The suits of armor of the prince and the aesthetics are Hindu or Japanese. We're trying to move away from Ballantine book covers and those aesthetics and go into something different.

You brought that different fantasy world in 'Pan's'. What did you learn from that which you could learn on this?

What's nice is to see that world quote unquote used, like a rundown version of those worlds which is what interested me in 'Pan'. In 'Pan' you don't get a glimpse of the neat fantasy world until the very end. The rest of the time you're looking at Pan's lair or Pan himself where everything is covered in moss and is old and is rained upon and is sort of eaten away by time and lime and salt. To take the world and say, 'What would happen and how aged it would be and how edgy and savage it would be – ' that aesthetic is definitely a post 'Pan' idea. It's also the idea that Tooth Fairies can be bought and sold on the black market. They bring them in containers. These ideas are just a little more quirky than the regular fantasy world.

What did 'Pan' change for you? It's a movie that gets the Oscars and all the acclaim and everyone loves it and you're working on a different level now because of it. So how does that change things for you?

Well, I don't think that I'm going to feel the change on this movie because this movie was greenlit essentially before 'Pan'. The day that I took 'Hellboy', that morning I'd gotten on the phone to talk to Benecio [del Toro] about 'Wolf Man'. I thought, 'Okay, I'm going to do that now.' Then this came and it was really, really fast and so it was months and months before 'Pan' was really even shown. So the budget that we're getting and a lot of the freedom that we're getting is still a little bit pre 'Pan', if you will. That does give me the leeway though that the studio has been incredibly great about the freedom in which we approach the creatures and the world after 'Pan'. We're doing some really quirky creatures and ideas and the designs are not things that you've normally seen. I think that leeway, if not the much larger budget we are still getting the leeway and the respect and the feeling that the studio is really invested in the film.

But personally, do you feel a sense of pressure now, since getting such critical acclaim with 'Pan'?

No. I have no pressure because I know you're always going to get a sector of people who are going to hate what you do. You can do any movie and it never fails to provoke the anger of a good percentage of people. It doesn't matter what you do. You could be doing 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' or you could be doing 'Amelie' or anything and there will always be that percentage of people that are going to hate it. Sometimes what's great or tragic or beautiful is that the same people that love one hate the other. They're the people who go, 'Oh, wow! I can't wait to go to X.' Then when you come with Z they go, 'Fuck, that was a piece of shit.' What are you going to do? So if you let yourself feel pressure by a precedent, I think that's really silly and you're taking yourself and the idea of a continuity with the world seriously. I think that you have to have continuity with what you want to do and drive yourself to the ground trying to make the best movie you can every time out there and fail or succeed depending on who's listening.

Does it get easier to grind yourself to the ground with each movie that you make? The daily stuff now must be nothing for you at this point, right?

To me it never gets easier because every movie has a way to invent it's own set of problems. There's been days on this movie when we've been working with five actors and all of them are either blind, deaf – I mean, blinded by the masks or they have prosthetics in the ears and they cannot hit their mark. They cannot listen to instructions. They're stumbling on a rock ledge. There's no such thing as the usual unless you're shooting on a TV set day after day for two or three years, but I don't think even then it's the norm. Even then there's something that goes wrong. It's always hard. I've never done a movie where I went, 'That was an easy shoot.' Not a single one. They're harder and less hard, but they're always quite tough.

Have you gotten different genre scripts since 'Pan's'? Like different from horror or fairy tale?

I think that the thing I realize is that I'm just attracted to a certain type of fantasy, if you would, that loves the aesthetics of horror, but not the mechanics. The only movie, pun intended, that's a horror movie is 'Mimic' which has the mechanic of a horror movie. Most people were like this at that [laughs]. I think that the aesthetics of it were dictated by the same aesthetics that dictated 'Pan's Labyrinth' in the same sense as it was wet and subterranean and drippy and strangely rusty. That type of thing is the same. So I'm very much attracted to the almost expressionistic worn down aesthetics of horror films. But I'm not interested in, for example, the scares. I'm interested in the creepiness. 'Pan's' is as creepy as any of the other movies and even something as loud and head banging as 'Hellboy 2' has certain things that are pretty creepy.

SEMI-EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: GUILLERMO DEL TORO (HELLBOY 2 SET VISIT) PART 2

How involved are you going to be in 'The Orphanage' remake now that New Line has announced it?

Well, I plan to be involved. I love the first movie and I think this is a chance to launch it and have the Spanish language original reach as much of an audience as we can. I hope that it replicates the success of 'Pan' and that Juan Antonio, the director, is launched onto the scene because I think he's a real talent. I'm also curious though to do a variation. I've never done that. If I do it I'll do it with something that I know really intimately. I won't direct it, but I think if you find the right director you can find a really interesting take.

So you wouldn't want to do something like 'The Grudge' where they bring the same director in?

I don't think so because he already said what he had to say about it. If he wanted to then of course. If he came to me and said, 'I want to do it because of x or y –' then I would let him in a second. He's a really great director, that guy.

So you're going to be doing this through next summer. How does the impending strike affect you because I'm assuming you're in the guild here, but you also work in Spain?

It affects me only as a producer in that obviously I won't have any other projects as director by the time that the strike hits. So I'm probably going to be recuperating from 'Hellboy' and writing. I'm going to be writing a movie in Spanish. I want to try to do one in Spanish after, either '3993' or one that I've been trying to do for a while called 'An Honest Man' which would be the first time that I'd do something that doesn't have a fantasy element to it. It's pretty nasty. I think I'll take six or seven or eight months to write that and for myself. So I'm not breaking any rules. As producer then, for example, if New Line wants to go with 'The Orphanage' before that they'll have to go without me because I'm going to be in post on 'Hellboy'. I'm affected in the sense that I do believe the things that the WGA are asking for are things that are already pertinent and will be more so in the very near future.

Because that also effects other stuff that you're linked too, right?

Yeah, and I would love to have any of those movies, if an alternate universe existed where I could have those movies prepped and ready for after the strike it would be great, but as it is if the strike hits I very likely will end up doing the one in Spanish because I can do that with non SAG actors in Mexico or Spain or Argentina.

This question is early, but how do you market this film?

Well, the thing that I feel with Universal that I'm very happy about is that they're marketing or they're approaching the movie with glee. First of all it's a franchise only if you view at such because the first movie was not a blockbuster that had everybody saying, 'We've got to just do the next one immediately.' So the fact that they took it shows an enormous amount of faith and balls which I think they go together. They've been going at it very rightly ever since. They're saying that they're going to put character and world first and foremost before genre, before action. They're saying these are the worlds, these are the characters, this is the place that they live in and this is the way that we're going to put out there. It's not a movie that they're going to try and conform. I think one of the things on the campaigns for the first movie, when I met them on the first movie, I kept saying, 'Where's Hellboy?' You had all this action and no Hellboy. You had all these scenes, and then even then I thought the action was emphasized too much in the selling of it because the characters were really charming, I thought, with Liz and Hellboy and Abe and so on and so forth. Listen, I think the main difference is that they want to do good with the movie. They want to do right for the movie and send it out into the world and say, 'This is a little saga that we're trying to continue.' I think the selling point that they have other than character and world is the scope. The scope of the movie is so different from the first movie. It's so different from the scope of anything that I've ever done, frankly. It's a much bigger movie than 'Blade' or 'Mimic' or 'Hellboy' or anything.

So when this movie opens and it makes $200 million and 'Hellboy 3' is green lit where do you see it going?

In that eventuality what Mike and I are always trying to do is if this is the last one of the series then you left some threads out, but everything felt satisfactory, but if there was a third one it would go to, we hope, a very tragic place. Well, not tragic but a very dramatic place. When we started plotting this one we talked about how it would end so that we knew where we were going in case it happens. If it doesn't happen then we still plotted it to know where we're going. Obviously I don't want to divulge the ending or this or that, but it'd obviously go there. It would ultimately show what would happen if Hellboy fulfilled his destiny and why he would fulfill his destiny as the Beast of the Apocalypse. That's the only logical way that the character can end.

So you see this a natural trilogy?

I think it'd be beautiful. I always thought the first one was like, 'That's it?' When they asked if I had any ideas for the second one I didn't jump up immediately and say yes. It took me a while to think about it and find an idea that made me want to do it.