Like a raving alchemist who one day wakes at the frigid ends of the Earth, Guillermo del Toro has pursued the ghost of Frankenstein all his life.

The chase to tackle the material is a public affair for the Mexican filmmaker and artist, beginning when he first mused about making a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story in 2007. But the obsession long predates that. Del Toro was seven when he first watched James Whale’s classic Frankenstein picture from 1931, the one starring Boris Karloff as a mute, deformed innocent who simply wants to pick flowers with a child… yet winds up killing the flowers and child both. The future storyteller was then 11 when he cracked open Shelley’s 1818 novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. And at once, he felt his mind broadened and haunted by a more complex vision of this new Adam, a being constructed from the leftover parts of dead men.

“The book is closer to Paradise Lost,” del Toro observes when we sit down with him for the second time in several days to discuss his passion project. “It’s really a poignant examination of what makes us human and the pain of being alive. To be born in a world and existence that you didn’t ask for is extremely personal, I think, to Mary Shelley and in a strange way to myself.”

At age 11, del Toro didn’t know about Paradise Lost, its author John Milton, or the post-Enlightenment Romantic movement that Shelley was a member of when she absconded as a teenager to Lake Geneva with poet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and the notorious Lord Byron. That would come later. Del Toro would consume it all though, as well as every other Gothic master of Shelley’s generation and those that followed (with a smirk, the filmmaker likens Bram Stoker’s Dracula to a 19th century “Tom Clancy novel with a vampire”). But it always came down to Frankenstein for him.

“My attraction to the Romantics is this existential sense of beauty in the horror,” del Toro notes, alluding specifically to the idea that during their courtship, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley traded poems, and perhaps other affections, in secluded graveyards. “I couldn’t think of a better term for what I like than graveyard poetry,” del Toro sighs.

A specific image derived from that type of poetry is also the one del Toro has been most eager to transfer to the screen: the sight of a creator awakened in the night by the “watery, speculative” eye of his creation at his bedside. It is a scene Mary first dreamed up on a stormy night in Switzerland, and it inspired the whole masterpiece that followed.

“When Victor wakes up in the bed, spent and exhausted after creation, and the Creature is looking at him from the foot of the bed, that’s stayed with me all during my life,” del Toro says. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I hope nobody does that scene, because it’s my favorite scene in the book.’ And fortunately for me, nobody did.”

When most audiences watch del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix next month, or manage to see it in theaters in the waning days of spooky season, they’ll witness that coveted moment. And yet, after all these years of planning and dreaming by del Toro, it will not be as how Shelley wrote it. In the book, the Creature is at this point monstrous; grotesque; an abomination that stands as evidence against its creator’s hubris. Yet in the film, Oscar Isaac’s Victor and the movie he leads admire Jacob Elordi’s ethereal, genuinely Miltonian New Man. It is a scene of awe and wonderment; a triumph for Victor Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro both. They’ve made their dreams flesh, and like any true creator, they cast it in their own image.

“I think that when you talk about the word adaptation, you should think about a fish that needs to adapt to land; they are completely different mediums, and it has to grow lungs,” del Toro considers. “At the end of the day, I say adapting is like marrying a widow. You can pay respect to the late husband, but on Saturdays, you gotta get it on.”

This is the tale of how del Toro adapted, and got on to bringing his own modern Prometheus to life.

A Story of Fathers and Sons

Arguably the most famous line of dialogue ever associated with Frankenstein remains “it’s alive!,” a turn of phrase that signaled the eureka moment of the Monster first raising its hand. Notably that quote does not appear in Shelley’s novel; it stems from the 1931 Universal movie. It is likewise absent in del Toro’s film, which instead replaces it with a far more intimate scene between Victor and his newly born progeny. When Isaac’s driven young scientist first meets Elordi’s Creature (he is never called “the Monster” in the movie), Frankenstein introduces himself by putting his hand to his chest and saying “Victor.” The Creature reciprocates and imitates, inadvertently taking the creator’s name as his own.

The flourish underscores a stronger sense of duality in del Toro’s Frankenstein than any other film version to date. It also speaks to the connection which drives both central performances.

“While we were shooting it, at a certain point I was convinced that they’re just the same person,” Isaac confides. “That was helpful for me because, in a way, Victor is only half of a human. You see that he is missing that other half. It’s been robbed from him.”

The theft Isaac speaks of is from del Toro’s newly-invented backstory for Baron Frankenstein. As opposed to growing up in the Age of Enlightenment like the novel’s good-ish doctor, Isaac’s Victor lives in its 19th century aftermath. Soon enough he even abandons central Europe altogether for Victorian London in order to escape the shadow of his domineering father (Charles Dance). There is a beloved mother too, taken from him at an early age, but her memory is obscured by the gloom of a patriarch who beats into Victor’s head that he must carry the family’s name. It is the bitterest of ironies, then, that other than that first tender scene where Victor accidentally lends his Christian name to the Creature, he never once thinks to name the creation. He eventually takes to referring to Elordi’s character as “It.” This is a tragedy in Elordi’s mind.

“The Creature only exists with Victor,” says the actor. “Whether it’s beginning in love or a need for him, or in rage, he’s never alone so long as Victor is there. When he’s chasing him through the snow, he’s only confirmed in life by Victor’s [presence]. So it’s impossible for the Creature to exist without his father to me, which is also me with my Dad. That’s all of us with our fathers.”

The dynamic between Victor and the Creature being the fractured relationship between a cold father and a sensitive son is perhaps del Toro’s most personal innovation.

“In Latin Catholic culture, this is so heavy,” del Toro explains. “It’s so much about father and son stories for me. To say ‘in the name of the father’ is the birth of it all in a Latin household.” The concept is even something that a father like Isaac could relate to with his director.

“We talked a lot about the idea of the way that you treat kids,” Isaac remembers, “or how one can treat kids as an extension of themselves, as something to be prideful about or ashamed of. Even when my kid acts up, and he’s acting like a spoiled brat, I’m like, ‘Oh God, how does that look on me? It makes people think that I’m that way or I taught them that.’ But that’s just him being an asshole.”

In this way, Isaac and del Toro sought to exorcise many demons they see that come with pride, and particularly prideful fathers. Therein lies the folly of this Victor Frankenstein, a character of immense flaws—but who both men contend is intensely sane.

“He’s too certain that he’s right,” del Toro acknowledges. “He’s too easily offended by loss and by contradiction. He is incredibly single-track-minded, but those things for me, they’re not madness. They’re just tantrums of the mind.” It is even during the film’s first act, where Victor carefully and lovingly dissects human anatomy, that the picture finds its greatest sympathy and romance for Isaac’s protagonist. Unlike every other Frankenstein movie, this isn’t mad science; it is a kind of love-making.

“Victor is in many ways a concert musician, in many ways a sculptor, in many ways a film director,” says the film director. “That’s why the anatomy construction is shot and scored like a joyous moment…. Everything that came before the creation of the Creature is horrible and full of doom. But you know, this is what he’s been wanting to do for decades, and he charges at it with gusto! And so does the score and so does the filmmaking!”

In fact, much of the film’s expansive first chapter, which like the novel is told from Victor’s own memories of his youth to a stunned sea captain out to discover the North Pole, becomes a metaphor for del Toro’s own life. The joy of discovery, the fear of moneyed interests who do not provide what they promise (hence Christoph Waltz as Frankenstein’s financial patron), and of course coming face-to-face with your life’s work.

Says del Toro, “The Creature takes on a life of its own, like any movie or any piece of music.” Hence when the Creature appears on the same ice-trapped ship where a half-dead Victor is spilling his guts, the younger generation has its own story to tell. “That’s what happens when you finally have a talk with your kids or your father,” del Toro notes. “You get to say this is what it feels to be me.”

A Creature of Grace

Any and every version of Frankenstein must ultimately be about what happens when a man meets his maker. So it is for film directors and their cinematic children.

The day that Elordi’s Creature, under intricate prosthetic makeup work designed by Mike Hill and his team, achieved the final effect del Tor sought, it marked the culmination of a lifetime for the director. At last the dashing Byronic silhouette of Shelley’s Monster would be on the big screen, but with a grace and innocence even the daughter of the Enlightenment might be astonished by.

“My pilgrimage certainly ended there,” del Toro says of the day. “There’s a lot of language in the film that comes from Catholic dogma, Catholic cosmology: the crucifixion, the crown of thorns, resurrection of the flesh and the wound on the chest. I always thought he needed to look like the embodiment of—as they say in the Bible—Hijo del Hombre, the Son of Man. He needed to not look like a repair victim in an ICU, but a newly minted human being.”

Del Toro and Elordi’s Creature still resembles what Shelley initially describes as an abomination, but the scars on his flesh better resemble tattooed patterns and stylings than marks of horror or sacrilege. Perhaps even a stigmata. He is beatific when first quickened to life in Victor’s watchtower, a figure clean of soul and not yet sullied by the pettiness of the father.

This aligns with del Toro’s larger conception for the film. Whereas the half of the movie told from Victor’s perspective is defined by mud, steam, and death, the Creature is a genuine free spirit. Says del Toro, “Each of the chapters has a different flavor, and the Creature has the fairy tale flavor: finding an enchanted cottage, guided by birds, by mice, by wolves. He is taught what the world is through that moment of purity.”

This came into crystal clarity after Elordi’s considerable six-and-a-half-foot frame entered the picture.

“His look [was] the final piece of the puzzle,” says the director. “He has a majesty that reminds of the anatomical charts of Andreas Vesalius… There’s a grace and a beauty, and an almost saintly purity to that Creature that allows the movie to exist.”

The first time co-star Mia Goth saw Elordi in full-Creature regalia felt like magic. “Somehow he looked like he had the prosthetics on, and yet at the same time it’s like he wasn’t wearing anything at all,” says Goth. “There was this ability with the prosthetics where I was able to connect with him.”

In preparation for the role, Elordi trained with instructors in the Japanese dance Butoh to create that angelic fluidity.

“The core of it is it’s a dance of reanimating a corpse, or a dance of death,” Elordi says. “You put yourself in a room and focus on something in a way that you wouldn’t usually. I could experience my lungs in a different way just because I was focusing on them. I could feel the message from my brain to my left toe, and what does that feel like and what does that mean? It was an excuse to focus on the movement from inside.”

It also was a chance to play one of the most legendary characters in all of fiction. It is indeed hard to meet anyone who does not know who (or what) the Frankenstein Monster is. That brings an immense weight. So at first, Elordi attempted to only give himself to del Toro, choosing to read the screenplay for the first time in a blank room and basing every instinct and image he had in his head from what was on the scripted page during that first read-through.

“I knew that Guillermo’s love of the world of Frankenstein was going to be so much larger than mine,” Elordi says. But at a certain point after production had begun in Toronto, he finally raised what he calls the “actor question.” 

“I asked Guillermo, ‘Should I watch the movies or not?’ And he looked me in the eye like I was a fool! He said, ‘They’re just movies. They can’t hurt you.’”

For the rest of Frankenstein’s production in Canada and the UK, Elordi allowed himself to gorge on the legacy of it all: “It was just a treat. Every evening I’d watch some version of the film or read a different version of the book, or find a children’s comic book version of Frankenstein. I just started devouring everything, which kind of kept the tone for the months as I was filming in that world.”

Meeting Your Maker

The first time this project entered Mia Goth’s life will forever hold a bit of the fairy tale in the actress’ mind. After all, it is quasi-storybook that as she was walking down a street, the Pan’s Labyrinth auteur called her out of the blue to say he had just watched Pearl and now wanted to meet about a project called Frankenstein.

“I said, ‘Alright, Guillermo del Toro, I would love to meet,’” Goth laughs. “I was obviously incredibly flattered and so excited.” It would be the first of many discussions the two would have about the film and her various roles therein. Indeed, Goth most prominently plays Elizabeth in the movie, a woman engaged to William Frankenstein (Felix Kammerer), Victor’s little brother, but whom the elder sibling is besotted with. Yet she also plays Claire, Victor and William’s mother who they lost at a tender age, and we see in ghostly flashbacks that haunt Victor’s memory. 

Still, there is perhaps another uncredited character she plays in the film, which looms large in del Toro’s own life, and this is a woman whom Goth got a sense of early on in the process.

“He invited me to his home where he has like a six-foot statue of Mary Shelley,” Goth remembers. “We spoke about Mary Shelley a lot.” It’s an amusing note, but one which underscores what is arguably del Toro’s greatest change to the material. In crafting a love letter to Mary Shelley, the storyteller has essentially inserted the author into Frankenstein in the Elizabeth role.

“The female force in the film is the most modern force,” the filmmaker explains. “Elizabeth brings compassion and understanding and somewhat the most modern point of view of the Other that is articulated in the film. So I wouldn’t call it anything but just say that this energy is there, and in some ways Elizabeth becomes Mary Shelley.”

That comes with the ability to intensely understand every player in the story, be they an exasperating scientist or a spirit of nature.

“One of her superpowers is that she’s able to see everyone for precisely who they are,” Goth says, “and she doesn’t have any aesthetic criteria. Her morals aren’t motivated by aesthetics. She’ll treat a butterfly and a cockroach just the same.” Unfortunately for Victor, this means she also sees his mania for what it is. As the star surmises, “Victor’s all head, and she lives with her heart.”

Which makes the fact she also plays his mother ever the more curious. Claire Frankenstein only appears prominently in one scene in the film, and she is clothed head to toe in crimson red. For the rest of the film, the only character to appropriate red in his fashion choices is Victor—to the point he is finally drowning in it when his entire laboratory in a Scottish watchtower is defined by only silver (it was the ideal metal for sepsis in the decades before Joseph Lister and germ theory) and lots, and lots, of red.

“He cannot let go of the fact that the universe took away his mother, and that color that she wore, red, will pursue him throughout the movie,” del Toro says. “He finds the most absolutely blind ways to deal with it.”

That cavernous laboratory set would also seem to emphasize the desolation of Victor’s pursuits, with the visualization of Victor courting the lightning involving the placement of a long silver rod into a deep void, from which the Creature will be given life.

“It’s certainly full of openings and protrusions, the lab,” del Toro chuckles. “I mean, the tower itself is not exactly hard to miss. But I think that one of the things that intrigued me about the Mary Shelley book, amongst many others, is the fact that she seems to be very taken by the idea of the creation of life without the female agency. These are lonely pleasures Victor has.”

In one of Isaac’s first scenes, he indeed boasts that he will take the power of birthing life away from God. The thought of a woman’s power never seems to enter his mind, a blindness that Goth’s Elizabeth is keenly observant of.

“I think she’s stuck,” Goth considers. “I think she’s incredibly isolated and lonely and feels like an outsider, and I think these are all feelings that I can only imagine Mary Shelley felt. She’s born into this world of men and she’s shaped by her own lack of love and connection. And she’s yearning for something more, for something deeper and more meaningful. When she comes across the Creature, I think she finally finds that.”

Imagining how Shelley might have really felt, and the world she was born into, is perhaps the greatest driving force of this Frankenstein. Del Toro can speak of at length about the Napoleonic period that Shelley came of age in, and at what the impact of witnessing the excesses of the French Revolution had on her mother, the protofeminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and how they all informed Frankenstein, as well as his own film which moves events up to the shadow of the Crimean War.

“Mary Shelley was birthed out of a mother that died 11 days later, and then she gave birth to stillborn children, or children that died a few days after being born,” del Toro says. “Sometimes without even a name, you know. All this fusing of birth, death, and the absence of justice or God, all these things are in undercurrents in the book that I think are tapped, for the first time in many ways, by the movie.”

Ultimately it blends and congeals into a film that del Toro suggests could be his final monster picture.

“It becomes an amalgam of the book, Mary Shelley’s biography, the historical context, artistic context, and my own biography. And at the end of the day, at the end of mixing all those things together, there’s a jambalaya of joy. Or a jambalaya of horror.”

It is easy to imagine that Shelley, like del Toro, might see them as one and the same.

Frankenstein is playing in select theaters now and will premiere on Netflix on Friday, Nov. 7.

The post Frankenstein: Exclusive Look Inside Guillermo del Toro’s Love Letter to Mary Shelley appeared first on Den of Geek.