‘Frankenstein,’ Guillermo del Toro’s 50-year dream: ‘The biography of humanity is one of broken families’

Guillermo del Toro finds material for his films in his memories, his traumas, and the favorite monsters he grew up with. Frankenstein — his most recent film — as he recounts in an interview held at the St. Regis Hotel in Mexico City, was the dream of an 11-year-old boy from the provinces. He remembers riding his bicycle to a supermarket of the now-defunct Maxi chain, buying a pocket-sized edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece published by Bruguera, and telling himself, “I’m going to make this movie.”

Fifty years later, at 61, the Guadalajara-born filmmaker — passionate about his country — admits that he couldn’t skip Mexico when presenting a film that, like many of his projects (as he acknowledges), “almost didn’t happen,” and that has allowed him to “exorcize” his own story.

In a room designed for meeting with the press — surrounded by props like a human anatomy book similar to Victor Frankenstein’s, a replica skull, and a quill resting in an inkwell — Del Toro, ever smiling and kind, can’t help but dwell on the “beauty” of a work that marked him since childhood and that he insists is Shelley’s own life story. He says that his adaptation — a gothic, fantastical, and modern version of the British author’s novel — seeks to bridge biographical gaps that haven’t been explored directly but are present across her other works, such as tyrannical father figures or the idea of war that defines the Romantic movement.

“Romanticism is born from the recognition of death and love, and how they can work together,” said Del Toro. “Romanticism is a very violent, very iconoclastic, very anarchic moment, seeking to destroy what was seen as a hypocritical society. People forget that Mary Shelley was 16 when she met Percy Shelley [her husband], who was 21 and married. They decided to elope against all the family’s opposition. He brought her a poison, laudanum, which was an opium tincture. ‘Drink this poison and I’ll shoot myself in the head. And we’ll live together eternally,’ he told her. For me, Romanticism is the English becoming Mexican, embracing melodrama,” he added with a laugh.

The filmmaker, winner of three Academy Awards — including Best Director for The Shape of Water (2018) — still doesn’t quite understand how his Frankenstein adaptation came to be, given the “astronomical figures” working against it and the fact that, despite this, he spent more than 20 years developing it. As with his version of Pinocchio (2022), everyone told him no — until Netflix finally gave his creativity the green light. The streaming giant organized a premiere for Del Toro this past Monday worthy of the grandeur of his latest film. The Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso — an architectural landmark dating back to 1583 in Mexico City’s historic center — was transformed into a decorative and symbolic stage for yet another of the kinds of stories the director loves to tell: tales of childhood, children, and horror.

“For me, the biography of humanity is one of broken families,” said Del Toro. “So, all the great movements — as Shakespearean tragedy or historical analysis so aptly demonstrates — stem from a lack of affection in early childhood. Whether it’s the Napoleonic Wars or political corruption, these are the result of missing figures who would have completed the self in childhood. Did you see Blade II [another of his films]? It’s the story of a vampiric son who returns to ask his father, ‘Why did you create me like this?’ And Frankenstein is, basically, the story of another child created by a wounded child to heal his own childhood, and it reproduces the brutality. It’s not that the work is a metaphor; our lives are the metaphor. It’s incredibly curious when you affirm, ‘I’m not going to repeat what I saw my father do wrong,’ and then at 41 you say, ‘Oh, when did I become my dad?’”

The parallels between Del Toro’s feelings, the work, and its characters are undeniable. The director of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) also took the liberty of portraying a moment from the novel that had never before been shown on film: the creation of the creature itself. Adaptations of Frankenstein have always shown us the monster and the lightning strike that brings it to life, but never the prelude leading up to that moment. The Guadalajara-born filmmaker didn’t want to depict it as one of terror, but rather as one of “joy.” For this reason, he decided to film the sequence as a musical, envisioning Oscar Isaac (as Victor Frankenstein) as an orchestra conductor setting the score — a waltz begins to play and the creature’s body starts to take shape.

“Imagine that moment, you have a guy who’s been wanting to create something for 20 or 30 years. That’s the moment he’s most fired up,” explained Del Toro. “He’s happy. And it has to be a moment of excess of anatomy, of blood, tendons, and muscles. From there comes the hangover that, for all of us born in Mexico, makes us wonder, what do we do with the leftovers? The questions that someone from the developed world doesn’t ask, we ask ourselves. Víctor throws away the leftovers. That’s how he sees humanity. He doesn’t care. He cares about his idea. It’s a brutality that you only question when you’ve grown up in a country where that language is commonplace.”

“Because I am Mexican”

As usual, Del Toro was greeted like a rock star when he arrived at the Colegio de San Ildefonso with his leading actors. He chatted with people along the red carpet, took photos, and signed memorabilia, pictures, and posters that fans had brought before the screening of his film. The excitement was such that, after introducing the movie, he joked that he was taking his actors — Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi (who plays the creature) — out “to get drunk” while the film was being shown, and that they would return afterward for a brief conversation with Netflix’s co–chief executive officer, Ted Sarandos, who was also in attendance.

Two and a half hours later, with a few tequilas and pulques in them — as Del Toro admitted — the three came back to talk about the film. Although Sarandos’s questions were asked in English, both Isaac, who is of Guatemalan descent, and Del Toro insisted on keeping the conversation in Spanish. The exception was Elordi, who drew cheers from the female fans during his brief remarks in English — and in his effort to say “Muchas gracias” to the fans present.

The Mexican director is a staunch defender of old-school filmmaking, always striving to minimize computer-generated imagery and to champion art “made by humans for humans.” Sarandos asked him why he put so much effort into the details and the almost artisan-like craftsmanship that goes into each of his projects. Amid the growing wave of artificial intelligence in the film industry, Del Toro — emboldened and in high spirits — gave a response that has become something of a trademark and drew applause from the crowd.

“Because I’m Mexican,” he said. “The way we see art in Mexico is with two hands and two balls. We don’t have digital resources, damn it, but we have the craftsmanship, the artistry, the vision, the color, the texture. I’m not going to film like a first-world director, even if I’m in the first world. The ingenuity, the way to make something look bigger, more beautiful, more magnificent, that’s all Mexican instinct.”

After Del Toro’s “horrible” experience with Harvey and Bob Weinstein — who stripped him of creative control over his first Hollywood film, Mimic (1997), and tried to sink his career before it reached its stratospheric level — he vowed never to lose creative control of his projects again. That’s also why he knows how to choose his battles — something that applies to the limited theatrical release of Frankenstein due to Netflix’s business model.

“I fight for the size of the screen. I’m interested in this film existing in theaters, but what I fight for most is the size of the ideas. That’s what’s vital. What’s vital is that the size of the ideas is never tamed, and that we always aim to make great cinema, cinema that transports you and cinema that shows you the work of hundreds of people who care that you’re sitting there,” he declared.

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