Guillermo del Toro on Writing and Directing the Oscar-Nominated ‘Frankenstein’

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Did you always know that no matter how long it took,

“that you were going to do your version A version of Frankenstein?”

Not really. I have done 13 movies, and I have written, or Corridon 42. So I'm very well-versed with the fact that I'm never going to get to make the movies I could have made. So, and there was complicated, because I knew I wanted to make it appear. I knew I wanted to make it the 19th century.

And I knew I wanted to make it big and lavish and unoperatic. None of these words and none of these notions sound like a Hollywood blog buzzer. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times. And on today's episode, it's Guillermo del Toro.

Guillermo is a three-time Oscar-winning director, and this year, he's nominated for his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That is the classic novel which tells the tale of scientist Victor Frankenstein,

“the monster that he creates, and the many tragedies that ensue.”

I've been a fan of del Toro's work for years.

From Cronos is very first movie through titles like Blade Two,

Hans Labyrinth, Shape of Water, he is a master of mixing scares and tears. And it making monsters that are both terrifying and absolutely gorgeous to look at. His new movie Frankenstein is no exception. It is not an exaggeration to say that this film is the culmination of his life's work. It's a story that he has been obsessed with since he was a child.

He was seven years old when he saw the classic 1931 film version. He was only eleven when he read the book for the first time. And when we talked, I asked him to take me back to that moment. Tell me, how did you get a copy of the book? Tell me just tell me the whole story.

You know, I used to go to a supermarket near my home, where you would get all the expats. I'm already got a magazine. I'm favorite, right from Spain. And I would, I would shop for horror books there.

And for horror magazines, like famous monsters of film land, and at that age at eleven, I peddled my bicycle to that store. And I bought the paper back from Spanish publisher. And that was the 1818 text, which is for me the only text. The only version of the three versions that exist of the novel,

that was revised during Mary Shelley's life. The 1818 is the most pure for me. It's a little on discipline. There's a little on game league. It's a little on repentant.

But it's absolutely the one closest to the pulse of the biography of Mary Shelley, the head of Mary Shelley.

And I read it and I, what I always felt is the creature is me.

“What was it about the creature at that early age that spoke to you in such a strong way?”

I really believe that the depth of fear that your experience before you get into your teenage years is the most profound fear you will ever feel in your life. And every time you are afraid or angry or full of rage as an adult is that very young child controlling you, feeling abandoned or feeling apprehensive about the future or the world. The deepest questions, at least me being raised Catholic, you know,

he was raised partially by my great aunt, who I called my grandmother. And she would tell me, look, you're going to go to Purgatory no matter what, for hundreds of years because of original sin. And I thought this is like time share, but for the soul. This is a complete scam.

You know, there's such a pageantry, such a cemetery to Catholicism. And at 11, the questions I had about the world were very profound. And Frankenstein, the book, downsized a lot of these questions. The reason why the world can be savage, why the world can be cruel, why how can we be cruel to each other?

Watching your movie and revisiting the book, which I hadn't read since I was a teenager.

I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but the loneliness of it was really underscored for me. And I was able, possibly in a way, I wasn't as sophisticated as you said 11 year old, that I didn't see what I was younger. It's just, he is so lonely. He is the only one of himself out there.

And I believe that was managed Shelley. How so? I don't think managed Shelley felt comfortable in the gender that she was put in by society.

“I think she had the spirit of her mother, which was also a free spirit”

of great hunger for the world. The feminist writer Mary Wolston-Craft. Yes. And she lived large and wild and beautifully.

And then basically in the eyes of her father William Goodwin, Mary Kielzer.

And in fact, teachers are to read on the gravestone of her mother. You know, the sort of crushing feeling for her that she is motherless and somewhat fatherless, that she's alone in the world. And I think that's the key for me. I felt so alone at age 11 and so full of love to give and so full of rage to this

voice of it was a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young and this, you know, some people find in the Bible the way to articulate their faith, their existence. I found it in this book. To quote maybe inappropriately, Robert and you're on heat. When he says, "I am alone, I am not lonely."

When you were a kid, were you alone or were you lonely or was it both? I think I was very lonely. And why was that? You had this aunt or this great aunt, you had other family members, but where did that come from?

“I think the way you interest back the world and where you put it and how do you shelve it?”

And how it affects you? If you are over empathic, if you are, if you are, if you day the suffering of others too hard. And you grow up with a much more somber, much more melancholic disposition. You know? And I was definitely resonant and I was very attuned to the way adults told you the way the world was,

not being truthful. You know, I saw the lies. I saw the falsehoods. Can you recall a moment where maybe it was religion, maybe it was something else, where someone an adult who you trusted told you a thing?

And then you were like, "That is sorry, by far, that is not true." Like, I can tell. I can see it. Why are you lying to me? Yeah.

No. Well, I was very pointedly, you can see on my movies. It started with my father. You know, my father won the lottery in 1969. And he changed, he changed quite a bit.

And it's not that he was a great fault. I'm talking about nuances. You know, he was by all accounts on my old experience, a good man. But he was not very consistent with what he said and what he did. And I did ask him, and he said, "One thing doesn't have to do anything with the other."

Which was marvelous. I said, "How can you be so Catholic?" You were part of the opposite day and then you behave like this. And he said, "Well, one thing doesn't have to do, a charity. For him charity existed as a notion in the church.

You gave money in the church and of a charity. But charity to your fellow human beings was another matter altogether." That that make you see the world as you get older, as more black and white,

“or did you understand that people are contradictory?”

I'm not sure anything. I actually love the fact that the world is neither black nor white in a constant way. I think the flow of the black and the white through the gray. It's so liberating to understand that that's the nature of the universe.

The young and the young revolving constantly and never ending.

You know, nothing is permanent. That is really good. What I didn't like was the inconsistent way in which it's phrased. The nature of the world puzzled me less than the declarations the adults made about what the world was.

We exist in a paradoxical state and anything we want to become permanent or safe or good or bad,

“quote unquote, is a tantrum, a tantrum of the soul.”

And that's the answer that I found an early age on the book of Job. When Job says to God, "Why me? Why this?" And the answer God gave him is, "Why not?" You know, it's really, really phenomenal to find that an early age. And I did, I was raising in Jesuit school, so we have a spiritual counselor.

And I was very close to several priests growing up. So I asked this question of them. I really, I really asked the questions of my ethical and spiritual advisor. And as with school I said, I wanted to discuss the book of Job so urgently. He just said, "Well, God made the world in a way that we don't have to understand."

And that didn't satisfy me. I found more answers later on in the Tao as a younger man. That seems deficient on that priest's part. I mean, you know, I went to Jesuit College. Jesuit's supposed to be smarter than this.

You know, the great thing about the Tao, it phrases it very much more beautifully.

He says, "He who tries to use the tools of the master, basically will cut himself."

You know, they are not tools that you can handle. And I understand the tools that make the world and that make the world so full of brothers. They, you marry on a celebrant, is that they somebody got run over by a car. Is that somebody lost a son. Is that somebody gained birth to a daughter?

I mean, that's the nature of the world. And I understand that easier through that phrasing. I feel like if you're not using the tools of the master. If you're not using the text that you were given as a child in order to make sense of the world, it feels like art and specifically when your younger books in literature is a way that you came to understand the world,

came to your own understanding of the world. And I'm just curious, how did that start? How did you become a reader?

“How did you realize that this was the way that you were going to start to make sense of how everything was?”

In 1969, when my father won the lottery, I was five years old. As part of his new life as a gentle man, gentle man, he bought a library. And it was full of basic literature, children's classics, quote unquote, and then Michael BDR of Heldon and Michael BDR of art, two in Michael BDRs of general knowledge. So at age five, I started to five or six.

I started to wander into the library more and more. And I started reading really fast. I was completely bilingual at age seven. I read the entire library in a couple of years. And a lot of the books were very dark.

He had a collection of Latin American writers and some Mexican writers. And I read all of Oscar Wilde. And I read Victor Hugo's Notre Dame and let me say that I have a Montecristo. And et cetera et cetera et cetera. And I realized this was a way to communicate with the world.

And just as a comic book's where art was. So I discovered health, biology, the history of art, all of it had the same time. It was a tumultuous time. That library was my gateway into words and images.

“That's incredible. Do you still have any of those books?”

Yes, I have them right behind me. You're the original books that you read when you were seven. Yeah, the English like the video of art is behind me.

That's amazing because I think most kids,

whether it's comic books or the books that they were raised with, I find that their parents end up tossing them in some fashion. That happened to me with my comic books with my mother and she burned them. She didn't even just tell them. She burned them. She burned them. She actually didn't like a fireplace?

No, no. In an empty log next to the house, she said,

She said to like, "The gardener."

They'll think all this and burn it. So she could organize my socks on my drawers. But, you know, those were formative years because movies were already an obsession. And I was reading a comic book, so I was very familiar with Nila, that was Jack Kirby, you know, a Steve Ditko, all the comic book artists.

And at the same time, I was becoming familiar with Goya, Manim, Manim, Manim, Degar. You know, everything had the same value. And at the same time, I became a very knowledgeable and young hypochondric. I knew about the cirrhosis, trickin' noses, glaucoma, high blood pressure. And I have been, you name it. And to this day, you can see it on my movies.

I have an obsession with biology that comes from those years.

Well, all of these building blocks led to the writer, director, creative artists that you are right now. It sounds like a lot of hardship was involved, however, around all of that. Is there, you can't imagine the world

“which none of this happened, but is it, do you ever think?”

I wish I was less lonely as a child, and I would be okay with being less creative. Like, have you ever thought about how one led to the other and the trade-offs? Well, they're indivisible. Yeah. You know, drumming, drumming company, famously said you got a gift and a whip at the same time.

Yeah. To have is to fear, to desire is to fear. There is no way to be a father without feeling fear for the well-being of your children. There's no way to be in love without having the bang of fear

that you, one, they may lose. You know, it is the nature of the cosmos to receive both. After the break, Guillermo talks about turning the story he loved all his life into an Oscar-nominated screenplay. I'm Jason Jones, I'm a reporter and meteorologist at the New York Times.

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This is the kind of work that makes subscribing to the New York Times so valuable and it's how you can support fact-based, independent journalism. So, if you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com/subscribe. Let's talk a little bit about that screenplay. Talk to me about when you first started.

You literally, the first day you started writing this. What was the first scene? Was it about structure? Was it a character? Was it dialogue?

How did you start? The first thing I did start with the beginning because I wanted to... I knew I wanted to show a very violent attack of the creature to the ship.

And I wanted the audience to say, "Well, I have never seen this before."

And to find the creature monstrous and re-prehensible and savage. And then I knew after going through the whole movie, you would understand.

“You would come back to that moment and realize, "Oh, that's why that violence occurred."”

And so you would understand the other side at the end of the movie. That was my hope. And then I knew I wanted to create this sort of... Almost imaginary childhood for Victor, in which she was already quite an atrocious mama's boy. You know?

And because he felt slighted, it would feel the old, the world owed him. We are now in an era in which we can see many of the most powerful men are... ...man children that feel the world owes them something that we are all paying for.

And I felt that was that felt very alive.

I wanted it to feel alive in the way that the novel felt alive when Mary Shelley published it. You know, it felt as of now. Mother, loom very large, as I went into the adaptation, I knew the romantics of where and our mother.

These were people that took the savor and went to war and galloped through waterloo.

And when they gave recitals, they were the tool of the devil in flaming passions in young hearts and being in favor of death. And love being fused into one, all of these things started to purify. And I wanted to encompass the romantic spirit and the loneliness that comes with it and the doom, the sense of doom and hope.

And that comes with it and the sense of great your poetry that comes with it.

“So all these things occupied by my mind and that's why when we started this campaign for this movie, I said the only nomination that I really desire is better that the screenplay.”

Because I have written so much for decades and this is the screenplay on the proudest of. God, I have so many questions about the romantics, but we're going to move on. You said this is the screenplay that you are most proud of. You have written screenplays for all of your films and as you said, you've written many more that have gone unproduced. Just tell me why you're so proud of this one. One of the things I found people that think they know the book, that's an illusion that happens often with those characters that are so large.

People think they know people think they know Dracula people think they know Frankenstein people think they know him on the crystal, but the mechanics that made the books what they are.

“Escape them. I think that one of the things I wanted to do was to I knew I was going to generate 90% new dialogue, but I wanted to feel of a piece with the book.”

So to learn, I read, for example, volumes of letters from the 1800s. There's a Patoa and a cadence and a style to the language that takes quite a while to try to condense and then you can save things to you. I am obscene, but to myself I simply am, you know, which to me is a very concussive statement, the language of the movie has to be a little more stylized and animated or operatic or there are conscious choices that require a lot of work. When you're writing dialogue given that you're trying to achieve this sort of Shelley Esk, Patoa as you said, how do you know that the rhythm is right because it feels like it's as much about rhythm as it is about words.

I have been a screenplay writer for about 30 years and the rhythms I have as a native speaker which come from Latin languages, right, are very, are very melodic and long. English tends to be very percussive, you know, a modern English certainly has the right that that of Hemingway, you know, a whole paragraph in Spanish can be said in English in four words.

“No, it's very concussive, it's very percussive, it's very rhythmic and 19th century dialogue is a mixture of both, you know, it has a certain rhythm, you know, nobody says, can I have a piece of toast?”

They would say, I hesitate to ask, but if it wouldn't mean too much trouble, may I partake of a piece of your toast, you know, there's a tentative, quaintness and at the same time clarity. Do you, um, do you write dialogue only in English? No, no, I have only written three, three movies in Spanish, you know, a chronicle rebels wagon and puns labyrinth, but I, I love, I saw, I say it's like, I'm also involved in Spanish, in English, in English, I have to ponder on ponder on and move things around.

It's, it's a mystery, and then I alien music to me, but it's a exquisite, but you, you cannot, it's very hard to master languages to the point of trying to write in them.

“I would like to get, um, we're coming up on our, on our, by the book segment where I'm just going to ask you a bunch of sort of quick questions about stuff you're reading, but I want to ask you about the ending here, right?”

And, um, adaptation, if we're talking about, as you put in another interview, transmutation, you know, the ending of Shelley's book is quite stark.

The captain of the ship enters his cabin, he discovers the creature standing over Frankenstein's lifeless body.

Yeah, in your version, they have an exchange Frankenstein and his creature Frankenstein and the thing he created, um, talk and there's forgiveness, there's understanding, there's a reconciliation.

“Yeah, um, why did you feel like that was the truest way for your version of the story to end?”

In my, in my opinion, the, the dialogue that occurs in the cabin in this version is the dialogue that occurs in the ice. Me turn the creature on Victor, you know, earlier in the book earlier in the book, uh, where he tells him, look, this is what happened to me and, uh, to me, the radical thing to do in the romantic time was to end up in a almost proto existentialist way, in which the creature is born by the current and the distance into nothing, you know.

That is a very, uh, a beautiful night nail is of nailism, you know, it's like a, a very powerful, uh, very, very counter to what was involved in the world, you know.

Um, therefore, very anarchy and to me right now, the radical position is grace, you know, um, and the fact that, uh, we tend to believe that forgiveness is very elaborate. But I think forgiveness is actually grace. We want to forgive and we want to be forgiven. We really long for it. And, uh, and I think that's the radical position for him now, uh, one of the things I decided very much so is, uh, if I have fuse through the decades with the spirit of the book and how autobiographical it was for Mary Shelley, I believe, to write this book.

It was all, uh, uh, uh, rephrasing her life. I decided, I would rephrase my experience as a father and my experience as a son. And the ending have a very strong tie with my own life, you know, and, uh, and that is to accept the grace and the rhythms of the world. To actually, you know, the movie is started with the son rising and the captain turning his back to it. And it ends with the creature facing the son and accepting it. Amanda named himself to, to that current is a different current than the current that Shelley worked great in the ending, but it failed like, look, if I am to sing this song, I'll sing it with my voice.

You know, at the, um, I think it was at Can, uh, when they premiered sentimental value, walking tree or said something like kindness is the new punk rock or tenderness of the new punk rock. You also saw it in last summer Superman, the idea that in times like these actually the radical thing is to be nice is to be kind is to forgive. It's to forge some sort of understanding between people. I think I, I think I, I proceeded a few years ago saying motion is the new punk.

“And, and I, I sustain it because here's the thing, grace and hope in ignorance have no value, but grace and hope with the knowledge of the world and how it is is radical.”

You are not doing it out of ignorance, you're doing it as a conscientious object to the world, you know?

When we come back, Guillermo answers some of our Bible questions.

Guillermo, as we approach the end of our conversation here, uh, I'm going to swear back to books. Your love, my love. What? For more than a decade, every week, the New York Times book review has asked authors a recurring set of questions about their reading as part of a series that we called by the book. I have a feeling that you above all people are going to have some very interesting answers.

What is the best book that you've ever either received or given as a gift? I would say the, the towel in the translation of Stephen Mitchell is one of the books.

“I, I love to, I discovered and I love to give and another great book, I think is called Wabi Savi for artists, you know?”

I love to give that, that I have received, um, that, you know, I think that almost nobody dares to buy me books. But, uh, I would say, I would say there's a really good book that is called Navocob's Butterfly. Which is a collection of miscellaneous. And I think Navocob have a fascination with the entomology and, uh, you know, particularly fascinated by butterflies. And when it collects loose, loose pieces that I find very compelling.

A lot more compelling than than he's organized studies of literature, for example.

Are there any classic novels that you only just recently discovered or read for the first time?

As a young reader, I have difficulty finishing my book. Hey, man, you're not the first. Whenever you hit the wailing passages as a young reader, I said, well, I would be completely shipwrecked. And that, and now, uh, like recently, you know, like a few years ago, I finished it. And the wailing passages became my favorite.

And, uh, and, uh, and I, I realize how much you change as a, as a reader. This is a classic journey with Moby Dick. It feels like everyone tries to start it at some point. They bail. They say there's too much about spermicetti, um, and then when they actually get to it and get through it.

Yeah, it is the detail oriented nature of the description of how you take away all and do all the stuff that people fall in love with. Yeah.

“Is there one book that you would be okay with never being adapted into film or never being adapted again into film?”

I think a guy that is very hard to adapt, but very rewarding is really a bravery. Um, Gregory, he's style is full of you as something you can bestish. You know, he's, he, he, he, the way he uses adjectives and then they walk in the way. Seems to be something that you can do, quote unquote. You know, and when you're a young writer, you say, well, I'm going to write in the style of, yeah, sure.

It's so funny that you say that about Bradbury just fell out there because I, you know, I've read something wicked this way comes many times. Yeah, and actually tried to read it again to my child and it was just not the right point. Like the language is was actually sort of more floored in sentimental than I recall, even though I love that book.

“And, and I remember seeing finally on the big screen, um, the Jack Clayton film.”

Yeah, and thinking about how that film was trying to capture the tone, the language, the style, and, and it didn't succeed in many parts. It succeeded, um, you know, with Jonathan prices character and some up, but, but the nostalgia, the, the sort of like sepia tone nature of that book is almost impossible to capture without feeling like, like a rip off of the natural or something. I mean, Bradbury is very difficult. Um, I have to ask this. I have to ask this question.

It is a true that the first movie that you ever saw that you were call seeing was the Lawrence Olivier version of weathering heights.

Uh, so how does it feel that your creature is now Heathcliff?

“Yeah, I believe it or not, it's full circle for me, because I saw it with my mother in cinema, down down that is now a parking lot.”

Uh, and, and I remember falling, there's something very big to a child. I fell asleep on my mother's lap on our phone call to us tomorrow, you know, in the morse or something, a very dramatic, and, and I think it made me who I am.

So the fact that the creature is is now in weathering heights, it's in the west, words, and that's basically, uh, powerful.

Well, I have to tell you, Jacob already looks, uh, gorgeous in both, both films.

“So yeah, I don't, the, the, the beauty of the Jacob is I think that I'll watch here reveals my wearing makeup in, in Frankenstein.”

He can open himself to a vulnerability that I don't think existed before, and he's in his filming work, and I'm very curious about the weathering heights I haven't seen it yet.

Yeah, um, Guillermo del Toro, thank you so very much for joining the book review. This has been just an absolute delight.

“Well, thank you, and what a pleasure to win my really quick.”

That is the best couple of it. You can get it. Y'all, thank you, man. All right, man. Good luck. Have a great rest of your Oscar out here. This show is produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Diamond. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and Paula Schuman and mixed by Pedro Rosato.

Our theme was composed by Alicia by YouTube. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.