Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

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Текст книги "Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions"

Автор книги: Guillermo del Toro

Соавторы: Marc Scott Zicree

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Then several designs for the mask, and the idea of him having no eyelids and no lips. I wanted him to be like the embodiment of S

Then I wanted something that looked 1920s but high-tech, sort of like the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t do it.

^{Kroenen’s lair was designed to have a 1920s high-tech, Gothic feel, reminiscent of the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.}

^{BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 150}

^{Hearkens back to ideas del Toro explored for his semi-mechanical, lethal protagonist in an early, unmade project called The Left Hand of Darkness, an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.}

* Shootout in a henhouse for M.C.

* In exp./storeroom hens S.

Mechanical Prince model 2714591 Pat.Pend

(1) and (2) cavities ready for eye insertion.

See ref. manual for more.

(6) Sideways gear for head movement.

(3) Crystal electromagnetic cavity w/organ

(5) Gold-Plated thoraxic shell

* “Where have you Been?” / ”Ranging over THE EARTH, from end to end. “The Lord give and the Lord takes away” “Why is life given to those who find it so bitter, they long for death but it does not come…” Book of JOB.

GDT: Over here [opposite] is Kroenen coming out of the floor like a ghost. That was a very nice idea, but we couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it, because he became physical. Originally I had this idea that he and Rasputin were able to come out of the shadows. And Rasputin does. If you watch the movie, in the mental asylum, the guard uses a flashlight, closes the door, and Rasputin comes out of the shadows.

MSZ: That’s very, very cool. And, again, you’re using very interesting palettes with the blacks punctuated by whites and reds.

GDT: Yeah. What is interesting with the pages in this notebook is that I started trying to do little compositions on each page. The blood helps now and then, as well as the little Lovecraftian symbols here and there.

MSZ: What’s this detail in the margin, underneath the blood splatter?

GDT: Those are little bells—glass bells that I saw in National Geographic or something. They are used to shoo away spirits. I thought the shape was beautiful. I drew them because I don’t like photographing stuff. That’s one thing that is very curious—I hate photographing. For many years my wife said, “Why don’t you take any family photos?” And I said to her—I know this sounds like an affectation, but it isn’t—I said, “I can’t just photograph something. I need to say what is in the frame, what is the color.” You know, contrary to Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick was such a great photographer, and he found everything. I can’t. I have to fabricate everything in the image. So whenever I see a drawing, or I’m in a museum, and I see something I like, I could take a photograph, but I do a sketch in the notebook instead.

^{The design of Kroenen.}

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 37B}

Glass bells for evil spirits.

–We could open with a sequence in a “mini-mart” in which 3 or 4 monsters surround the cashier and Hellboy comes in and taunts them. Then he lights or puts out a cigarette with his fingers and saves it for later. Little daggers filled with holy water. Malaysan Revenants hungry for virgin’s blood

–You should date a little more.

–Galician forests are very much like those found in Arthur Machen

–A man is called upon to rebuild a stone labyrinth

–For Wind in the Willows: PICKLED TOAD

–The mini-mart was built on an ancient cemetery.

–The disorder inside the truck bothers Hellboy: I know it’s a Garbage truck, but…

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 13A}

^{The Rasputin character differed markedly from the historic image of the man–a long-haired, bearded, almost ascetic monk—with which del Toro began the character design process.}

–Butchered cattle for sale on M street. Blood flows down the sidewalk. Steam pours out of the coffee-roasting machines. Very hot, wet streets

–Small gas lamp used at street stalls during the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries

–Rasputin (1872–1916). His name means “crossroads.” In 1909, he becomes a member of the royal court. He travels in 1911 and sometime in 1912

–Alias “Guisha.” Letter to Ilsa. Beforehand

–Ride the body of a dead man so that he tells you his secrets

–Key for H’s glove.

–Ilsa is given a small diary In it is written eveything that will happen in the years to come. “The book of sand.”

–Photo of R.(6–1916)

–Facts are far more damaging than lies. Sometimes truth is the tool to use to bring a man down.

–Jackets for Monte Cristo.

^{The Rasputin character in Hellboy drawn by Simeon Wilkins.}

^{Rasputin played by Karel Roden.}

MSZ: So Rasputin, of course, had the long, black hair, but he’s bald in Hellboy.

GDT: Well, that comes from the comic. I think Mike did it because he wanted to purposely imply more of a reborn magician.

You know, I read every book on him. I found fascinating theories of how he resisted death. There’s one theory that says that Prince Yusupov, who was supposed to kill him, and supposedly tried to kill him for twenty minutes, was actually giving him a blowjob. So he came out and said, “I cannot kill him!” [laughs] Well, he was trying, but it was a very slow method. [laughs] It would take a long time. Another theory was that the cyanide in the food was a small dose. There was one book that literally explained, step-by-step, how it was just a really botched attempt at both a blowjob and an assassination.

But among the facts I found that were interesting was the fact that the explosion in Tunguska Forest, the famous explosion of an object that was never recovered, was like the equivalent of an X-File in tsarist Russia. I put that in the movie, in the director’s cut. The storm came from that explosion. I tried to come up with a great backstory for Rasputin, which is not in the movie. He’s a convert, and he really believes he’s bringing about the end of the world for good, because this world is too corrupt, and so on, and so forth.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 36A}

^{Del Toro knew he wanted to include a spiked pit trap in Hellboy.}

–Room in which Kroenen opens the trap in the floor, leaving HB hanging from a rope. Abe, or a rucksack, falls on the spikes below

–A hospital for children of the war. “Thousands of children came through these doors in the 1930s. Bad vibe”

– Some of us are like this cylinder of wax. We can replay whatever happened.

–Open-air Chinese pharmacy with an anatomic model

–Patterns on the floors for the TOP-SHOT

– In HB’s room, the pick-up “bed” is where he saw Liz for the first time.

–Cartoons and movies are playing on HB’s televisions.

–The Baby Behemoth’s birth

–Tentacles emerge from his eye whenever anyone says “Hellboy” to him! “Child…” “Look what you have done”

^{The pit trap ended up claiming Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) as a victim.}

GDT: There’s a piece of architecture on the top here [opposite] that I thought would be intriguing. We never made it on Hellboy.

On the right is the sort of trap door with spikes that ended up in Kroenen’s lair. I just wanted to have that really pulpish feel. I love Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. The great thing about the Fu Manchu novels is how inventive the traps are. To this day, my favorite trap in a Fu Manchu novel is, there is one where they say, “This is his deadliest weapon.” And they go, “Oh, my God,” and then they prepare the revolvers, and they go, “At the count of three, open the door,” and they open the door. They enter, and it’s an empty room. There’s nothing. And they go, “Nothing happened.” And then all of a sudden, a giant mushroom blooms from the mouth of one of them, and the other one starts screaming, and a mushroom blooms from their noses, mouths, eyes, and they realize the room is full of spores. I love that. Anyway, that’s the spikes.

And then at the bottom, you can see a thing that is ultimately in the movie, which is like a Cthulhu creature being birthed out of the midsection of Rasputin. [laughs]

^{BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 44}

^{Hellboy provided an opportunity to deploy a tentacled, Cthulhu-like creature the likes of which del Toro has been drawing for years.}

–What are you reading? Words, words, words. What’s it about?… ? He tells him his own story.

–You can’t take anything from me hut my life.

–Ofelia returns the jack-in-the-box engagement ring to him.

* Careful: beyond this. He: You don’t love me. Marry someone handsome.

–With the pig’s head, after looking for him in its nostrils (to be or not…) the doubt

–The traitors RG.

–I must be cruel only to be Kind.

+THE TRAP, the duel with his friend.

–The fly that accuses.

+Ernie’s farewell.

–Fight and bullets.

T* The face of daddy-God (without the shell.)

^{Storyboards by Simeon Wilkins.}

^{As Hellboy moved closer to production, del Toro began to record ideas for specific scenes, including images of Hellboy silhouetted against the moon.}

GDT: These illustrations [opposite] were done closer to production, but not yet in production. And, again, I knew that Mignola drew the shoulders more sloping, and I knew that there was no way to do that to a human silhouette, because the thing that determines how you do the architecture of monsters is the articulation points. That’s the only thing you cannot change in a human body. You have a joint, or you don’t have a joint. I didn’t know how to make the shoulders more like the drawing, so I came up with the idea of a Civil War–type of coat, with the little cape on the shoulders. And I was praying that it would work in leather, and it came out very well, I think. I was trying to see if it was still Hellboy with big boots and pants, because in the comic, again, he doesn’t wear boots—he has hooves—and he has short pants.

Then on the top right I knew I wanted him to rip off a sword, a sword from a statue, and use it to battle a tentacled monster. And that’s in the movie.

There’s some other stuff that didn’t make it into the movie, though. Some compositions—him silhouetted by the moon, certain roofs, and stuff like that.

MSZ: There’s these little arches again, these pointed arches.

GDT: Well, I always like architecture that frames the characters, if I can do it.

MSZ: Also, there are references to Wind in the Willows throughout these notes. Was that a project that you were working on?

GDT: Well, it’s a project that I wrote with Matthew Robbins for Disney, and I think it’s a really good screenplay. We tried to make it really, really as true to the book as possible, and then we went to Disney and they said, “Could you make Toad skateboard?” And I left the project.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 34B}

–Hellboy uses a broken sword. It could be made of bronze and enormous enough for a statue

–In Wind in the Willows there could a duel between Toad and Weasel on the gable roof. There Toad [?] him in the face

–Chase through skylight valley. Hellboy.

–The lightning overexposes TOAD WEASEL.

Attic in Toad’s mansion

Redesign Hellboy’s overcoat for the movie…

Embossed BPRD patch into the leather of the jacket.

Should the upper part be any darker??

–Collar kept standing up with TAPE.

–Military campaign–style cape helps give him a “Mignola” outline

–For the machine that opens the cosmic portal (the gyroscope), CGI needs to be used for realism.

Make it longer than in the comic to help the outline and hide the tail.

GOTHIC LINES

^{Del Toro named Hellboy’s gun “The Good Samaritan” and asked his art team to develop a series of studies, including those by Sergio Sandoval at DDT}.

^{Here, del Toro instructs Ron Perlman (Hellboy) on how to point the massive gun, which somehow looked the right size in Perlman’s large hands.}

^{TyRuben Ellingson came up with the final design.}

GDT: Well, one of the gags here [opposite] is in the movie, which is Hellboy sliding. I wanted him sliding and shooting backward.

Above him is a really early design of the Samaritan, and this is the page where I came up with the name “The Good Samaritan” for the gun. People think it’s in the comic. It’s never been.

The bottom was something that I wanted to do that is not there. It was like a Jacques Tourneur moment in which you see Sammael’s shadow in the foreground.

Then in the middle, I like to play with the flashlights. We did some of that, but not to that degree.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 36B}

–He grinds his teeth so hard when he smiles that one of his front teeth breaks. With push in.

–We need to give the pistol a name

–Ellipses with fluttering of moth wings.

–Hellboy falls down a ventilation shaft while fighting with Sammy

–Even though it’s a revolver, the pistol should eject cartridges like an automatic. The silencer might retract

The Good Samaritan.

–When the underground dwellers are killed, hobos warn them about Sammael and his enormous appetite.

FLASHLIGHTS

–Shadow and bone noises in the museum.

–Hellboy gets punched but manages to land well. He breaks the tiles in a straight line as he slides across them.

–Kroenen should listen to his Wagner records with a refined, absolute delight.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 41A}

^{was inspired by a Japanese mask del Toro recorded in his notebook.}

–Kodo drum ensemble, but without techno elements.

–Trip to Japan with Lorenza, Marianne, and in– laws courtesy of Blade II. I hope the movie is a hit in this country. I want to take my girls to Ghibli Museum to see Miyazaki’s stuff.

Hellboy sets a booby trap filled with barbs. He’s the one who sets it off: “Trigger” in the floor

Yellow light.

–Concrete tunnel in Tokyo.

–Dessert: NATAREKOKO.

LANDMINE sends barbs flying when it explodes.

NATAREKOKO

Scarlet

Kroenen’s mask. Made of white porcelain or black leather with a bright red device that fits over his mouth

^{Sergio Sandoval at DDT did numerous conceptual iterations of Kroenen’s face and mask.}

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 41B}

–Push in and follow HB as he backs away.

–There should be some Oriental influence on the design of Kroenen’s Nazi uniform. Flags with [swastika]

–Amaniga moves his creatures really quickly despite the fact that they’re so large.

–Sammael’s voice should be made by fusing three voices played backward that alternate pronouncing letters:

–We left the hotel early and ate sushi in the street—a disaster.

Amber light illuminates Sammael as he eats a guard.

The smoke from a blackout heightens the backlight.

–Paint job a la Z II on his face.

–The world’s greatest paranormal detective. He doesn’t really detect that much. He’s a bit of supernatural bouncer.

–For the set’s metallic finish refer to Chichone.

–Sammael attacks Left-Right and then vice-versa, in serious ass-kicking mode.

–He stabs his arm.

^{The final design.}

GDT: This page [opposite] is from a visit to Japan to promote Blade II, with my daughter and my wife. I love those concrete shapes in the tunnel. They ended up being in the BPRD in Hellboy.

Then I saw a Japanese mask that had no bottom, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to give Kroenen a mask like that, but full of tubes that are red in the bottom, maybe kind of gory?” And he basically has the mask.

On the right is a sculptural detail, and in the middle is a Japanese sign that says “natarekoko,” which is a dessert that I was eating at the time.

Then on the right-hand page [above], in the middle, I wanted Sammael to stab Hellboy, and I didn’t do it—PG-13.

On the top, I wanted Sammael to be eating a corpse, backlit against the steam of the intestines of the corpse. But at the end of the day, two things prevented that: PG-13 and the fact that the horns and the protruding bones in the shoulder blades had to go. Backlighting the silhouette we ended up with would have been very boring, so I hung him upside down instead.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 42A}

Dust rearrange

–The device HB uses to find the corpse. GEIGER.

They move up and down like switchblades

Long snout, skull with no skin on it

His snout pulls back like a lion’s mane revealing the bone below

Bladder

Ear or not?

Abe’s mouth hyperextends like a fish’s mouth.

Fish mouth at rest.

GDT: These pages [opposite] are from the same visit to Japan. While I was there, I tried to meet with my heroes: Katsuya Terada and Yasushi Nirasawa. I love their work, so we went to dinner at a sushi place that Nirasawa’s father owns, and he drew the three of us on a chopstick cover, and I glued it to the notebook [right].

MSZ: So this is his drawing of you?

GDT: Yeah. It’s really good! I look like a Miyazaki character.

MSZ: This is the only time I’ve seen a page where your writing goes in this direction.

GDT: That’s probably because I put in the chopstick-cover illustration. I didn’t start writing until after I put it there. And what I tried to do, in this particular notebook, was to finish all my thoughts at one time on a single page. I didn’t want anything continuing on the next page. I knew that if I did it vertically, I would run out of space, so I did it like that.

MSZ: So each page is self-contained?

GDT: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I mean, there may be an exception. That’s why facing pages have their own subjects. On the left [opposite], for example, there are multiple ideas for Hellboy, but none of them bleed over to the next page.

Here, I was thinking of an amulet that Hellboy could have to awaken the corpse, which affects the dust particles in the air.

Then I came up with an idea that was too expensive, which was to have Rasputin frozen in a statue like in the comic, and then to have a series of mirrors that were clockwork-operated, which would beam the light into him.

Then, at the bottom, I wanted Abe to have an articulated mouth like a fish. You can still see the old Abe, which is a bit like Moebius’s Silver Surfer. The mouth was going to project out like a fish mouth. And Mignola was so horrified by this idea. He said, “That’s the worst idea!” He was so horrified by the idea of the mouth that he said to me, “If you don’t do that, I’ll give you four pages of any of my stories you like.” And I have the four pages upstairs. I’m a cheap man.

Then you see Sammael, again, attempting the same thing. This drawing is a little more similar to what we ended up with. And the claw—I wanted it to look like a lobster claw in the air. That didn’t make it.

MSZ: Now, as we’re going through these pages and seeing the designs of Sammael, it’s becoming refined. Were you working with your design team at this point?

GDT: I was already talking to Mike at this point. I think Wayne Barlowe was already on board, and I started to send him these things, but these were still my own musings.

MSZ: What’s this bladder?

GDT: The idea was that the neck would inflate like a bladder, and the tentacles around his mouth would do a “Brrrr!” and expand to reveal his teeth.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 42B}

Drawing of Terada, Nirazawa, and Hellboy with me below them. 5/29/02 Tokyo

MASTERPIECE

SOLD OUT

Ton of pus!

Masterpiece!! Dinner with two Japanese buddies, both very friendly and talkative.

–Floor and murals on the walls

–[?] digital lines for punch

–Vibrating shine in the eye a la ANIME

–Medieval architecture mixed with industrial

–Blue set, blue character, blue days

–The eggs shine, acrylic nest

–The [?] for the tentacle BW.

–Build the outside space (eye).

–Dry leaves around him (a la O).

–Cloud from above, see tentacles

–Nest with eggs made from acrylic.

–Theatrical effects for water [?].

–No baby [?] to No Abe injured.

–Tongue design should be bigger than the mouthspace visible outside (7 feet).

–Steadicam guy should be Varomia. Tell Patrick ASAP.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 44A}

–clak clacks clikty-clack, clack clack, then grows silent. The mouth smiles.

Try to keep Sammael changing his silhouette whenever possible.

His bones dislocate. This helps

–Broom’s autopsy: “a piece of nail split his spine in two, the impact pulverized two vertebrae.

–The idol on the altar should be a highly stylized Behemoth

octopus’s

pupil

–When we film Sammael, we should vary the speed and perhaps use a long lens for detail.

Lower teeth are bigger than upper.

Backlit Fog

–Hair implants for one of the agents.

–[?]

–The “little hand” establishes the episode CBL.

–The “Marita” establishes the episode CBL.

–Wax cylinder for the recordings of memories in a journal, in AMOM.

–Use ribbons or climbing ropes to come and go in the areas of temporal distortion. Movement sensors.

^{Hellboy’s jaw, with its distinct under bite, was a mixture of Mike Mignola’s original character.}

^{Ron Perlman’s bone structure.}

GDT: The eye here [opposite, top] is me exploring the idea that Sammael would have an egg-shaped pupil that would dilate. And I thought, “One of the eyes could have flies on it,” which is very disgusting.

At the bottom of the page is me reflecting on how to fit vertical information in a 1:85 frame.

The next idea was to give Ron Perlman longer lower teeth than upper teeth, which ended up in the movie. He has huge fake teeth in the movie, but the lower ones are bigger than the top ones. Now, why did I want the lower teeth bigger? Hellboy has a really extreme lantern jaw in the comics [above left], and one of the ways Mike does it is by doing the lower teeth the way Jack Kirby did. Kirby used to have his bottom teeth come up above the lip in a straight line.

^{Sergio Sandoval at DDT elaborated on del Toro’s idea of a stitched-together, cadaverous being.}

GDT: You can see [opposite], as strange as it is, I’m already trying to draw Hellboy like Ron Perlman. I’m trying to find a way. And there is a nick in the flesh of his cheek, which I wanted to be very, very deep. I couldn’t do it. But it’s the nick that Kroenen gives him in the final fight.

And I wanted Hellboy jumping between buildings with the moon silhouetting him. I didn’t do that.

This is pretty accurate to the way he looks in the Apocalypse, though—at the top of a mountain of debris, with the horns.

Then, in the center are Kroenen’s skin grafts. DDT was using these sketches, and they were becoming a little extreme. I was thinking, strangely enough, that Kroenen needed to be sexy. And I know an eyeless, lipless guy is not sexy, but I thought, “There needs to exist some kind of really, really, really twisted girl that is going to get off on Kroenen.” So I said, “For that, my minuscule audience, we have to make him sexy.”

Then there is the lock on the safe that needed a triangular key. It ended up being different in the movie, but it’s similar, and the key is triangular.

Then Mignola has Hellboy with sort of a ponytail. And in 2001, ponytails were, like, really for porn producers. So I gave Hellboy a Japanese sumo wrestler haircut that kind of indicated he had some fighter training. And, also, Mike has Hellboy with male pattern baldness, and I felt that was not very sexy, so I gave him the scalp shaving of a Japanese warrior. He shaves his head. So, all in all, I wanted Hellboy to keep to the comic but to be a little sexier.

MSZ: You’re dealing with so many design elements from the film right here in this one little compact area. As well as different parts of the film.

GDT: And there’s things from Mountains of Madness, too. Now, in Mountains of Madness, they wake up and time has been altered. A potato has sprouted. That’s in the movie. Cthulhu in the fog. It’s always more than two projects.

MSZ: That’s something you’ve alluded to—that when you’re working on a multitude of projects, if anything falls through on one, you’re, in a way, somewhat insulated because you’re working on multiple things.

GDT: When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked. What I find—and I’m not saying this works for everyone—is that the promiscuity of having four or five things online actually makes them feed each other. And you go, “Aha! That idea is great for Madness. That idea is great for…” And you keep them alive. It’s a dialogue.