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The very first Frankenstein movie was a silent film from Thomas Edison in 1910. More than a hundred years and hundreds of Frankensteins later, Academy Award-winning director Guillermo Del Toro has made his version. He tells Sunday morning Seth Doan all about it. Why does this story endure?
Well, first of all, it was written by a teenager That was full of questions and rage and rebellion. You know, it's the same questions we have now. But she had. She didn't have the stodginess of the time, oh my god, that's my pizza. What did you get?
Here's Oscar Isaac. The star calling you.
So, yeah, she didn't have the stodginess of the time. She was the daughter of two brilliant minds. Uh but she knew the hypocrisy of uh the life uh uh that everybody led and you know She asked the fundamental questions, what are we? Why am I human? Why am I here?
This is not Just a horror or a monster. It's a human story. It's a human story. I mean, you have to remember, the time when it was written and published in 1818, people were fascinated by a gothic romance. The gothic romance.
was prurient, but she brought the element of asking fundamental questions, almost like John Milton in Paradise Lost. It was a genuine work of high literature.
Now the book is, the 1818 edition at least is a lot messier, a lot more gluttonous. It wants all the answers. It wants to talk about capitalism and existential dread and life and life as the enemy. When you talk about Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes. Jekyll and Hyde, these are the building blocks of human mythology, modern mythology.
It's a lot to sort through from a Screenplay perspective. You've got to figure out what's relevant, what you want to take, what you want to highlight. Yeah, but you transmute. You don't translate. you transmute.
Adaptation is a screen adaptation, which means a fish needs to adapt to land. Legs need to be sprouted, lungs have to be created, it's not uneasy, it's all chemical, it's not chemical. What strikes you about this story? What made you say this is what I want to spend years of my life focusing on? I found it a great way to talk about me and my dad.
And then as the years passed, I found that it was a great wait to talk about me and my dad and me and my kids. In what way? In the way that, you know, father is always a big shadow. and on a on a child and then you behave like a child And then you become a father? and you are still behaving like a child and then you pass that shadow.
And if you don't talk about it, no one tells you about it. you know and their father is not a supernatural being he's just a guy and making peace with that identity with the identity of you and your father. and stopping the pain, whatever it is, by forgiveness and acceptance, it makes it profound and it makes it mine in that way. This wasn't just any story, any book you read. No.
You'd really wanted to make this film. I gave it over 50 years of my life, so yes. It it is in it's in all my movies. What do you mean? From Kronos all the way to Frankenstein.
All 13 movies have elements of the film. Pinocchio is another prodigal father asking for forgiveness of his child. My first movie, Kronos, deals with eternal life, ends in a very similar image than Frankenstein Blade 2, which is a commercial action movie, has the story of a monster child that goes back to his father and says, why did you created me like that? It's everywhere. Shape of water?
Shape of water, certainly. You know, the idea of the monster being of the same essence than the main female character and the female character recognizing herself in it. Were you thinking about Frankenstein through all those movies? Yes, yes. On purpose.
All my life. You said, I want to make this movie because there's some element of Frankenstein. Yes. Crimson Peak.
Well, not like that. It's like proclivity. Right? If you have a certain proclivity, you gravitate towards that. What is it for you about Frankenstein?
It's me. It's me as the monster, it's me as the creator, film directors and Victor Frankenstein have a lot in common. In what way? Explain me.
Well, you try to control. and things go wrong when you try to control. And at the same time, you have to learn to to create in a much more constructive way, in a beautiful way, and that comes with time. And the creature, I felt, I was a Catholic boy. I am a labs.
Catholic man now, but I understood everything. I went to Mass on a Sunday, 8 a.m., then I came back home and I turned on the TV and there he was. Maurice Karlov and Frankenstein. And I all of a sudden realized this is what my grandma talks when she talks about the Messiah. This is my Messiah.
I understood Immaculate Conception, resurrection of the flesh, the stigmata, ecstasy. I saw all that and I said, this is my shepherd. this creature. This is me. I'm not of this world, I'm something weird.
Do you identify more with Victor Frankenstein, the creature? Yeah. Because we are all creatures. I mean, we have a world that tells you you shouldn't be a creature, but in reality, we're all weird in some way. And if it's it's not the weird that is bad, it's the fact that we say that the weird is bad, that is bad.
In what way are you weird? In any way. I mean, like uh when I was a child, the the norm for a Uh a healthy kid. was to be outside playing football, being rowdy, being outgoing, being self-asserting. And I was this strange.
Pale creature that liked to read. And I was a hypochondriac at age seven. I thought I had trichinosis. You know, I thought I had liver damage. I thought I had.
cirrhosis, you know, you name it. And I studied medical manuals and I would go to my mom and say, I think I have a terminal cancer. Oh yeah, where? The pancreas, because I would discuss those.
So I was a weird, weird kid. You describe yourself as such a such a creative being, a creative child. Where do you think that comes from? I think that when you are unhappy with the world, You endeavor yourself to create your own. You know, I was talking about creating my own house, my own environment, but you do it through your craft.
You, you know, it's sort of a professionalization of the imaginary friend. There's not such a thing, so you create it. You can paint it, you can draw it, you can sculpt it. I can paint, draw, sculpt, design, and I've been doing it since I was a kid. And then reading, you know, you can experience life either through life.
or through literature. or fiction. And I became an expert at experiencing it through fiction. I read thousands of books between uh childhood and puberty. Then puberty brings other distractions and You lose your way away from literature for a little bit.
What are you unhappy with about the world? Generally, I think that what monsters have given me Evidence is what I don't like about the world. I think the world tells you comfort, wealth. Beauty are the desirable standards. I I find romantic love to be tortuous and impossible to achieve.
Success is defined in a way that I don't like. Monsters tell you, look, it's okay to be you. It's okay to sweat, it's okay to be imperfect, you can forgive yourself for that and you come to the find success for me is failing in your own terms. That's where you learn. Uh what you are.
And I think that The world is always saying more is better. I don't think so. Like when you think about wealth, For me, for example, a wealthy man is a man that has enough. Not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite somebody to a beer, you're rich.
If you have whatever, yachts and planes and islands, and you still need more, You're not rich.
So it's the same with beauty, it's the same with career, it's the same with happiness. I can't be happy alone. I can be happy alone with nothing. I can go to DMB, to the DMV and have a feast just watching people online. The DMV.
The DMV, because you are watching people and I love people watching. I tried to figure out dress is code for who they are, behavior, posture, what they're doing. You're like, enthralled by humanity. You found the perfect vocation. Yeah, yeah.
A director is a spy from another planet trying to figure out humanity. We'll have more from our Sunday morning extended interview. After this break. Hiring isn't just about finding someone willing to take the job. It's about getting the right person with the right background who can move your business forward.
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How difficult is it to approach the same subject that has been done successfully for so many years? You know? When Frank Sinatra grabs a French song. and sings it again and calls it my way. is not the French song anymore.
Do you feel any connection to the Frankensteins of the past? I mean, my first crush. Must Mary Shelley. And then the Bronte sisters. I mean, I truly can tell you this.
You are born to sing one or two songs in your lifetime. This is my song.
So what do you do now? Oh, I don't know. Macrome? Is that one of the thoughts? Pottery?
That's going to be you. That's going to be me. But if you make something that you've spent 50 years thinking about, that's an element through all of your films, what do you do?
Well, you know. Fortunately for me, my theme has always been redemption, forgiveness, and sort of letting go, you know, acceptance.
Now I'm 61, so I have. Regret and memory to look forward to. Expect some epics in that regard. What is it about the genre of Gothic horror that appeals to you? The marriage uh of the decay and beauty started there.
I mean the engravings of a particular man called Giovanni Battista Piranesi inspired this love for ruins, which is sort of the wabi-sabe in Japan, the beauty of that which is imperfect and decaying, the marriage of love and death. cemetery, graveyard poetry. All these impulses that are really laconic and melancholic and This started there in the Romantic movement. Did you want your creature to be beautiful in a way? 100% it has to look like something newly minted.
Not like a repair job in an ICU. Yeah, I think the creature needed to look like a newly minted human being, Adam. But there's also a handsomeness, a sexiness. to Jacob as as the creature. I was race Catholic.
And a lot of those crucifixions in Mexico had the loincloth a little too low. Were you thinking about that? No, but my grandma certainly was. What if she saw this film? She kept going to mass a little too much, if you ask me.
But there is, there is. A very strange uh You know, when you see the sculpture of Santa Teresa by Bernini, She could be in ecstasy. Or she could be contemplating something else. There's a an amalgam of uh illumination and pleasure. And s especially in in Catholic imagery, there's a pageantry and a it's a very bloody iconography.
It's really swarthy uh Catholicism. And you wanted some of that to come across in this film. You wanted there to be some sex appeals, not that, no, the the the sort of the ambiguity of uh seeing something so perfect.
so newly minted That is attractive. I mean, I've done sexy. creatures. I did shape of water. This is not what we tried.
You know, we didn't do any gestures towards that at all. there's a purity, it looks like the essence of a human body. And that's what we were going for. In terms of Catholic language, we have a crucifixion, crown of thorns, the wound on the side, resurrection after the third day of the battlefield, blah, blah, blah.
So it's full of that. And there is a meditation of the role of God and Jesus. meditation that if they are consubstantial Why do God send Jesus to be crucified and to die? What is he trying to find out? The movie is a meditation of that.
For someone who identifies as a lapsed Catholic, you have a lot of religious things in there. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Laps or no laps. And now How hard was it to change actors? You were planning on doing this with Andrew Garfield.
Yeah, no, no, it was to me at this age, in this moment in my life, and my career, and my craft, I know that when something goes wrong, it's going right. And Andrew Garfield was that thing that went wrong? Yeah, well, him leaving. Was could have seen as an accident, as something unsurmountable. I always see.
Uh that my profession is hostage negotiation with reality. Reality says, I'm gonna kill it, and I go, no, you're not, listen. Put down the gone, let's talk. Was there a fear that this would kill? Not for me.
Not for me. Zero. Zero, never, I never doubt the accident. Everything that happens, I say, why is it happening? Why did I lose that location?
How can I make it better? Why is the mist gone? Why did the sun rise a little too early? You know, I say, how do I use it? On the actors, why did you pick Oscar?
Why did you pick Jacob? Ice. I cast the eyes. 50% of film is looking at and 50% of film is being looked at. What do you see in their eyes?
Oscar had brilliance. Madness. seduction and pain. and Jacob was completely open. completely open.
He had an innocence and an openness and a purity in his eyes that was completely disarming. And I saw Priscilla. the movie where he plays Elvis and he had a moment of rage. Which the creature needed, and I went, bingo, this is the guy.
So, can you sit across from someone and just look at them and know by looking in their eyes. Yeah. They don't need to really read or do anything. No, no, you I I can feel people pretty good with their eyes. Yeah?
Yeah. It's my profession. Because if the eyes Dawn hold the character, you don't have the character. You know, i if i that's why uh When I talk about the most interesting landscape in the world is the human face. That's a landscape you can never get tired of.
How important is location or sets? You wanted this not to feel computer generated. No, no, no, it's very important. This movie has a level of craftsmanship and a level of reality that movies don't. often have anymore.
I wanted giant sets, I wanted to build an entire ship. put it on a motor to move it with the gigantic miniatures, hundreds of wardrobes, blah blah blah. when you go to an opera. There is a sort of luxury in seeing the velvet and seeing the gilded surfaces and seeing the scale of the sets and hearing the singing. This is the scale of this movie.
The scale of this movie is a fantastic opera. When you look at the film When you look at Boris Karloff, that film, even those trailers, it's a very different tone from yours. I'm not doing that. The film, first of all, the film that James Whale did is a masterpiece that was based on a 1927 play. Uh not the book.
Number one. But Reid of Frankenstein is more based on the book. And I, so I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to adapt. adapt the book through my own prism.
is Mary Shelley's biography in that book and is my biography in this film. This is one of those stories that we all feel like we know. We grew up with, but you don't. No, like most people uh really haven't. read the book.
They think they know what it's about, but A large portion of the book is the the creature's story. that has very seldom been rendered if at all. even to the point that people think of the creature as Frankenstein. Yeah, yeah, well, that came from my play. that came from a play that decided to name both the creature and the creator Frankenstein.
It's not about instinct because I think treating the creature like an extension of Victor is an interesting thing because that to me is fatherhood. Bad fatherhood. When you treat your kid as an extension of you, that is making you look good or look bad. That is the moment when you say When the child has to say, look, to you, I'm this or that, but to me, I'm just existing. And that's a moment in the film actually.
If you loved Boris Karloff so much, why did you seek to do something so different? If you know that There is a different way of talking about a character. that speaks to a side of humanity that hasn't been done. And Frankenstein is one of those. You can say, I'm going to do Frankenstein.
Oh, again, as a Latin American dictator. I want to watch it. I want to do Frankenstein. Oh yeah, in space.
Okay, I wanna watch it. It's multivalent. You can change it with one inflection. That's great mythology. It's completely new.
And if you can give emotion to a tale that is 200 years old, That's a great alchemical trick. And I was born to try it. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app.
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