Shape of water
THE SHAPE OF WATER I Guillermo del Toro on the making of his latest magical movie monster…
Guillermo del Toro on the making of a monster.
When Guillermo del Toro was six years old, he watched Universal monster movie Creature From The Black Lagoon and fell in love – with the movie, with leading lady Julie Adams, and, this being del Toro, with the creature itself.
“I saw the creature swimming under Julie Adams, in her white suit,” he says, sharing a packet of crisps with Total Film in a London hotel, “and even at six, I just thought, ‘My God, she’s gorgeous.’ And then I looked at the creature, and I thought, ‘My God, he’s gorgeous.’ And then I thought, ‘My God, it’s gorgeous that they’re in love. This is such a beautiful movie.’”
Now 53, del Toro still cites Creature as one of his favourite pictures, and was even attached to remake it at one point. The Shape Of Water, set in and around a government laboratory in Cold War America, is, at least in part, an ode to Jack Arnold’s poetic fantasy, with Sally Hawkins’ mute Elisa falling in love with Doug Jones’ amphibian beast.
To hone the homage, Amphibian Man, as he’s listed in The Shape Of Water’s credits, was captured in South America, home of Arnold’s lagoon-dwelling creature Gill Man. He’s far from a copy, mind…
“I felt we were not designing a creature, we were designing a leading man, because this creature is someone who needs to display doubt, anger, loneliness, brutality, power,” says del Toro, who ploughed $200,000 of his own money into pre-production. “It’s difficult to find an actor with that range. And if that actor is covered in rubber…” He laughs. “I started at home with two sculptors, David Meng and David Grasso. Many busts, full figures. Then Legacy did a full maquette with a glowing bioluminescence paint job. I studied it and studied it. And then I called [creature effects technician] Mike Hill, who became the father [of] the creature.” Amphibian Man took three years to create, but only one actor was ever going to bring him to life: Doug Jones, who’d previously worked with del Toro on Mimic, the Hellboy movies, Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak.
Del Toro grins. “It had to be Doug because he is not a performer, he is a proper actor.” Good job, too, as del Toro wanted zero overlap with Jones’ other fishy form, Abe Sapien. “I said, ‘Doug, you have to act completely un-Doug-Jones-like. You cannot be mannered. You cannot be fluid. You have to be very powerful, very animalistic, with a strong centre, like a bullfight. And you have to also be able to be vulnerable and afraid.” The result is a man-made monster we can all embrace.
ETA | 16 february / THE SHAPE OF WATER OPENS next year.