From being raised a Catholic to working with the Weinsteins ...the shaping of the director behind Oscar contender The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro tells Geoffrey Macnab how his distinctive directing style for The Shape Of Water evolved as a response to a bad experience working for the Miramax company — and why he gave his leading lady Sally Hawkins a boxset of Laurel and Hardy
The press has been so full of stories recently about the alleged abusive behaviour of American producer Harvey Weinstein towards women that it is easy to forget he also had a reputation for bullying male filmmakers.
They were often forced by Weinstein (nicknamed ‘Harvey Scissorhands’) and his brother, Bob, to make, remake, edit and re-edit films to the Weinsteins’ minutest specifications.
Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning The Shape Of Water boasts some wonderfully fluid cinematography: shots in which the camera glides through flooded apartments or roams through the underground corridors of the secret government laboratory where the mute heroine Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works as a cleaner.
It turns out that Del Toro’s film-making style, with its very long takes, evolved as a direct result of the unhappy experiences he had 20 years ago with the Weinsteins on his Miramax-backed sci-fi movie Mimic, starring Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam.
The 53-year-old Mexican director has worked with many of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, but only once did he feel his creative freedom threatened.
“The only time I have experienced bad behaviour — and it remains one of the worst experiences of my life — was in 1997, when I did Mimic for Miramax,” Del Toro remembers. “It was a horrible, horrible, experience.”
Del Toro is a Falstaffian figure, a larger-than-life polymath who loves movies, knows everything about them and can hold forth equally eloquently about horror pictures or animation. He has a very strong personal vision — and that is why it was such a struggle working with the Weinsteins on his New York-set yarn about deadly cockroaches.
“I was interfered with in plot, in casting, in the type of action. They second-guessed all the time. I never had a single day that was pleasant,” he says.
Del Toro adds that this was not Harvey Weinstein’s doing but that of his brother, Bob, who oversaw Miramax’s genre label, Dimension.
In response to the gruelling experience he endured on Mimic, Del Toro learned to shoot in a style that defies cutting and front-office interference. “I learned to make my camera more fluid, more a storytelling character,” he says. “It helped me develop the language that now I practice on The Shape Of Water. It taught me to edit every day because I was always expecting to be fired. I’ll have a cut of the movie six days after wrap. I think adversity is good — that is very Catholic of me.”
Like Orson Welles a generation ago, Del Toro can justly be called a one-man orchestra. He writes, directs and pro- duces. His friend and mentor Jeffrey Katzenberg used him as a consultant/fixer on Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss In Boots. He is as passionate about animation as he is about live action and he is an expert on make-up and visual effects. At any given time, he will have multiple different projects on the boil.
When Del Toro enjoyed his international breakthrough with 2006 fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth (billed as Alice In Wonderland for grown-ups), he challenged himself. “I said that in the next 10 years I am going to direct animation, direct a video game, write a novel and do a TV series. I wanted to learn every narrative aspect of the business,” he says.
Of course, Del Toro hit all his targets. He wrote the novel (vampire yarn The Strain), he directed a number of TV series (Trollhunters among them), he designed the computer games (even if they were never produced) and he found time to take on plenty of other projects too.
The Shape Of Water brings many of Del Toro’s pet obsessions together. It is a fantasy horror piece with an obvious debt to Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it is also a very tender love story. It’s typical of his subversive approach that the heroine (played with Chaplinesque grace and humour by Sally Hawkins) is no passive fairy princess.
“When we were in pre-production, I gave her (Hawkins) a box with the entire Laurel and Hardy, the entire Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Chaplin, and I said to her ‘Study them because you’re basically a silent comedian’,” Del Toro remembers.
He first saw the British actress in TV drama Fingersmith, in which she played a lesbian pick-
I didn’t want Elisa just to be a demure girl waiting for a prince to rescue her