How del Toro found his muse in Sally, the luminous girl next door
THE film-maker Guillermo del Toro had images of British actress Sally Hawkins in his head as he wrote his masterpiece The Shape Of Water. ‘It took three years to write — and I wrote it for her,’ Mexican del Toro says of Hawkins, who stars in it as Elisa, a woman who dreams of water. She lives above a cinema and is part of the night-shift cleaning crew at a secretive U.S. laboratory where an amphibious creature from the Amazon is being studied by Cold War scientists. ‘Elisa seems to comport herself in an ethereal way,’ del Toro remarks as we talk at the Soho Hotel in London. ‘She’s luminous and magical — but you believe you could find her at a bus stop.’ Elisa is also mute. ‘Love goes beyond words,’ del Toro says, adding that ‘like water, it has no shape ... there are no rules’. Elisa becomes transfixed by the creature, which is indeed a sight to behold — del Toro says the challenge was to create ‘the Michelangelo’s David of amphibian men’. As much as the film is a love story, it is also about fear and intolerance. The creature is tortured by the research unit’s security chief, played by Michael Shannon. The director has seen all Hawkins’s screen work, including the BBC drama Fingersmith, Happy-Go-Lucky, Submarine, Paddington and Blue Jasmine. ‘It’s like writing a song for a singer,’ he says. ‘Many times in the shoot I’d say to Sally: “This is a song I wrote for you!” ’ Co-stars Shannon, Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins were also in del Toro’s mind as he penned his screenplay, though he collaborated most with Hawkins. She emailed him that she was writing a story about a woman who transforms into a fish — and aspects of that tale were incorporated into the script. Hawkins is up for every film award going this season. ‘She’s phenomenal,’ del Toro says admiringly, hailing her as ‘the most remarkable presence in cinema’.