Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
THE DEPTH OF LOVE
We’ve been trained to expect the unexpected from Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican auteur has infused his unique vision and intelligence into movies about bizarre comic book antiheroes (“Hellboy” I and II), giant battle robots (“Pacific Rim”) and gothic horror (“Crimson Peak”), while investing the most of his singular design genius and psychological insight into smaller, more personal and historically informed pieces such as “Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Now del Toro has taken all of his creative passion to the wall with “The Shape of Water.” A fable like no other, it’s a Cold War-era tale of a mute janitor named Elisa Esposito (English actress Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with a recently discovered half-fish, half-man thing (del Toro’s go-to creature player Doug Jones in the scaly suit) being held at the secret government facility she cleans. With the help of her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), work partner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Soviet mole Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elisa plots the manimal’s escape from the unforgiving control of government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon).
And then discovers that she wouldn’t want to live without the creature.
Dizzyingly romantic and dazzlingly gorgeous, the movie addresses eternal American issues while staging sequence after sequence that only del Toro could have imagined. We talked to the filmmaker about what looks like the ultimate expression of his lifelong monster love.
Q “The Shape of Water” seems like a culmination of all the themes, loves and obsessions from a quarter-century of your work.
A I feel it’s a strange synthesis and reformulation, because it’s the first vitalist movie that I’ve made. All the other movies have a sense of loss and melancholy, with the exception of the big ones like “Pacific Rim” and “Hellboy,” y’know? But this is the first of the smaller, more personal, stranger movies that I’m talking about leaving the theater not with a sense of crushing beauty, but with hopeful beauty.
By the way, the other part of that answer is that it requires 25 years as a filmmaker to pull this off. The ever-shifting genres in the movie, the tonal difficulty of a piece like this; there are 50 reasons why it shouldn’t work. I’m pretty sure that if you get 49 right, it still doesn’t work; you need to get all 50. It’s a triple somersault with a very difficult landing.
Q The genesis was your affection for the 1954monster movie “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” right?
A Since age 6, yeah. You know, everybody has a moment in their life, they see a movie or an image, at which they understand adult love. It’s a mystery when you’re a kid, but you understand it in an instinctive way. For me, that moment was when Julie Adams and the creature are swimming in the river. I thought it was an extraordinarily beautiful
image. It made me really ache for them to end together, and they didn’t end together.
I don’t think “Shape of Water” is that idea anymore. Obviously, I’m not trying to riff on that particular creature. But the DNA of it is there. What I tried to do is a movie about the otherness and embracing it rather than fearing it. It seems to be the moment to talk about that. The subtitle of the screenplay from the beginning was “A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times.” Q Yet it’s very deliberately set in 1962.
A Because ‘62 was the last year of the American fairy tale, when it was finally about to converge and it didn’t. It was postWorld War II affluence, cars for every suburban home, TV, self-cleaning ovens, obsession with the future, we’re going into space, the Cold War and Kennedy’s in the White House. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy’s shot, Vietnam escalates and skepticism settles. Nevertheless, that negative space that is left in the American imagination is when you can say, “Once upon a time in a kingdom, a princess reigned.”
What happens with that is, it allows you to relate to the issues today because they were alive then. That perfect time was not so. It was a perfect time if you were the right race, the right credo, the right position economically. So it dismantles a little of that and makes you think about today in a parable, fable-like way. It disarms your everyday arguments about today’s politics and allows you to talk about the subjects.
Q Yet your heroine, Sally Hawkins’ Elisa, can’t speak, nor can the amphibian man she falls in love with. Obviously another deliberate choice on your part.
A I thought it was really important on many levels. The first one: The two characters that don’t speak communicate far better than all the other characters that do. Octavia and her husband: They both speak; they don’t communicate. Giles and the Pie Guy: They talk but they don’t communicate; they mix their signals. Shannon and his wife: They talk, but he wants to dominate and silence her. And the Russian spies have everything upside down except the scientist’s principles.
But these two characters that don’t talk understand each other perfectly. She says, “When he sees me, he never sees I’m incomplete. He sees me as I am and for who I am.”
And that is the essence of love. Love renders you speechless.
Q Sally learned American Sign Language for the role and seems to express herself — well, Elisa — perfectly well with that, body language and looks. And Elisa may not be able to talk, but we find out she can sing.
A The beauty of it is, the silence makes her emotions more urgent. When she’s doing the monologue, her eyes are already burning with her need to communicate. Then the only way she can communicate her love is by singing, and there’s that beautiful moment when she is so desperate to say what she feels that she sings. Then that falls into the dance sequence, which is organically presented as part of her character since scene No. 1. She lives above a theater; she is watching musicals all the time, but even this is not in a meta way. She’s not watching the great movies; she’s not watching “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Citizen Kane.” I think the movie is as in love with cinema as it is with love, but not necessarily just great cinema.
Q Are there any tricks to directing a speaking actress in a mute role?
A What I talked to Sally about very early on was, I said, “You should be second nature with the language so that you can do inflections. You have to be able to sell it with the sign language; emphasis or lack of emphasis, you have to be able to get it all across.” And in her eyes, I needed to have the way the character was feeling. So you have mul-
tiple signals in one. So those were not challenges; those were opportunities, and then the rest of her acting was profoundly cinematic. When I met her, I gave Sally a Blu-ray set of Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Chaplin. Stan Laurel has a way of doing nothing and everything, and I said, “You’ve got to move like that.”
I tell you — I’m going to sound like a press kit — but nothing was easy. Especially when you consider the movie looks $70 million and it was done for $19.5.
Not only that, may I tell you, with great pride, as of today, we’re closing, doing the DVD and Blu-ray transfer, and we’re over $100,000 under budget.