Newlyweds find dark heart of ‘Nightmare Alley’
Del Toro veers into new territory with co-writer Morgan
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s last movie, “The Shape of Water,” was a box-office hit that won four Academy Awards, including director and best picture. The film was a delicate, delightfully weird love story between a cleaning woman and a fish-man kept at a top-secret government facility. His follow-up, “Nightmare Alley,” is a bleak tale of carnies, grifters and a dishonest society that creates a far more despairing portrait of the world.
With a similar visual style to Del Toro’s previous work, beautifully lit and finely crafted, “Nightmare Alley” steers the veteran filmmaker into new territory. The departure includes the fact that Del Toro co-wrote the screenplay with film journalist and historian (and new wife) Kim Morgan.
“When ‘Shape of Water’ came, it was responding to a completely different series of impulses,” said
Del Toro. “But by the end of that campaign and at the end of the process with the movie, the world was in an almost epistemological crisis about truth and lies and populist discourse and how to distinguish a system of reality that just reinforces what you believe and that doesn’t challenge you into seeing the world. And these were things that were very heavy.”
Del Toro acknowledged that this more serious frame of mind set the stage for “Nightmare Alley.”
In the film, Bradley Cooper plays Stanton Carlisle, a drifter on the run from a mysterious past who falls in with a traveling carnival. He makes himself a fast study of the work of the mentalist Zeena (Toni Collette) and her husband, Pete Krumbein (David
Strathairn), picking up the tricks of their trade. He takes off with another carnival performer, Molly (Rooney Mara), and starts his own act, finding success at big city nightclubs. With the aid of a shady psychoanalyst, Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), he begins to fleece powerful local swells for money. He eventually crosses paths with the fearsome tycoon Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), and then Stanton’s plans begin to falter, leading to a desperate end.
The film is adapted from the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham that was previously made into the 1947 film directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power. Set in the late 1930s to early 1940s, Del Toro’s version shifts hard from the dusty, ramshackle world of the carnies, honest about their dishonesty and who they
really are, to the sleek society world of the city where no one is as they seem and everyone is out only for themselves. Whether through tarot readings, sideshow mentalism or psychoanalysis, “Nightmare Alley” frequently reaches toward the unknowable.
Del Toro encountered the book before seeing the original movie, while Morgan recalls seeing the movie and then reading the book at about the same time.
“I was certain there could be another version because after I read the book and then I saw the movie and I thought, ‘OK, this is definitely oriented to the genre. And I think you can do a different take on the material.’ We ended up doing what I think is a character study.”
Del Toro and Morgan were married earlier in
2021.
The filmmaker had ended his marriage of more than 30 years to Lorenza Newton in September
2017, around when “The Shape of Water” was being released. Morgan had previously been married to the Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. The two of them went public as a couple when they appeared together at the Academy Awards in 2018 when Del Toro was there for “The Shape of Water.” They had been looking to find a project to work on together when they landed on “Nightmare Alley.”
“We were already together, and we were already looking for something because we wanted, I guess, to venture into a creative endeavor together,” said Del Toro. “And we not only did it, but survived that, the shoot and the pandemic. And we said, ‘I think we’re ready to marry.’ ”
The two began the process of the adaptation with their enthusiasm for the ending — “We agreed the ending was the North Star,” said Del Toro — and then working their way backward through the story.
“I felt like the novel, a lot of it was about fear,” said Morgan. “I was so interested in William Lindsay Gresham. One of the reasons I became really interested in this project was that when we both read the novel again, we both really went into a deep dive to learn more about him. There’s not a definitive biography on him, but we learned so much about him.”
The novel of “Nightmare Alley” was a success, one that Gresham would never match, even as he published other books.
Having been diagnosed with cancer, he would take his own life in 1962.
“We also felt this was very timeless, the novel,” Del Toro said. “The novel is so absolutely an indictment of the American dream, the capitalist ideals.”
Morgan was on set for most of production to contribute new ideas as needed. And also because, as Del Toro put it, “We created the screenplay together. She would be watching the director … with our work and say,
‘Hey, that’s important. Can we preserve it?’ ”
“Which was nice,” Morgan said. “Because, you know, writers aren’t usually on the set.”
Del Toro jokingly said that they two of them “became a two-headed monster” as they were working on the project.
First, they transcribed all the dialogue from the original novel.
Then they worked separately, trading pages back and forth and editing each other’s work until they came together to write side-by-side.
For a relatively new couple, to spend their time submerging themselves in Stanton Carlisle’s dark despair might seem an uncomfortable place to be.
“There is something when you’re looking at such dark material, it is good to talk about these things,” said Morgan. “So it’s good to open up and share your fears and share things that you relate to and to see the humanity in Stanton. We sort of merged it with William Lindsay Gresham, with our own lives and with people that we’ve known.”
“As an artist, you feel there is a possibility that there is a tyranny of nice. Nice can become as oppressive as anything else,” said Del Toro. “And you just convulse. We are, after all, reacting to what’s in the atmosphere, and sometimes you react with a poem, and sometimes you react with a gut punch.”