Del Toro’s favorite beast
In 2014, Guillermo del Toro was shooting his gothic horror romance “Crimson Peak” when he asked Doug Jones to come in for a meeting on Jones’ day off. The two men have known each other since the actor played a “Long John” mutant cockroach in 1997’s “Mimic.” In the years since, Jones had become the Mexican auteur’s otherwordly muse, “Hellboy’s” Abe Sapien, “Pan’s Labyrinth’s” Faun and Pale Man, and ghosts in “Crimson Peak.” Now, del Toro wanted to talk to him about a role unlike any he’d played before in a film that didn’t yet have a script.
“Guillermo told me the entire story,” Jones says of the tale that would become del Toro’s highly anticipated Cold War-era fable “The Shape of Water.” “As it was coming out, my chin goes into my hands, I’m leaning forward, I’m begging him, ‘Well, then what happens? Where does she go from there? Really?’ It was like story time with Guillermo del Toro. The only thing that was missing was a campfire and marshmallows.”
“I wanted the movie to be like a song, a song about love and a song about cinema,” del Toro, 53, says. “It was a strange impulse. I knew the movie was going to be very vital. I knew the movie was going to be life-affirming. Part of me knows that I’ve been saved by movies several times in my life. And not necessarily by great movies, but ‘Sunday’ movies, movies that you stumble upon on TV when you’re 15. I wanted to make it about those movies.”
The inspiration for “The Shape of Water” came from Daniel Kraus, del Toro’s writing partner on the novel “Trollhunters,” who was a teenager when he first conceived a story about an amphibious being held captive by the government. The monster, a nod to “The Creature From the Black Lagoon,” made it a natural fit for del Toro, who fashioned his own deeply resonant story. An Amazonian river god ( Jones, in a formfitting suit and prosthetic makeup) faces a grim fate in a New York laboratory until Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute janitor enamored with him, intercedes, with the help of her friends Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Giles (Richard Jenkins).
“What was important was to come through the service door into this story and not the front door,” del Toro says. “The important thing was I could tell the story of invisible people saving an outcast . ... It was not about scientists and agents and government people in an adventure with a creature. It slowly became a sort of everyday, quotidian perspective of an extraordinary thing.”
Del Toro himself can remember the first movie he saw in a theater, William Wyler’s 1937 adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” which his mother took him to see when he was a small boy. That sparked a voracious passion. He was 8 when he first borrowed his father’s Super 8 camera, and a young teen when he made a movie about a monster who comes out of a toilet bowl, takes in his new surroundings and decides to return to the sewer. Del Toro laughs at the memory, making the comparison with his new aquatic creature.
“This fish man has a much better origin!” he says of designs he financed himself before pitching “The Shape of Water” to Fox Searchlight. “He’s a beautiful elemental god from the water. It’s Michelangelo’s David of amphibian men. … I think Sally developed a bit of a crush on him. Not Doug. The creature. When Doug was around, she was, ‘OK,’ but when the creature came into the set, you could see her get a little more fidgety and nervous.”
The films of Douglas Sirk, Stanley Donen, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were del Toro’s stylistic inspiration for “The Shape of Water.” Set in 1962, cars and clothes reflect that era. But the lush production design, almost Technicolor cinematography, and quotations from favorite movies, even a Donen-like musical number, pay homage to Hollywood’s earlier Golden Age.
“Guillermo’s always been a genius,” says Jones. “He’s always been one who absorbs everything around him. He has seen, watched, read, listened to, appreciated all forms of art, and all movies of all genres, he has studied and absorbed all of it.”
“With this movie, I tried to ask myself, ‘What am I going to do different than I’ve done before?’ ” del Toro says. “I tried to push myself on a filmic level. And I tried to find a new way to tell the story, primarily humanly, a very adult theme for me, which is the other, the acceptance of the other, of those that have no voice and are invisible.
If you say, ‘I don’t believe in love,’ you sound instantly very smart, but I want to be punk about it and say, ‘I believe in love.’ I believe in love of our family and our friends and the love of art and the love of cinema.”
Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer.