Crimson peak
Is this Guillermo del Toro’s spookiest offering yet?
Guillermo del Toro sprawls on a sofa seat in his trailer on the Universal lot, a large grin lighting up his grey face. He’s exhausted, still tinkering maniacally at his ninth feature, Crimson Peak, and determined not to let the damn thing go until he’s 100 per cent happy that it’s top-to-bottom perfection.
“I am still under budget, I still have time,” he justifies, the light that dances in his eyes evoking Jack Nicholson’s crazed glint as he hunches over his typewriter in The Shining and bangs out ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ again and again and again. “I have two shots – two VFX shots – that I still don’t like, and I’m going to tweak them. I’m going to be done next week.” He offers another tired grin. “That’s what I say every week.”
Given that Stephen King saw the movie way back in mid-March – it’s now mid-July – and tweeted his admiration (“Was treated to a screening of Guillermo del Toro’s new movie,
Crimson Peak, this weekend. Gorgeous and just fucking terrifying”), isn’t del Toro’s perfectionism spiralling out of control? He laughs. “I have become addicted to fucking around with this movie more than any other,” he admits, somewhat proudly. “I’ve been screening it very often to small packs of people. Every time I see it, I find something. It is about eight minutes shorter [than the version
King saw]. I removed some voiceover that was cumbersome. I sped up the narrative a little bit. Actually, when I showed it to him, I thought it was only working 50 per cent because the scares need to be edited and mixed. Now I can say every scare works. I’m much happier.”
The good news is, Legendary Pictures is content to indulge del Toro’s each and every whim. The filmmaker has, of course, been burnt by studios before – his tussle with Dimension Films over the final cut of his Hollywood debut Mimic is well documented – so the support is crucial. “I tell you, Legendary is the best studio I’ve ever encountered,” he states. “I just say, ‘I won’t deliver the movie for another three weeks.’ They go, ‘OK.’ Once a week, I send them the final print, and then I go, ‘Listen, I’m changing this and that.’ But they’ve been very patient. I think that now it’s the movie, and now I can finally put it to rest.” Once those VFX shots have been tweaked...
Building blocks Legendary, it’s fair to say, rescued Crimson Peak. Back in 2006, when del Toro first started flogging his script (co-written with Matthew Robbins) around town, the highest offer was $30m. Never mind words like “cinema” and “art”, this was, in cold commercial terms, a tremendous risk: an R-rated gothic-romance. Here was a tale set in 1901, as English inventor Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) woos and marries American authoress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) on his travels, then takes her back to Allerdale Hall, his old dark house in the north of England. Only Sir Thomas’ sister, Lady Lucille ( Jessica Chastain), isn’t nearly so taken with Edith, and the gangrenous three-storey structure that Edith must now call home contains terrifying secrets – the spectral manifestation of past traumas. Yes, the house is haunted.
Working firmly within the gothic and gothic-romance traditions evidenced in the
likes of Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Turn Of The Screw, The Fall Of The House Of Usher and The Mysteries Of Udolpho, to name just a few of the key influences, del Toro could not convince Hollywood suits to take coins from the pot marked ‘Spandex’ and spend them on candelabra. Then Legendary, who’d so supported del Toro on monsters vs robots pic Pacific Rim, stacked $50m on the table and wrapped it up with the pretty bow of autonomy.
There were to be more bumps (in the night) along the way, though, most notably when del Toro’s original leads, Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Stone, dropped out. First to go, in June 2013, was Stone, the actress’ hand forced by a schedule clash with Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight. Cumberbatch followed suit in August 2013, for less concrete reasons (“To this day, I don’t understand his decision,” sighs del Toro).
The upside? Most actors are desperate to work with the man who brought us Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth ( Crimson Peak owes more to the DNA of del Toro’s Spanish-language films than his Hollybusters like Blade II, the Hellboy movies and Pacific Rim), meaning the dynamic duo of Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston were delighted to step in. They joined Mia Wasikowska, who had signed to play Edith. It was an easy decision for the Australian actress given she “absolutely loved” Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, and identified with Edith having moved from Canberra to Hollywood aged 17.
“It’s challenging to maintain a sense of self when you’re completely uprooted and placed in a different world,” she says, her frail figure, marble skin and wide eyes screaming gothic waif. “Edith starts off as a very ambitious young woman, she’s very sure of herself. And then, over the course of her relationship, she starts to doubt everything that she thought she knew about herself.” She pauses to ponder. “It never struck me as a typical horror film. The scariest aspect is the relationship between the characters.”
Wasikowska describes her onscreen hubby as “mysterious and brooding”, while del Toro says the actor possesses “an air of tragedy”. But today, rocking an immaculate grey suit and
open-necked shirt in the LA sunshine, Hiddleston is all energy and passion and big, wide grins. His eyes sparkle as he recalls del Toro writing to him in August 2103, inviting him to read the script. He wrote back, and the pair then began trading reading recommendations, with del Toro schooling Hiddleston in the pioneering gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe, and Hiddleston highlighting the violent depravities of Jacobean drama. Finally director and actor met over scrambled eggs in Toronto, where del Toro was filming Pacific Rim.
“We talked some more and then Guillermo said [ adopts perfect GdT voice], ‘Let’s do it, brother,’” laughs Hiddleston. The actor adored the screenplay’s gothic tropes – “stories with an innocent, open-hearted, independent heroine who’s driven compulsively into the future by a connection to a tall, dark stranger” – and took to Sir Thomas, who, he says, is certainly the most tortured character he’s ever played.
“He has a superficial charm and he’s impeccably mannered, elegant, refined and sophisticated,” he says. “And there’s a truth to it. It’s not a mask. He is actually a curious person and a deeply gifted engineer who dreams of being one of the great Victorian industrialists. He believes in that future, but he’s weighed down by the past – by things he has done, by things that have been done to him. Allerdale Hall is the only family property remaining. The house, like human beings, harbours secrets. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the history of Thomas and Lucille’s childhood is very traumatic.”
Earlier that day, del Toro shows Total Film four scenes: a waltz between Sir Thomas and Edith; their arrival at Allerdale Hall; Lady Lucille feeding porridge to a sickening Edith; and a creepy bathtub sequence. Stitched into elegant gowns and maintaining, at all times, a ramrod posture, Lady Lucille is ever-present, exuding motionless menace. Is she the Mrs Danvers of Crimson Peak?
“Guillermo’s his own artist,” says Chastain, who first met del Toro on the set of Mama, which he executive-produced. “I think if you sense anything of that, it’s definitely more from me than anyone else. I love Rebecca. But there are a lot of things mixed into creating that character. There is a loneliness to Lucille that is so massive – larger than any kind of loneliness that I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to understand what that would feel like.”
Like Sir Thomas, Lucille has her reasons. Del Toro is uninterested in absolutes, but rather desires to explore shades of good and evil, and to invite viewers to feel empathy for his monsters, human or otherwise. It’s a theme that Chastain embraced.
“My heart goes out to Lucille,” she says. “I have so much compassion for that woman. I saw her more as an abused dog. I rescue
“The house is a living entity. It never gets up and walks, but it’s an entity in the literary fashion” guillermo del toro
dogs. There’s something about an animal that’s been abused by a human… When you go near them, they so desperately want to be touched and comforted, but they’ll bite you.” She smiles sadly as she tells of the 10-page biography del Toro presented her with. (He did the same for Hiddleston, and told both of his stars to keep their characters’ innermost secrets to themselves). “There’s so much history that Lucille comes from. All she really wants is to be touched and to feel intimacy.”
An actress who likes to fully inhabit her characters, Chastain read death poems to get into Lucille’s mindset, and dug so deep into her psychological torment that she was left exhausted and depressed by the four-month shoot. Naturally a warm, joyful person, she today talks of dismal things: “To be away from her brother equals death”; “She’s been in the house her whole life, like an abused animal in its cage”; “I was always in physical and emotional pain”; “Lucille wears tight, restrictive clothing because she has so many wild emotions and she’s out of control until she’s swaddled, like a baby.” Unsurprisingly, Chastain concludes, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
House of horror Never one to use CGI where real sets and practical effects can be employed, del Toro oversaw the construction of Allerdale Hall, a towering, cavernous abode that he describes as a “butterfly trap”. It’s a staggering feat of production design and, as all good haunted houses should be, a character unto itself.
“We wanted people to live inside a rotting carcass,” says del Toro. “We said, ‘Let’s make the top of the house dry and mummified.’ The ceiling is broken, the bones are showing. Insects live in it, but it’s dry. Then as you come down, you go into the warmer areas. There are fires, red glaze oozing everywhere, that looks like blood. Then, in the cellar, there is red clay oozing. Every so often, a wind comes in and the house goes, ‘Ahhh.’ It sighs. It’s a living entity.” He grins. “The house never gets up and walks or shit like that, but it’s an entity in the literary fashion.”
Del Toro shyly quotes the work of Jacques Tourneur ( I Walked With A Zombie) and Hammer’s Terence Fisher ( Dracula) as inspirations, while he attributes his graceful camera style to the likes of Jack Clayton ( The Innocents), David Lean ( Brief Encounter) and Max Ophuls ( Letter From An Unknown Woman). But the biggest influence is Italian horror maestro Mario Bava, whose garish, sickly palettes del Toro recalls by painting Allerdale Hall is “post-acidic Technicolor”. Rotting walls are lit by fluorescent lights hidden behind furniture, while pinpoints of colour were achieved by punching holes in the walls and ceilings to shine targeted lights through, then mending the ruptures in post with digital tinkering. Crimson Peak’s R-rated violence is not indebted to the dances of death in the giallo sub-genre that Bava birthed, however: “It does have a couple of very brutal murders but they are not dwelt upon,” says del Toro. “These are murders that you go ‘Ah fuck!’ and then it’s over.”
Meanwhile, the ghosts roaming the corridors, though augmented with CGI, are all physical (del Toro wanted to give his
“best of the best” cast something to react against). He promises a “gallery of ghosts” and shows Total Film footage of a semitranslucent phantom writhing in a doorway. “That ghost is physical,” he announces. Really? The incredulity is met with a chuckle. “I’m very proud of it.”
But much as the house and its revenants promise thrills, chills and blood spills galore, let’s not forget Wasikowska’s words: relationships and feelings are the scariest things of all. Wasikowska talks of how Edith and Lucille fight for “ownership” of Sir Thomas, and a dark sexuality informs the film.
“That’s obviously a trope of gothic romance as well,” nods Hiddleston. “The heroine is pulled towards maturation and awakening by her sexuality. She’s virginal and sexuality is a dangerous thing. It changes you forever. If sexual appetites are not expressed or permitted, it will emerge in other ways.” Asked if there’s a hint of incest as there is in Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher, he pauses. “Thomas and Lucille have a very deep connection because they were both orphans from a young age. There is a sexuality in the film that interlaces the three characters in a triangle. Gothic romance is about exploring sexuality and the supernatural in the same fabric, or in the same web.” Del Toro has before talked of how his movies tend to avoid sexuality, admitting it’s not a topic he feels comfortable to explore despite acknowledging that it’s one of the driving impulses of human beings. With Crimson Peak, he at last lets it all hang out. “The movie starts in a ballroom, in a waltz,” he says. “I do almost money-shot closeups of hands touching an elbow or a shoulder [ one of the films he asked Wasikowska to view was Scorsese’s The Age Of Innocence, with its consummately controlled scenes of burning
passion]. I wanted to make it a supremely delicious sort of lovemaking moment; that waltz is a courtship. And then there is a moment when they do have sex. I wanted very much to make it a girl’s version of a sex scene. I didn’t want it to be the male fulfilment fantasy you see in every movie. I wanted it to be a little more feminine. And when I say feminine, I mean Tom and Mia should be feminine about that moment, because it makes it a lot more nuanced and sweet and powerful.”
So not all of the sex is twisted? Del Toro takes a breath. “There’s a second moment of sex in the movie, much later, that I think is very disturbing. In fact, when we screen it, people react to that moment as if it was a horror scene.”
And so we have it: an exquisitely lensed gothic romance that explores the relativity of evil and offers horrifically real violence and sinister scares while pulsing with warped sexuality. “It is an adult movie,” laughs del Toro before scampering off to tweak those last two VFX shots. “And I think Stephen King’s going to like this version too...”
Crimson Peak opens on 16 October.