The creature feature with heart
A love story about an underwater beast is personal for Guillermo del Toro,
‘Most people dream they can fly when they’re kids, but I always wanted to breathe underwater,’’ says Guillermo del Toro.
He was 6 years old when he first saw Creature from the Black Lagoon, with its shonky monster besotted with a beautiful swimmer. Del Toro immediately identified with the monster, sharing its love for Julie Adams and wished they could end up together; he drew a picture of it, he says, two or three times a day for a decade.
‘‘The most beautiful dream I have is that I live underwater. It is very personal to me, that fantasy. And any time I can be, I’m in the pool or the sea. I’m a large, unidentified sea mammal!’’ He is the walrus? He does look a bit like one. ‘‘Yes. I am the walrus. Indeed I am.’’
The Mexican director is best known to arthouse cinemagoers for his dark fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which was set in fascist Spain. Meanwhile, genre fans revere him for the Hellboy films (2004, 2008); fanboys know him for the blockbuster Pacific Rim, which was mauled by disappointed critics but made more than A$400 million (NZ$435m) at the box office.
Del Toro bestrides all these categories with the ease of a man who just doesn’t care. As a child, he immersed himself in art books and pulp comics; to his primaryschool self, Swiss painter Henry Fuseli and comic book artist Jack Kirby lived in the same creative world.
As a film-maker, he makes no grand distinctions between his films. ‘‘Of course you can like one more than the other – the other one can seem banal, or whatever it is you don’t like – but it is really part of the same movie,’’ he has said. They all come from the same place: his florid imagination.
His new film, The Shape of Water, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year and is now heading full-tilt for the Oscars, features a scaly blue river god. This new creature has something of the lagoon about him; Del Toro has, in fact, rewritten the creature’s fate.
This blue beast is the hero. The heroine is not frightened of him; she chooses him. When he is persecuted, she saves him. With due respect to Del Toro’s feelings about genre, this is one of his arthouse fables; it could, in fact, be a companion piece to Pan’s Labyrinth. Both films follow the fairytale template in which an adventurous girl encounters a beast; both culminate in a confrontation with authority.
Del Toro is always resolute, in fact, in sticking it to the man. ‘‘There are two types of fairytale,’’ he says. ‘‘There are the reprehensible ones that say ‘do not disobey your parents’ and ‘do not wander into the woods, or you will end up bad’. And the other kind is anarchic.’’
In this tale, the hated authority is an agency of the United States government. The time is 1962: the height of the Cold War. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) works at a security facility near Washington with her best friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa is mute. Zelda is black. They are cleaners.
‘‘I was focused on creating a coup by invisible people, who are invisible to the a..hole who is in charge,’’ says Del Toro.
The a..hole in question is the ambitious officer Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who returns from South America with a blue humanoid that breathes through fanned gills. Chief scientist Dr Robert Hofstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) is immediately fascinated, but his military masters’ ambitions for the creature are vague. The point is that our guys got to it before the Russians did. It may be sent into space. It may be dissected.
Elisa sneaks in at lunchtimes to sit by the creature’s tank while she eats her sandwiches. She discovers he likes hard-boiled eggs. She plays him records.
‘‘That was my idea of a date,’’ says Del Toro. ‘‘I thought that was the most simple, nice date you can aspire to, you know, listening to Glenn Miller.’’
Clearly, Del Toro is not one of those carnivalesque Mexicans. ‘‘I’m a social inept, I’ll tell you that. For me, a wonderful date is watching pre-Code movies – from 1931, 1932, 1933 – all day. And ordering a salad,’’ he says with a chuckle.
The creature starts learning sign language. The obvious point in common between Elisa and the creature is that neither can talk – but they communicate, as Del Toro says, better than anyone else in the film.
Obviously, Del Toro loves strange beasts, peculiar body parts and nether worlds. This is a man, after all, who once made a film about giant cockroach simulacra taking over the New York sewers (Mimic, 1997). It took three years to design and make the glowing, finned, aqueous costume worn in The Shape of Water by Doug Jones, who has now played monsters in six of Del Toro’s films.
‘‘The problem is that you are not creating a monster, you are creating a leading man,’’ he says. ‘‘You are also creating an animal. And you are creating a god.’’
Del Toro and designer Mike Hill would work from dawn to dusk on clay models, moving the creature’s protuberant eyes a few millimetres one way or the other and calculating the proportions from shoulder to buttocks that would be closest to the golden mean.
‘‘It had to be this sort of bullfighter’s body, like a swimmer’s body. It’s not a bulky male body. It’s a very slender, fluid male body.’’
Even so, The Shape of Water is not really about the creature. It is really about the water in which it lives, which becomes a metaphor for love.
‘‘Water is the most powerful element on earth through its fluid nature,’’ says Del Toro. ‘‘Nothing stops it. It will go through stone or steel. And yet it has no shape: it takes the shape of the vessel it occupies. And I thought ‘that’s love’. That’s love! You can fall in love with someone 15 or 20 years older, you can fall in love with someone of your own sex or a different religion or a different political persuasion. Like water, love breaks through every obstacle.’’
But it is also an adventure, a classic heist film in which a group of unlikely contenders with right on their side get the better of the powers that be; Elisa, who is usually so shy that even her sign language is self-effacing, railroads a few allies to smuggle the creature out of Strickland’s lair.
There are good reasons, Del Toro says, why so many of the adventurers in fairytales are girls.
‘‘I think because there is a will, a fabulistic will, to think that the world opens itself more and yields more to the female nature,’’ he says. ‘‘That is why male gods destroy, male gods wage war and female gods give life and the seasons.’’ There is no way he could have written Elisa as a man.
‘‘If you had a male character and a female mermaid, it would become a story of possession. Of ownership.’’
That is the problem with men, he says: they turn their gender into an ideology, reducing themselves in the process. Not that there aren’t any good or extraordinary men in the world, of course; in The Shape of Water, they include Dr Hofstetler and Elisa’s gentle neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), whose sexuality puts him on the margins with Elisa.
Then there is del Toro himself, the gently lumbering walrus. He wrote The Shape of Water with a woman, Vanessa Taylor; interviewers regularly ask if she was there to bump up the feelings. Actually, she is a thriller writer. ‘‘All the sappy stuff: that’s me.’’
In the past, he has said that he feels out of step with the culture. ‘‘I’m never ironic, I’m never postmodern, ever. I’m always earnest. For me, irony puts you above your subject. I get high on my own supply.’’
The Shape of Water isn’t especially sweet – the water god behaves like the animal he is, sometimes violently – but it is sincere. ‘‘I do feel like this is like an ointment against cynicism, fear, hatred,’’ he says now. ‘‘It has a pure heart.’’
If it has a message, he says, it is that we will survive only through inclusiveness. He doesn’t want to be drawn on US President Donald Trump’s wall – Mexicans are always being expected to talk about Trump’s wall – but it’s about that. If I have to explain myself then I didn’t do a good movie. If I did, then it’s all there.’’
❚ The Shape of Water (R16) opens in New Zealand cinemas on January 18.