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When Tamara Deverell, production designer for Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” first arrived at the nearly finished set of Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, she couldn’t resist.
Deverell had by then spent countless hours toiling on the film’s central set, a massive laboratory located above an old building. scottish The stone tower, with a huge round window that lets light into a workshop filled with ornate instruments, and a deformed body stretched out on an operating table.
“I walked into the lab set when we were finishing it,” says Deverell, “and I said, ‘This… this is alive!’
It’s hard to resist metaphors in the making of “Frankenstein.” Moviemaking is a Frankenstein art in itself. Every element of the production – costumes, set design, lighting, music – is brought together like appendages stitched into a body.
Del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th-century Gothic novel, in particular, is a celebration of the art of filmmaking, tinged with the old school. Hollywood craft. Del Toro called on several of his most regular collaborators to turn his long-standing vision of “Frankenstein” — “his grandfather’s lament about the monster,” as he puts it — into a living, breathing reality.
“I wanted a handmade movie of epic scale,” says del Toro. “The sets are massive. The wardrobe and the designs and the props are handmade by humans.”
But creating “Frankenstein” required all the pieces to develop in synchronicity. Costume designer Kate Hawley can create the most brilliantly colorful costume, but if it doesn’t read with the lighting chosen by cinematographer Dan Losten, it won’t work. mike hillThe creature designer couldn’t create Frankenstein’s monster without shaping it around an actor Jacob Elordi,
“It’s a great group of monster makers,” says Hill. “A lot of Victor Frankensteins on the set.”
a monster mash
In “Frankenstein,” a $120 million epic for Netflix (it opens in theaters Friday and begins streaming Nov. 7), del Toro tries to both honor the frenetic spirit of creation symbolized by Victor (Oscar Isaac) while glorifying the monster (Elordi), a character with whom del Toro felt a deep kinship since childhood. Is.
Hill first worked with del Toro not on a film but on a piece for the director’s personal collection: a model of Boris Karloff sitting in the makeup chair for 1931’s “Frankenstein.” In del Toro’s films, creatures are often the soul of the film. For the Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water,” Hill designed the suit and prosthetics of the film’s central blue-green amphibian humanoid, played by Doug Jones.
For “Frankenstein,” Hill and del Toro didn’t want a stitch-covered monstrosity. They wanted a newborn baby.
Hill says, pointing to his eyes, “I knew that if we made his face too scary, when you’re taking a close look at this character, if you’re looking at wounds and blood, you get distracted. You have to keep the soul right here.”
Hill and del Toro’s Monster differs from the 1931 original in several ways. There are no nuts or bolts. There is nothing mechanical in it. He looks like a flesh-and-blood first draft.
“I didn’t want to give this creature a cyberpunk look in any way,” says Hill. “I respect the nuts and bolts of the original version, but we’re not doing that. We’re doing Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s book. So I wanted to streamline that a little bit.”
Hill is quick to credit others in the production, but he knew everything was riding on the electric moment when the creature arose. “It’s like waiting to see Superman wear his costume for the first time,” he says.
One of the creature’s most distinctive features in “Frankenstein” is the tattered hooded cloak he wears throughout the film. Hawley, the costume designer, first worked with del Toro on an ultimately unreleased treatment of “The Hobbit.” Del Toro, a notorious sketcher, saw her stacks of Goya art books and various notebooks of inspiration and told her, “We share a common language.”
For “Frankenstein”, del Toro wanted costumes that did not look like a period piece. “His first brief to me was, ‘I don’t want any (expletive) top hats,'” Hawley laughs.
The work on the creature was so extensive that Hawley had an entire team dedicated to dressing and clothing him. Throughout the film, the creature’s appearance evolves, and undergoes the challenge of mud, snow, wolves, and dynamite.
“It became a huge monster in itself,” Hawley said.
Like his previous films with del Toro (“Pacific Rim,” “Crimson Peak”), Hawley’s work includes splashes of rich, vibrant color that say as much about its characters as the dialogue. The colors red and green, as they often are in del Toro’s films, are prominent. But costumes, like the royal blue dress worn by Mia Goth in the film, shined.
“The blue dress took probably four months to get right,” says Hawley. “You’d think you’d pick the most intense colors, but the way it works on camera, through the camera lights, it required a lot of experimentation. So everything is an alchemy.”
‘Not afraid of darkness’
Cinematographer Dan Losten observes that since he and del Toro first collaborated on 1997’s “Mimic,” much has remained the same: single-source lighting from windows, crane-aided camera movements, in-camera effects whenever possible, and a penchant for wide angles with deep shadows.
“We are not afraid of the dark,” Lasten says with pride.
In “Frankenstein”, Lostin also lit several scenes using candles. One location in the film, Wilton House, built in 1753, was shared with Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” a film famous for its candlelit scene captured with a NASA lens. But this was not the effect Losten wanted.
“We’re not soft light people,” says Losten. “Lights have to have character.” “We like to have more contrast in the lighting.”
Together, Losten and del Toro have developed such a shorthand that they often have an intuitive sense of how shots will link together and how movement will be blocked – even if Losten sometimes tries to push del Toro out of his comfort zone.
“He has a very strong idea about left to right in blocking. Sometimes I try to push it from right to left because the lighting is better,” says Losten. “He says, ‘Lousten, you’re killing me, you’re killing me.’ But we like to be on the dark side of actors. “We want to shoot in front of the windows.”
Together, they have crafted exquisitely atmospheric scenes, often in which Lostén pumps as much smoke or steam as possible into grand Gothic locations.
“Sometimes, he thinks I’m trying to burn down the set,” Losten says with a smile.
Sets were built in Toronto, where del Toro has been based for the past two decades, while on-location work took place in the UK, with Deverell’s trips with del Toro through Scotland doubling as research trips. He visited art museums, looked up and down old towers and visited an old sewage plant decorated with Victorian ironwork, Crossness Pumping Station in London.
“I don’t talk to Guillermo much about film,” says Deverell. “We talk scenery, paintings and other films. He’ll say, ‘Watch this movie.'”
“Frankenstein” features several extensive sets, including a giant, fully constructed ship trapped in the Arctic ice. But the lab has a piece de resistance: a giant stage for Victor. The large round window, which is part of a circle motif extending through the film, is an allusion to a similar window in “Crimson Peak”.
“Guillermo wanted it big,” says Deverell. “I think he was designing it with Oscar in mind, who could move beautifully.”
final notes
Composer Alexandre Desplat considers “Frankenstein” to be the third of a triptych with del Toro, after “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” For each, Desplat has composed lyrical, emotional scores that express an unexpressed longing in the central characters: the creature, the puppet, and the monster.
“I needed to bring out their unspoken voices, their unspoken feelings,” says Desplat. “That’s why the score has a big orchestra that sometimes plays grandly, sometimes with restraint. But on top of that there’s a beautiful violinist, the Norwegian violinist Eldbjorg Hemsing, for whom I wrote very pure lines that express the most beautiful emotions of the creature.”
For the scene where Victor is building the creature from pieces of corpses, Desplat was initially unsure how to score it. Is it supposed to sound Gothic? Or violent?
“But very quickly we came up with the idea that it would be seen from Victor’s point of view,” says Desplat. “At that moment he is in a creative trance, like a painter or a sculptor. That’s where we decided to play the waltz.”
On “Frankenstein,” Desplat, like his colleagues, could easily identify with the film’s creator hero. In the multifaceted craft of filmmaking, everyone is a Victor Frankenstein.
“Yeah, although I don’t have that many pieces of corpses at home,” Desplat says, laughing. “I have some ice in my fridge.”