Guillermo del Toro: “I think forgiveness is an incredible tool” | The Mexican director tried to make “Frankenstein” for decades

I opened the ribs of Guillermo del Torolook inside the cavity, and there – where there should be a beating and bloody heart – you will find a copy of the Frankenstein of Mary Shelley. It is the founding text of much of modern horror, but when the filmmaker behind Pan’s Labyrinth y The shape of water describes the novel as his “Bible” and Boris Karloff’s monster as his “Messiah,” saying he was simply inspired by it seems an understatement.

No, Del Toro is too ethereal for that: better to say that he lives in communion with the young woman who began writing feverishly one stormy night in Geneva in 1816. He is the Father of Monsters, after all, and they all bear the scars of Shelley’s Creature: marginalized, abandoned and feared. His great ambition was always to make Frankensteinand after almost two decades of false starts and broken promises, it finally does it, with the scale that a budget of Netflix.

It is a beautiful work, with that rich, gothic varnish that characterizes its style. But although it is one of the most faithful adaptations ever made, the true power is in its deviations from the text: the sense that he Frankenstein Del Toro’s story is as much his story as Shelley’s. Their pain feels deeply intimate.

“There are large portions of the film that are autobiographical to me,” he tells me, surrounded by candles and blood-red flowers, a day after the British premiere at the London Film Festival. “I do it because (Shelley) basically wrote an autobiography of his soul.”

“I know Mary Shelley through Guillermo, so I care about her through him,” he says. Jacob Elordiwho plays his Creature (Oscar Isaac embodies the creator, Victor Frankenstein). “For me, it’s Guillermo as an influence and how she has influenced him: the way he sees the world, his suffering, his pain. Because I see the Creature as an extension of that, you know?”

Academics could spend their entire lives debating the true meaning of Frankenstein: whether it is a romantic challenge to Enlightenment rationalism or a complex examination of the role of the mother in 19th century society. But what continues to resonate, two centuries later, is the anguish of his prose, expressed by a Creature brought to life by an egomaniacal scientist who immediately rejects it as an aberration.

Read the phrase: “Remember, I am your creature: I should be your Adam; but I am rather the Fallen Angel, whom you expel from happiness without having committed any fault,” and imagine 19-year-old Shelley writing it after having been rejected by her father, the philosopher William Godwin, for eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin had preached against the oppressive conformity of marriage, but those beliefs did not seem to apply to his own daughter.

“The figure of the tyrannical father was constant in his life,” says Del Toro. “Godwin wasn’t a great father: He disowned her for running away with Shelley, he demanded money from (Percy) to pay his debts, and he was distant when she needed him most. Look, (the movie) isn’t written from abandonment but from knowledge. I can justify it. It exists in the spaces between the structure of the romance novel. So, well, I felt like I had license to do it.”

And so, while Shelley’s Victor enjoys a blissful adolescence (“no creature could have more tender parents than mine”), del Toro’s does not. His father (Charles Dance), a doctor by profession, adores his youngest son William, but only sees in Victor the opportunity to extend his legacy. When he misses, he hits it.

He Frankenstein Del Toro then extends the cycle of abuse for another generation, making it unavoidable that Victor and his Creature are reflections of each other. “For me, at a certain point, it became crucial to believe that the Creature era Victor,” Isaac says. “That maybe there wasn’t even an objective Creature, that it never came to life, that everything was a horrible projection, that every time something evil appears, the Creature arrives.”

The Creature, before mastering English, tries to communicate with his father by repeating his name: “Victor.” Isaac sees beauty in that simplicity. “The great musician T Bone Burnett says that before we had language, we sang, right? Before language there was tone. And you can’t lie with tone. Then we invented language so we could lie.”

“The fact that (the Creature) uses just a few syllables and gives them different tones is pure honesty. Those little mouth movements, the way Jacob does it, create a huge range of emotions with just a few syllables. It makes me think about that, you know? About the truth behind it all.”

It also subtly resolves one of the internet’s eternal debates: what should we call the Creature? Frankenstein? Frankenstein’s monster? As Elordi says: “It’s irrelevant, right? We invented that language so we could talk about Frankenstein – if we call it that or a monster – which reflects the world very well.” What matters is not the name but what it means to the Creature: “‘love’ at first and then, as it becomes conscious, it becomes ‘why?’ And that simplicity is deeply moving.”

The reflection also reaches the two female characters, both played by Mia Goth. One is Claire, Victor’s mother, the only truly protective figure in his childhood. The other is Elizabeth, William’s fiancée, who represents romantic ideals and has true empathy for the Creature. That Victor feels attracted to her is a true Freudian mess, with which Del Toro plays by making him, as an adult, drink milk from time to time.

“That made us laugh a lot, the milk, because we always said ‘the milk! the milk!'” Isaac jokes. “The fact that the only woman he’s seen is his mother… who knows if they really looked alike, because he’s the one telling the story. I suspect not. But in his mind it’s her and the milk is an extension of that.”

“Also, he is someone who is very controlled,” he continues. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t take drugs, he doesn’t smoke opium. He’s not that kind of person. In fact, he does something very innocent: he drinks milk. But the reason is much sadder and deeper: when he gets nervous or needs comfort, he reaches for breast milk.”

And what does the Creature then become if not a manifestation of that longing? “We worked with a performance magician named Gerry Grennellwho I’ve worked with a lot,” says Isaac (Grennell is officially listed as a dialect coach in Frankenstein). “He was the first one who said that it’s like (Victor) created his broken inner child and then wanted to reject him. And that inner child had to grow up and chase him to the ends of the Earth just to forgive him. And that, for me, was the key. It made me understand how he could be so cruel to him, how he could reject him so completely, because there was no separation between the two.”

So, if the question is who does Del Toro see himself in – the creator or the creation? – the answer is both. When I ask him about the inclusion of a new character, Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a weapons manufacturer who becomes Victor’s patron, describes him as “a film director, in a way.”

“I wanted Harlander to be like the studio that promises everything you need,” he says. “Except you’re going to do it his way. Except now you owe him something. Victor doesn’t care where the money comes from, he doesn’t try to find out, because he’s flattered, spoiled, and we decided he should start dressing more extravagantly, more devoted to his desires.”

“I think the character gives a modern feel to the movie. We live in a world where, if you blink, you’re working for someone with a very shady past.” It is difficult not to think, at that moment, of Del Toro’s own experiences in Hollywood (he famously renounced the theatrical cut of his film Mimicfrom 1997, after creative clashes with producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein).

The director’s deep identification with the novel may also explain why he chooses to close the film with forgiveness. “Victor flees from his guilt, his shame and his ugliness, which are those of all of us,” says Elordi. “And in the end he realizes that this guilt and shame are not ugly. So, in the end, Victor accepts himself. And he is freed to see the sun. I am deeply moved by the story that Guillermo built.”

“I think forgiveness is an incredible tool,” Del Toro says. “Very difficult, but very valuable. I think the spirit of romantic existentialism justified the end of the book, when the Creature is swept away by the current towards nothingness. I thought it was a way of renewing the pact between the novel and the modern world, where there is a desperate lack of forgiveness and acceptance. And it seemed organic to me, because the ending is not happy but not unhappy either. It is existential in another way. It basically says: here we are and here we go, which is all we have. There is no menu. It is a single taste: life”.

The Independent of Great Britain. Special for Page/12.