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The great thing about art is that you are creating

something that is gonna stay there forever.

It's very important that everything is accurate and perfect,

'cause people come to expect a handmade movie

when you go to an epic like this.

I thought it's gonna be an extraordinary process,

and it has been.

Victor!

Certain stories become part of your DNA.

If you're religious, you get them from the Bible.

If you love fairy tales, you get them from the fables or parables.

Two of the closest things to me are Pinocchio and Frankenstein.

The theme of father and sons and the fracturing of a human being

is a big theme for him.

They both are stories about "abnormal kids,"

born to fathers that are disappointed in a way.

Say one word.

One word more. Anything.

It's Guillermo's take on it.

He's been thinking about it for a long time.

Ever since he was a small child,

this has been a bucket list project for him that he's always wanted to do,

and he felt like he was ready as a filmmaker to make it.

Yes, yes. That's you.

I've lived with Mary Shelley's creation all of my life,

but I wanted to make it my own.

Through the years, I decided to make it a he said, she said.

The first part of the movie

is told from the point of view of the scientist, Victor.

Trickery?

Are you sure?

That is not trickery. That is a decision.

Motor coordination between the eye of one dead man

and the arm of another.

Release now.

Please.

"Please" always helps.

There's an element of uncertainty, what can be trusted of Victor's story.

"Is there really a creature?" is the question.

Whether you believe me or not…

…it will come back.

That's sort of the purpose of a monster

that comes from this kind of literature,

is to make us question our humanity and turn a mirror back onto the world.

I made you well.

I need you to make a companion for me.

One like me.

The second part of the movie is like when your kids come to you

and say, "Here's what you did wrong," and you have an epiphany.

So it's the prodigal father, I called it,

getting the son to tell him what he did wrong.

It's a story about this brilliant scientist

who was able to create life.

But it's also about so many other things.

There's themes of grief and of fathers and sons and loneliness and isolation

and that need to belong and that need for love.

For Guillermo, it was

"How do those things all dovetail together?"

And the thing that he did so brilliantly is he really gave you space

to not judge either story but to actually understand each story,

to be able to tell the full breadth of what the book does,

'cause it was really important for him to tell the monster's story as well.

I will make you bleed.

I will make you humble.

Part of the appeal of the book

is that it's like a teenager that asks too many questions

and you get irritated 'cause they're very smart.

The book has that fidgety sort of energy.

It wants to question capitalism.

It wants to question, '"Who am I?"

"Why am I here? Why did God send me?"

"What is my purpose? What is the world?"

And I wanted to capture that.

I want to know who I am.

Guillermo has embraced those questions

without necessarily feeling the need to provide a definitive answer.

-I fear you, Victor. -No, no…

I always have.

Every ounce of madness and destruction.

You are the monster.

Guillermo worked out a way to stay true to the original novel,

but also putting in his own handwriting, his own style,

his own way of showing emotions, showing life.

The film is a dedication to the metaphysical

and Gothic and otherworldly,

but also very much of this world.

He takes the things that we can't conceive,

these images from our subconscious, and he brings them back,

and he makes them palatable for us to understand.

I tried to absorb the style of dialogue and the themes,

so a lot of the dialogue is entirely original,

but it has the patois and the rhythms of Mary Shelley's from the book.

Some of what I will tell you is fact.

Some is not, but it is all true.

The way fiction and the reality of the novel merged

is just amazing.

The structure's basically intact.

And there's a chute going from top, right to the bottom.

I can arrange for your belongings.

What Guillermo tends to do is write for actors,

so he wrote the first draft with some of these actors in mind.

Certainly with Oscar in mind.

I didn't even really know

that Frankenstein was something that was simmering for him and…

I sat at his house, at his amazing house,

full of books and, you know, oddities and art,

and we just started talking.

We talk about our fathers

and we talk about being fathers,

and we talked very sincerely.

And he just said, "Heck, you need to play Victor."

But I said you have to be not afraid

of playing the main character which becomes the villain.

He just said the good and the evil are sides of the same thing,

and they're constantly flipping back and forth.

No, don't touch me!

Don't ever touch me!

I am more attracted to making movies about people that are full of villainy,

because ultimately it's a more real way of seeing the world.

Jacob came to be cast about nine weeks before we started shooting.

When that happened, I said,

"Anything that goes 'wrong' in this movie is gonna go right."

I'm gonna listen to the movie."

The idea on set he had every day

was that the movie will reject what it doesn't want,

and it will keep what it wants.

We're just here as, like, fans

and as lovers of this thing,

and the movie is gonna tell us.

Where would be a good mark? For the crossing?

Jacob and I spoke in preproduction a lot, but then very little.

One or two takes in, I printed,

'cause he was exactly what needed to be and there was not many repetitions.

He's an excellent actor.

I was really impressed at what a pro he is.

For someone that's so young

and has to deal with 10, 12 hours of makeup,

getting called in at 2:00 in the morning,

Jacob embodied it with such poise and commitment.

And you can even go like this

and you leave this hand there,

-you feel the name… -Yeah.

…and then you say it.

With The Creature, I needed somebody that sees promise.

Mia Goth gave me that.

Mia is a very instinctual actor.

She's really able to respond on the fly, kind of intuitively.

She's one of the most real actors I've ever worked with.

I learned to shoot her the way she needed to be shot,

to give her spontaneity.

Elizabeth.

I must confess something to you.

I have a belief in the marvelous and so do you.

There is a bond between us. Can you feel it?

An almost physical one.

I truly believe it to be something else.

Believing something does not make it true.

I figured out that that's exactly how Elizabeth would feel.

However it is you feel on the day,

let that inform whatever it is the scene wants to be.

-William. -Victor.

Look at you.

May I introduce the woman I'm to marry?

Lady Elizabeth Harlander.

There is a big change from the novel, and any adaptation of Frankenstein,

because Elizabeth is William's fiancée.

Felix is William, who is Victor's younger brother.

Guillermo really wanted to create that dynamic

so you could understand Victor's pain.

He is the guy that would love for his brother to love him.

Victor Frankenstein's brother doesn't really appear in the novel.

It's a 5-year-old child, and that's it.

When I read the script, I nearly fainted,

because Guillermo blew up the whole role to something

that is actually quite considerable.

If I did my job right, you will feel like that's the way it was,

but it's not at all.

William was a fully-developed character,

something I've experienced very rarely.

I have secured William's service

for the duration of the project.

Anything you need or want shall be granted.

There was no one ever considered for the role of Harlander

other than Christoph.

He had that gravitas that you really need for that role.

I wanted him to be an antagonist

and a victim at the same time.

Guillermo was very adamant about that

he needs that character and what he needs it for.

That's already a pretty firm basis for what I do.

He played it very charming and full of wit.

But when he reveals what his real motive is for financing the experiments…

I want to be placed in this new perfect body.

I find it very moving.

Let's lower the dummy slowly.

Lower the dummy. Copy that.

All right. Let's shoot it.

Ready, and action.

Three, two, one, go.

Guillermo has generally said there are four legs to the table.

Production design, cinematography, costumes, makeup and hair.

And they're all essentially one thing.

Call them all production design.

In that way, those four areas have to be completely coordinated.

Basically, a director prepares a whole meal,

and those that make it with him are also the guests.

And if you seat that table properly, with Mike, with Kate,

with Tamara, with Dan Laustsen,

it's a great meal.

Wardrobe is set, set construction is wardrobe.

Cinematography is set construction.

Action.

The only role of the director

is directing all those elements to tell the same story.

-A little more of the mushy brains. -Yeah.

When we've got the same people doing it

over the course of a number of films,

that all gets refined.

Those trust relationships are completely defined,

communication is very, very clear.

That's part of the secret sauce.

Little Laustsen.

Like them with the hat or no?

Every day I meet with everyone,

and every day I tell them what I'm changing.

There's not a single thing that means nothing.

Everything means everything.

That symphonic approach fuses everything.

The cinematography, the wardrobe and the set design.

There are very few filmmakers who actually are capable

of creating worlds,

that are able to operate at such a scale and execute such scope.

Guillermo really puts all of his heart into this film

that you can feel it.

He really put something together that is an experience

once in a lifetime, I think.

Everything had a practical quality,

and it speaks to a type of film that is an endangered species, I'd say.

I'm not sure how many more of those there's gonna be.

There are huge sets, huge props, complex wardrobe.

I wanted the movie to test the capabilities

of every single craft in movie-making.

There. There.

There are three phases to image creation.

At first, I want to see what you think,

and then I tell you what I'm thinking.

Then it becomes a dialogue.

And then the final thing is coordinating all that

between all the departments

so that the image feels like everything is working together.

We do a huge mood board.

We say, "These are the colors that are coding the movie."

The greens should be only for Elizabeth.

The blues should be Harlander and the brother and the father.

The red is only for the mother and Victor.

And then when we have all these documents, we have a dialogue.

And Kate's wardrobe captures that.

Guillermo said to me, "I don't want fusty old period for this."

"You know, it needs to be of its own."

At the very beginning of a film, I always respond to the script

with a response in terms of images and a mood board,

and I've used this for discussions with Guillermo.

It gives me a map, and it gives the team a feel

for fabrics and colors and things to respond to as well.

I wanted to make the costumes feel modern.

I didn't want you to see a pastel-colored period,

because I wanted Victor to be dressed like Mick Jagger.

I remember first seeing Kate's drawings

with different ideas taken from pictures off the Internet,

kind of these strange amalgams, and seeing these incredible costumes.

And so you kind of come in and I put these things on and

see what they feel like

and try to pretend a little bit that I belong.

That's the first feeling. You know, just approaching it.

As we gather research, many drawings are made.

I think we've got hundreds of drawings of Victor.

And then one day Guillermo's walking casually past.

He went, "Well, that's my Victor right there."

And then we had to-- Went with that one,

and that developed into fittings with Oscar

and became the layered wardrobe that he has now.

One of the first things that happens with characters

is the initial questions.

"What are the elements of this guy?"

"Is he trying to look a certain way?"

"Is he not? Is he trying to provoke?"

"How does that translate into how the story progresses

and what happens when he has a little bit more money?"

What does he put on?"

The costume fitting started to be a place to start collaborating

and realizing we're actually building this character together,

especially when we got to the creation of The Creature,

and the way he takes off pieces or adds pieces,

and what is that saying about his inner life?

I got so much information from that.

Mike had done a couple of early maquettes for The Creature

which were so beautiful,

you know, with all those beautiful lines and that pinky-red running through it,

and that starts informing me about how I can utilize those things

within the clothes or costume.

I talked with Kate to see what would emphasize this Creature,

his length and his height and his elegance.

And Kate is a master at this type of character.

So the costume was reflecting The Creature's look as well.

A simple coat has taken quite a few weeks of R&D.

So the idea was The Creature finds his coat

in an old burial ground of soldiers from the Crimean War.

So we thought it was a beautiful idea to…

have the imprint of the skeletons on the coat,

so we created sort of spines and things.

The evolution of this coat goes through a lot of stages and transitions,

with the journey to the Arctic and his visit to the mill.

So every time he's in an environment,

the qualities of his garment change.

-We can play with it a bit more. -Yeah. I would…

-I would leave only the eyes. -Okay.

It's interesting, 'cause we did months and months of concept work,

and then Guillermo is improvising all the time through the process.

So, your actor comes and it's like you've almost got to let go and see what falls.

A lot of your job is sort of reacting to things,

to support what's happening on set.

There's huge collaboration in that.

And not to mention, Mia is part of that collaboration as well.

We had so many costume fittings.

The level of craftsmanship is unparalleled.

I've never experienced anything quite like it.

I was always looking forward to my fitting

'cause I was always able to get a little bit more information

and to see how Kate was looking at the story as a whole and…

and my relation to other characters and how the dress was a language for that.

It's a question about Elizabeth's environment

and the books that she loves and nature, and how do we incorporate that

into her clothing to make it unique?

We took traditional garments

like a cape, shawl, pelerine of the period

that responded to sort of the beetle and moth imagery

that Guillermo likes to use,

and we developed these into sort of fractal body patterns.

When you look at beetles and things, their patterns are so big.

But then we had to sort of work out

how we could apply patterns or delicate layers,

and we developed this artwork that took months of fractal patterns

and mixing blood cells and malachites and that together

which is all part of this nod to the themes of nature.

We've also been playing with the idea of X-rays,

and we've been developing this on tools and things like that

to play with overlays so it's not so flat and saturated.

So we've been trying to capture that with Mia's clothing.

And action.

There's a dress for a moment on the heath

with her and Victor in his full seduction mode,

and we're looking at these beautiful stones

that art department have created.

They have these swirling patterns in them.

Kate's done some incredible things

with taking patterns from our sets and using them in the costumes.

Kate knows that her wardrobe is a piece of color,

a piece of shape and a piece of information

and a piece of beauty within a set.

So Tamara and her, very important that they have a dialogue together.

Tamara's great at sharing every part of their process with us,

and so we look at the work they're doing

and we reflect her architecture and things with our department.

You don't feel wardrobe pulling one way

and architecture pulling another.

These are not isolated ideas that occur at the same time.

You're directing an opera,

and you're leaning to the same emotional point.

Guillermo's very clear, as was Dan Laustsen, our DOP.

It was always how color was going to read,

because what you see to the naked eye

is not what you're reading on camera ever with these cameras.

We do many, many tests through digital cameras.

We got Dan to set up lighting.

We are very much in control of the color palette,

because otherwise it's changing everybody else's work.

You know, if Kate is spending a lot of time to find the green color

and we're just going to make it more blue, the green is going to disappear.

Dan and I talked about the painterly color of the movie,

and we ended up with blue, white and gold for the prologue and the epilogue.

Then the childhood is black and white and red.

From then on, you start adding more colors.

We talked a lot about how to light it and how the set should look.

And, of course, all that is done with the production designer, Tamara,

because to light it well is a teamwork.

There's an evolution in the lab, through Dan's lighting.

He tells the story when it's fresh.

And the first time that Victor's here, it's very bright,

and then it gets darker and the storm comes,

and then there's lightning, and then there's the moment of creation.

Guillermo wanted very saturated colors.

Elizabeth he wanted in the greens, and Victor's embraced some of the reds.

And there's sort of an interesting color palette together.

It reflects the colors in the batteries and the lab,

so it's all a part of that slightly psychedelic world.

The color palette for The Creature

was to make this thing that was pleasing to look at.

You know, there's beauty in ugliness.

The makeup needs to tell you that he's made of pieces.

Why is he made of pieces? That's one thing I wanted to know,

because, really, if you are Victor Frankenstein,

you go to a cemetery, you grab a body, you grab a hand, you grab an arm.

That's it. It's made of three pieces.

But if they give you the pieces of a battlefield,

then that explains why he's putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle.

So the makeup needed to reflect that,

but have a beauty.

Mike and I are Frankensteinheads.

I have a whole room dedicated to Frankenstein.

Mike builds the things that are in my room for Frankenstein,

and we are groupies.

Michael loves Frankenstein as much as Guillermo.

When he saw Boris Karloff on screen for the first time, it changed his life.

I had to figure out what Guillermo wanted.

You know, I can help push his ideas further,

but it has to be about what he wants and what his movie is about.

And what I got was,

people see monsters in beautiful things sometimes,

and we didn't have to do this ogre of a creature.

We didn't want all these garish wounds and stitching.

So I said, "Well, okay. This is Victor's first go at this."

So, you know, a dressmaker can't make the perfect dress the first time.

There's a lot more stitches and patching going on.

The second one would be a lot better. But his first one, to me--

I thought, "Okay. You've got to make sense of these scars."

"So maybe they're access points, maybe they're points he went in,

"changed the muscle and then figured, 'That's not right.'"

"It's not working. I can improve that," then went back in again.

Victor Frankenstein is not a butcher. He's trying to make the perfect man.

At the end of the day, this is a man brought back from the dead,

but it doesn't mean that he can't look beautiful.

So I just played around with colors and forms and shapes

that would make the actor's body feel powerful.

Victor!

And developed it further and further from there.

Yeah. Something. He was…

To be a part of… To be a part of…

So, I called Jacob,

and immediately, we started talking about the monster.

When we started, he just said, "You have to leave the world behind."

"Emotionally, you have to close your ears off

and close your nostrils off and change the way that you see things

to be able to shift into this kind of original being."

I said the hard thing to do is the zero.

I said, "If you want to study anyone, study your dog."

You know, your dog can be there.

If it needs to attack something, the dog attacks…

…and then sit by you like he's been there all day.

You are my friend.

I studied butoh,

which is sort of like the dance of re-animating a corpse,

and that was really helpful in terms of isolating different parts of your body

and thinking about movement in a different way.

Jacob is a really well-proportioned man,

so it was ideal, and I could see that in his frame.

But also, he had an almost panther-like grace

in his body and his movements.

I think he was born to do this.

And action.

Mike and I agreed on using as much of the body of Jacob as we could,

because that gives him more expressiveness and more reality.

This is the very first time

we applied the makeup to Jacob back in Los Angeles.

It was the first application we ever did on him,

and then the next application was the first day on set.

It's a tag-team effort.

There's a bunch of us, and we all swarm Jacob at once.

First we start on his head,

then we slowly move down and he's encased in prosthetics.

It was totally consuming

because I would sit in the makeup chair for ten hours,

and sort of lose my humanity,

and your skin gets washed out and covered with something,

and your face and the structure changes,

and then you put the costume on,

and it's an immersive experience.

The full body is actually 42 pieces.

Normally, with a makeup like this, you can overlap in appliance.

So you've got a little room for error.

But since I broke the makeup up along the actual cuts and stitches,

where Frankenstein put him together like a jigsaw puzzle,

which is very exacting, it takes a little longer to apply,

but much more manmade-looking.

Guillermo wanted us to stay away from jet-black hair,

so we have more of a brown, layered, multi-colored, darker version.

And I believe it was his idea to have the one shock lock,

'cause obviously it's cool,

but also it shows that he's distinctly made up of different people.

All I needed to be was

the sort of perfect still canvas for him to paint life onto.

So I just wanted to be as calm

and as respectful of his process as I could be,

because he's genuinely one of the finest artists

I've ever encountered.

I think what's amazing is that the descriptions in the book come to life,

and it's not the one that we normally associate.

If you can-- If you can go up here, it would be nice.

I was taken aback by it because I had this idea of what The Creature is like

in other iterations of Frankenstein that I've seen.

But what I really loved and appreciated

is kind of how it's scaled back in a way a little bit.

There's a purity to it.

The way Jacob embodies him,

there's so much grace,

and what continues to happen throughout the story

affects the way his body becomes stronger and more defensive,

and then eventually into more offensive.

Stay back!

So we did make some replicas of Jacob as The Creature.

One was a dissection body.

So where we see these pieces being put together,

where, you know, the knee will go into a new knee socket that gets screwed in.

The section of the brain comes out so you can see inside the head.

You know, a new heart, and see where Victor is operating

and putting this piecemeal creature together.

The other one we have is

when The Creature's raised up on the Y-frame for his birthing scene,

obviously, we couldn't leave an actor stood up there all day in this pose,

so we made a full six-foot-five replica of Jacob in the makeup for that scene.

Being a Frankenstein movie,

there's a lot of body parts, there's a lot of corpses.

I wanted to show the surgery with anatomically correct butchery.

Because, ultimately, to break a bone and reglue it

or to connect ligaments and tendons is an incredibly messy business.

So we have literally dozens of bodies

and body parts on that set.

And I thought, we'll just throw a few out there,

but no, no, Guillermo wanted them all.

A little more out here.

-Yeah. -Yeah.

Most directors put their office next to production and accounting.

But I am a pest.

I put my office in the art department.

And I demand to see props two, three times a week.

A bad piece of set decoration can pop you out of the movie.

'Cause it's not real anymore.

Early on, we were sort of doing this dance

of "What is our take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

and what is Guillermo's vision of that?"

My tendency is to be really real and accurate and historic,

and Guillermo is more into the fantasy

and pushing the vision.

That combination of our two visions together really works.

At some point, Guillermo likes to go

from the very rough concept to, like, fully 3D model.

It has to go from being rooted in fantasy to a little more rooted in reality.

These models were basically the first physical look at these sets

before construction goes in and actually starts building the real thing.

They helped visualize what will go on in that set.

The more tools that we can use as an art department

to share with Guillermo and Dan Laustsen to get the design ideas across the better.

And then there's always the question

of what's important for Guillermo to have as a built set.

Victor's apartment was a must-build, and one of my favorite sets.

It was scripted that it was this impossibly cluttered and crooked set.

It was a really beautiful way to start the movie,

'cause it was one of our first sets,

and it sort of set the tone for what our Frankenstein would be.

I remember I had my very first day in the lab set.

Leaves are falling, water's trickling,

and you look up and you just lose it.

It's so big, it's so magnificent,

you can't believe it is inside of a studio.

Well, the lab had to be spectacular.

I mean, it's the place where the creation takes place,

and it's kind of the ultimate set.

The irony is the lab is so iconic in people's heads,

from the different versions that we've seen,

but it's not in the book.

Mary Shelley just skips over the how.

From the original movie and everything, there's been a number of those labs,

but, of course, Guillermo, he needs to top all of those.

I think we did that, with a brilliant combination

of production design, lighting, special effects.

You know, we're raining inside there and we got lightning flying.

It was really something to see.

I knew that I wanted to shoot in the lab with big cranes,

with a lot of movement, like a concert.

So I knew I was gonna have the cranes sweeping up and down.

It was a mixture between a musician or a performer,

going from one synthesizer to the other

and having to run ten stories up to call in the power of electricity

and come ten stories down.

And how frantic it is when the storm finally comes.

Being there,

with those days of rain and seeing the way it transforms

from just an empty, rundown water tower to this mad lab,

with body parts and blood strewn all over the place,

and at the center, this crucified Creature,

it was astounding.

So we're sort of a third way up in the tower,

which is really, in our world, 450 feet high.

So, below us is the lobby,

and then below that is The Creature's cell and an ice chamber.

And then going up, this vortex goes all the way to the very top of the tower,

where Victor has to attach the lightning rod.

And then there's a chute that goes down the middle that, by dropping things down

from one to the other, we tied all of those things together.

Guillermo wanted a tiled nightmare.

There was a very rudimentary sketch early on of Elizabeth and The Creature

in front of a tiled circle, and that was all he had.

So the idea of this is it's a vaulted Gothic-style tiled nightmare of a place

that's underground, below the lab.

Some of the tile is real, some of the tile we created.

It's a bit of a tricky set because we had to burn the set, basically.

What Tamara has done here is a masterpiece.

You know, the set is so amazing.

But, of course, because everything is shot on the crane,

all the walls have to fly to be able to get the crane in.

If you're building a set, you want to move everything.

And it has to move within three minutes of you saying, "Move that."

So anything that was there, a steam machine, a column, an archway,

you need to remove it so the crane can go into the set and shoot.

So, the set is supported by the grid and the ceiling,

so we had to come up with a solution for wilding columns.

So what we have is a machine that comes in,

lifts this section up and then this pulls out,

and then it drops down into position so we can pull it out

so the camera can sweep through.

Our talented team put that together.

Genius.

I thought I would offer some help.

That was easy.

I thought… I thought I'd make up…

So we're playing it as if there's two vaulted chambers below the lab.

One will be the ice chamber, so it has a slightly different look,

and then we're gonna redress it for The Creature's cell

where Victor puts The Creature after he's created him.

Let's do it again. And you just go, "Yeah." And you move.

We could have built the ship on a stage,

but there's no stage really big enough to hold it.

So we built it in a parking lot.

It was always there, this icon of the production,

just this massive boat.

It is so big.

It's a monumental piece of craftsmanship.

It's like an optical illusion. It doesn't make any sense to you.

I want a real ship.

I want when The Creature moves it, I want The Creature to move it.

So we did the ship for real.

Interior, exterior, everything.

It was very exciting,

'cause when we got the chance to actually shoot that scene

where I get lifted up onto the boat itself, with all the sailors

and the torches everywhere, it was massive and it moved,

and it was on a gimbal

with ropes and real masts all over the place.

So, for anyone familiar with the novel Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,

you'll know that it starts and ends with the captain's log on a ship.

So, for us, we had to come up with strong opening for the front of the movie

where the ship is stuck in the Arctic ice,

and that's where a lot of the climactic action takes place.

So we had to set this ship convincingly in the Arctic ice.

You see all of these icebergs that were made

by our special effects department and our art department.

They look incredible.

The ship also had to shake from side to side,

so we have what is called a gimbal,

that moves it nine degrees in either direction.

What we have here are ship models for the Horizont.

It went through many phases,

helping determine how the ship moves,

how much of the ship is built.

This was used for stunts to figure out

which portions of the ship would wild on the port side,

and we had our rigging up top for a rigging team.

We had portions of our riser that wild for camera.

Having a physical model like this helps the whole team.

Of all the sets, the ship is the most challenging one,

but it's mostly because of the logistics.

We basically worked from September till the end of January.

The welders were on it for, I think, a good eight weeks,

and then the middle of October,

Special Effects had built the inner core, which we call "the spine."

Basically, it's the piece that rotates, you know, on the gimbal.

And the carpenters started putting all the decking in,

and then all the detail work started.

And at the same time, the masts, obviously,

were a very big piece of the puzzle.

Like, we didn't put a mast right through the captain's quarters,

which there would be on a boat.

Guillermo loves the symmetry,

and he wants to walk into the captain's quarters

and see the round window and have Victor framed in the round window.

So we cheated things.

We're gonna extend with him. Go. Go.

Very good. Very good. Very good.

Arm up.

Very good. Say it.

When you're shooting a ship like that, then you have a logistical problem.

50% of craft in directing is problem-solving

mechanical and physical means.

So, in the ship, you have a battle of cranes to light it,

cranes for stunt,

cranes for blocking the light.

Every crane has to negotiate the space.

So the negotiation of that logistic to shoot the ship

is, in and of itself, like going into a battle.

You have to have a very precise strategy on how you shoot it.

In the scale of the movie, he knows exactly

how the drama is and how he's going to tell it.

You know, he's very precise about that.

So the big scale, a lot of action, and then coming into, like,

a very intimate scene in the captain's quarters.

Perhaps there is a finer point in me telling you my story.

Whether there is or isn't, Baron…

I'd like to hear it.

Originally, the interior of the ship was gonna be Danish white.

He said white represents death,

and so when you get to the space of the Arctic,

it was almost like he'd created a limbo.

We made it white and that kind of worked, but then Kate decided to do the Royal Navy

in a particular blue that was a little heightened.

I remember, you know, the ship and Tamara,

you know, everyone was expecting dark navy uniforms.

There was a question mark,

and Guillermo said, "No, we need that quite bright."

When we saw the uniforms of the sailors,

we thought, "Let's bring that blue into the captain's quarters."

So we integrated Kate's colors into the ship.

The sailors are the landscape.

The landscape is the ship. The ship are the sailors.

It's all one thing.

In terms of Edinburgh, where we shot the street scenes,

really it wasn't a stretch for us

because it was actually used as a marketplace at the time.

And actual public gallows happened in other places in Glasgow.

The cathedral has huge, soaring ceilings that are amazing.

Just when you go to frame them in our, you know, 1:85 frame,

you don't see the soaring ceilings unless you're, you know, looking up.

But the lower area of the cathedral had lower arched ceilings,

and it was moody and intimate.

And better for Dan to light 'cause it was all on ground level.

Like, for him to light any of these giant cathedrals would be a nightmare.

Look at this. It's so gigantic.

Of course, the beauty of location is you get the age.

You've got the feeling of the real stuff.

But when you go into the studio, you can control everything.

But this is… this is history. This is fantastic.

We shoot much more wide angle than what we have done before.

And when you're shooting large format,

you don't have these, like, super-wide angle looks

because you have the big sensors.

And that's a very powerful look, I think.

And because the camera's always moving, you know, the light has to move as well.

It's very organic.

The way we are shooting the movie, Guillermo and me, you know,

we're going a little bit more back to the old-fashioned big lights,

because we don't have any lights inside the set.

Most of the time, all the lights are outside the set.

Laustsen and I have been pursuing single-source lighting for a long time.

What does it mean?

It means that you have a huge amount of light

coming through a single source, like a window,

and everything else is a bounce

or a fill that you should not be aware of.

So the result is it feels like a period movie.

You don't feel it lit.

It feels like you're entering a real place.

Father! Save her, please!

So, we are starting super-wide, and coming into, like,

a kind of close-up in the same time.

And that is the reason we have big machines outside

to control the sun and control the lights.

When I get into those rooms,

I think, "Oh, it's a very sunny day."

"It's very bright."

And then I realize it's raining outside,

and it looks like there's full sunshine inside

because of hundreds of lights outside.

We want to do as much as we can in the camera.

And the miniature shooting is because it looks so real.

There is a difference between the physical and the digital.

Particularly in something like the explosions on the lab.

You're seeing real bounces

of the physical battery falling and hitting the other.

And the accidents that happen with a physical set blowing apart

are gonna be ten times more complex

than any decision a digital technician made.

This tower is 450 feet high.

We could never build it, but we've built the full miniature,

which is really a maxiature, 'cause it's, like, 30 feet.

There was a set built in Toronto that we then had to match as model makers

but at a 1:40 scale.

There's some details we have that traditionally

we'd have to hand-sculpt to do the match.

But now we can use 3D printers to help us.

So a good example is the door at the very front,

all that ornate detail, at one point, someone had had to sculpt.

But this time round, we know that is gonna be the exact same thing

as what's over in Toronto.

That was kind of a fascinating process, to work with a group of artists who--

You know, there might only be

ten people in the world who do what they do.

They'll give more reality.

You have a base that is real, then you enhance digitally.

Whether it's the deer in the forest,

or shooting the footage of the wolves with real wolves, then going into digital,

you have to have some element that you explored with physically.

So we built a tower and blew it up.

Guillermo's process has gotten much more immediate.

On this movie,

he's been a constant presence in the cutting room, early every day

to see how the story that is on the page

is translating into the story on screen, which are not always the same thing.

Guillermo has a pretty good idea what the movie is gonna look like,

but he still shapes it as he shoots.

If there's something that you need that you may not have,

it gives you the ability to go back and get it.

It reminded me of when I would make movies with my friends

with a video camera, and we'd be like, "Okay, now you say your line."

"Okay, now you say your line."

Basically editing in camera.

It had that kind of energy to it.

-Again? -Yeah.

We started with no score,

because the movie does have a great rhythm without any temp music.

And once Alexandre Desplat comes in and adds his work,

it'll take it to a whole new level.

Alexandre is, in my opinion,

one of the best composers alive.

He's a guy that knows exactly why he's doing something

and exactly how to achieve an emotion,

and exactly how to make the music eloquent.

I deeply think that, to have a good score, you have to find…

the soul of the film, create beside the film

another dimension that follows the film,

and amplify the emotions of the film.

So with Guillermo, there are some scenes

where we think maybe there shouldn't be music.

Maybe we don't need it because the characters don't need to add more.

Or it could be a very violent, rough scene that we see,

and if the score is the opposite it may be better than just adding more horror.

Cut!

In some very active moments of craziness, you know,

when he's building his Creature

or when he's trying to get the storm and lightning,

I've used many organs that create a kind of multi-wave,

multi-arpeggio movement,

which really amplifies the craziness of the situation.

But if you put on top of that the violin…

…suddenly it's taken this twister of sounds and…

They feel this energy that Guillermo put in his film

and I try to convey with the music.

No, no, no!

If there was a recipe,

every movie would be a masterpiece.

But it's very hard to do a masterpiece.

No! No! No!

It's a vapor that you have to kind of mold

and take to wherever you want to take it.

Is immortality a curse or a blessing?

Do you want to be alive in a painful state?

Can you find the redemption in that?

The ending of Pinocchio,

the ending of Cronos and the ending of Frankenstein

are exactly the same.

A character being bathed in a dawning sun

and accepting the daylight.

The idea of loving a character that is imperfect,

and forgiving those imperfections.

And ultimately, the search of style with the camera,

and the light, and the color is on Cronos and is on Frankenstein.

If I made Frankenstein earlier,

I would have done it a dialogue between me and my father.

Now it's a dialogue between my father and me and me and my kids.

Generational pain passed from one generation to the other,

and how can you say, "Stop. Let's move forward"?

There's a line from that moment to this one that takes 30 years.

And the funny thing is, I think it marks an ending.

What I would like to do is I would like to make a movie that tries

to do things that I don't "normally" do.

Some people age and they become more risk-averse,

and some people age and become more risk-prone.

And I think I would like to go that way.

There's a line in the movie that says, "And having reached the end of the world,

there was no more horizon and the achievement felt unnatural."

That's how I feel right now.