IDEA INCUBATORS
MSZ: These notebooks are very personal, of course. What prompted you to have this material published?
GDT: I started the notebooks a long time ago. More and more, people have heard about them and become curious about them. I started putting a few pages on some of the DVDs of my films because we were running out of extras. I think the first time we put the notebooks on a DVD was Blade II. People reacted very well. At one point I thought, there are a few personal moments in them, but they were moments that were public in some way because I seldom record stuff that is truly personal.
MSZ: I love when there are little personal asides. They give context to all the ideas that are in the notebooks.
GDT: One of the really, really great ones is on one of the first pages of the lost Cronos notebook. It says, “March 3, ’93.” That is the day when Bertha Navarro, my producer, spoke with Imcine, the Mexican film institute, and the guy in charge said, “Cronos is a horrible movie. It will go to no . festivals, it will win no awards, nobody will ever want it, and it will be forgotten soon enough.” And instead of getting angry or whatever, I just wrote it down and said, “This is an important day in case I can ever prove the guy wrong.” And it was 3/3/93, and it’s in that book. But unfortunately, the book got lost.
Losing things is part of the process, too. That’s why, every time I talk publicly, I always say it’s really important in our life to have talismans. Like my car. We call him the Handsome One. Every day, when I’m riding in it, I’ll have a moment where I love my car. I go, “I love you.” You imbue these things with power.
If you have a really great relationship with an object, if something happens to it, it’s part of the story. Because you’re collecting memories, or experiences, and that event becomes part of the tale.
MSZ: That raises a question I’ve had: Who are you writing these notebooks for?
GDT: For my daughters. When they are grown-ups and they have lives of their own, children of their own, or whatever, they can look at the guy that was their father when he was young. I want them to understand that being a grown-up is not being boring. It’s being alive. I want them to know that grown-ups are people, too.
MSZ: Have they seen the notebooks? Have they had a chance to look at them?
GDT: You know, they look at them now and then, but they draw manga-style, so they find my drawings absolutely reprehensible and horrible. But it doesn’t matter. I told them, “I want you to enjoy them if you can."
MSZ: There’s a wonderful playfulness in the notebooks. For example, you write about the need to fill empty space. Is that something that you still do with your notebooks? Do you sometimes just try to fill up the page, to make a beautiful page?
GDT: I do. There are definitely moments when the writing becomes part of the design. I’m very glib about it. I’ll write things like, “This means nothing. It’s just to fill the space."
MSZ: Well, you write, “No doubt the need to fill all available space is Freudian and very serious."
GDT: Yeah, because I do it out of compulsion. Literally, I just say, “I need a line over here,” and I don’t want to wait for an idea to write the line, so I fill the space.
MSZ: Speaking about the composition of the notebook pages: Do you ever sketch something in advance in pencil?
GDT: I do. I sketch, write notes in pencil, and then, if I do a drawing, I try to organize the notes around it.
MSZ: So you’re typically writing in pencil, and then you fill it in with ink as it becomes a finished page?
GDT: I draw faster than I write. Like, I might be five pages ahead of the writing with the drawing. So I write around the drawings, which means the images and text connect only tangentially.
Sometimes I’ll even do a drawing just to try a new set of colors, which has become a lot easier. When I started the Blue Notebook after Cronos, for example, I had zero money, and I would draw with four Prismacolor pencils. If I wanted a purple, I needed to shade that purple by combining colors, and if I needed a certain hue of green, I would find a way to do it with the same four pencils. It was very time consuming, you see? But it actually made me appreciate and learn the value of each of the basic colors of the spectrum and now, when I do film color correction, I am fast and precise.
Then, if you look at the Pan’s Labyrinth pages and some of the Hellboy II drawings, you’ll see I used acrylic. It’s a very heavy medium, and you need to put time aside for it, too.
I now have these alcohol markers, and they’re very quick. They are my favorite medium. Not only can I do a drawing fast, but I can start a drawing, put it aside, and then come back to it.
MSZ: Has that change in medium affected how you approach the notebooks?
GDT: Yeah, because now, with the markers, I can do a drawing in thirty minutes, whereas before, with acrylic, I would need, like, an hour. I’m self-taught, so the way I figured out how to use acrylic was to start with the darker shade and then add highlights. But with markers, you start with the lightest shade, and then you start adding darker, and darker, and darker colors. At the end, if you need it, you can put a layer of highlights on. It’s much faster.
MSZ: Besides experiments with color, how do you determine what you put in a notebook and what you don’t?
GDT: Honestly, I don’t think about it. If I’ve already given instructions to a sculptor, or I’ve already talked to the designer about a concept, I don’t put it in the book because it’s not a journal, really.
MSZ: What about the blood splotches and so forth, those elements that give the notebooks a sort of vintage quality?
GDT: What I was trying to do in the third notebook, in particular, was make it feel like a found object. I was doing these long, drawn letters, with long bottoms and flourishes. But it became very tiresome, and after a number of pages, I said, “Oh, screw this.” But during that time, I found the right color for the blood, and I thought it looked good to have it, so that it started to look like a found grimoire.
What is interesting is that I tried, most of the time, to do a little composition on each page. That’s why the blood helps now and then, or a little Lovecraftian symbol here and there.
MSZ: So your composition is really localized to a single page.
GDT: Yeah. And I actually try to do a composition across facing pages a lot of the time, although I’m often working with multiple projects at once. I don’t always succeed, but I try to make it coherent.