While working on Cronos, and as he would do with all his films, Guillermo kept a detailed notebook full of his illustrations, concepts, and thoughts. These are suggested by the storyboards, sketches, and production stills that follow, but none of this artwork is from the notebook itself.
For that, blame James Cameron.
“When I was finishing Cronos, Jim and I went to an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica,” Guillermo explains, “and it was a very, very, very dire time. I was staying in a hotel that was three hundred dollars a month, so it was very, very economical. With that hotel, most of the time the plumbing did not work, so I had to go to another hotel every three days and rent a room just to take a shower—or I could have a hot dog at Pink’s. Those were my choices. The day I took the shower, I couldn’t eat lunch.
“So when I met Jim Cameron, I was really filthy. I was a disaster. And he said, ‘Order what you want.’ And I thought, Oh my God, I’d better carve up for the whole week. I ordered like a madman, and wine kept pouring, and I got completely bloated and drunk. I said to Jim, ‘I want you to have my notebook for Cronos’, which was a Day Runner full of notes. I gave it to him, and Jim received it, and I think he was also not completely sober.
“The end of the story is that the notebook—he says that he placed it somewhere. He still lives in the same house, so I have hopes, but he says that he hasn’t been able to find it since.”
As a result, the pages that follow can only hint at what the Cronos notebook held, at what it still holds, like a snippet from a lost work of Sophocles quoted in a play by Aristophanes or snapshots of the Ark of the Covenant that is itself crated and buried in the closing-credits warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
What’s clear from the surviving Cronos storyboards and sketches is that, from the beginning, Guillermo possessed a bold creative vision and the ability to communicate it. In the years to come, Guillermo would make bigger films, more ambitious ones, but from the first he staked out a territory that was all his own.
GDT: I did this illustration of the Cronos device tearing into the skin [above] to show a possible idea for a poster for the film’s release. At the time, we were sending the movie out to American distributors, and I wanted to convey the idea that Cronos could be marketed. I was particularly happy with this image and the distributor, October Films, liked it, but they changed it for an image of a woman—like a girl having an orgasmic reaction to the device.
And the storyboards here [right] are rare—very few storyboards for Cronos survived. These particular story-boards were for an original prologue that I discarded, which was to start in the dark and then show the alchemist harvesting the insects.
MSZ: I know storyboarding is something you do on an ongoing basis while you’re working on your films. Can you talk a little bit about how you use them?
GDT: I now just doodle because it serves the same function as a more elaborate drawing. Even if you’re just using shapes, you can still communicate how you want to organize the frame—you’re still able to share the composition. I’ll give my doodle to someone who can interpret it and make it useful for preproduction. For example, if it’s for a VFX shot or a makeup effects shot, they’ll do a better job rendering the scene for budgeting.
I also use storyboards when I’m shooting. I call it the poor man’s Avid. Because I can edit on the page while I’m shooting. If I have sixteen or twenty setups I can put them all out on a sheet of paper and decide if I want to go from this one to that one, or if I have to skip one—you know, as time gets tighter. Storyboards are a great tool for making decisions like that.
MSZ: But this particular storyboard seems much more detailed. Was there a time when you drew more elaborate storyboards?
GDT: This one is so detailed because we were trying to budget for the effects we needed. I wanted to show the insect moving in the foreground, but I didn’t want to show its shape. So the storyboard was important for communicating how much we really needed to reveal to my guys at Necropia.
MSZ: And what is this color piece over here [above]?
GDT: That is a preproduction painting I did to show what I wanted to happen to de la Guardia when Gris bites him and drinks his blood. I wanted it to be all in blue and red, but I didn’t know how to do it with the budget we had.
MSZ: The colors are reminiscent of the contrast of the red and the blue in Hellboy, of Hellboy and Abe Sapien.
GDT: I normally mix a warm color with a cold color. I think red and blue is a color scheme that is a lot more 1990s at this point. But I also like to combine cyan with gold or amber, because there is a lot of gold in cyan. And if you use the right shade of amber, there’s some green in it, so they can be complementary colors.
MSZ: Something I noticed in this artwork—in both the poster and the color pieces—is the signature.
GDT: The signature is my take on Will Eisner’s signature. I’m a big Will Eisner fan, and I tried to combine his name with my name, because you know “Will” and “Guillermo” are the same name. And I used to add that little comic book bubble, too.
GDT: These pages are from the diary in the film, which were drawn by Felipe Ehrenberg, who did a fabulous job. I’ve always been obsessed with the props in my films looking the right way, and this prop was perfect.
MSZ: Each film of yours seems to have a special book.
GDT: I try to put books in all of my movies so I can keep them. This particular one also has patterns I ended up using in my diary.
MSZ: Yes, I wanted to ask about that because the Cronos book prop predates the diaries you acquired in Venice and your new approach to recording your thoughts in the notebooks.
GDT: I love the contrast of the crimson and the sepia, which comes from medieval and Renaissance diaries. I tried to adopt that in the first Hellboy notebook.
MSZ: And what about the storyboards [opposite], which depict the alchemist making notes in the book?