MIMIC
“AN EVOLUTIONARY LEAP. Evolution’s on their side.” This comment by Guillermo in his Mimic notebook sums up his second film’s key question. In Mimic (1997), New York entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino, fresh off winning her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite) inadvertently alters cockroaches’ genetic code so that they evolve into six-foot-tall creatures that mimic the appearance of human beings.
For Guillermo, Mimic had an ironically apt title, as it’s ostensibly about a creature trying to imitate something utterly alien to its nature. This was Guillermo’s fledgling attempt to shoot a studio film as a studio director, to assume the role of a commercially minded technician while maintaining his artistic core and instincts. Like many of the bugs in the film, Guillermo got squashed, in this case by the studio machine. Eventually, the film was taken away from him and recut, with sequences added by another director. For Guillermo, it was a soul-crushing experience.
In the end, he learned vital lessons for the future. Afterward, he would consistently favor artistic choices over commercial ones as he built a singular and successful career. “This is a struggle you have as an artist,” Guillermo notes. “Hellboy in Hellboy II, when he shoots the elemental, he’s shooting it because he wants people to like him. He goes, ‘Well, okay, I’m going to do the right thing for these guys to like me because they don’t like me.’ And he comes out and delivers the baby like, ‘I did a great thing,’ and they boo him and they throw stones at him. As an artist, I’ve gone through that. You say, ‘Okay, I’m going to do what people like.’ I go and do a commercial movie like Mimic, and it’s a huge hurt in my life. Then when you go and do the hard choice, there’s a reward in there.”
Thankfully, in 2011, Guillermo released a “director’s cut” of Mimic that gives audiences his version of the film (or as close to it as it’s possible to get now). Filled with unforgettable images and powerful scenes that were not in the theatrical release, Guillermo’s version includes a stunning opening sequence in a church hospital, dreamily white, its long arched hall narrow and high, with rows of patients’ beds—all children—draped in opaque fabric lit from within, like embryonic sacs or insect chrysalises.
“It was the first day of shooting of Mimic, and I thought it was a very beautiful, a very striking image,” Guillermo recalls. “It was the first image that got me into deeper trouble because some of the producers hated that image from the start. They said, ‘It doesn’t look like a real hospital. It looks like something off another planet. What are you doing? Are you making an art film out of a B-movie bug picture?’ And I said to them, ‘Well, I think they are one and the same. I think that the movie needs to be sumptuous, look beautiful, but have a real emotional sense,’ and so on and so forth. It was a losing proposition from the get-go.”
With Mimic’s restoration, one can perceive how incredibly beautiful the film is when considered shot by shot, with its rich golds and blues, its textures of brick and coursing rain. Restored to a lyrical and patient pacing, it’s now unmistakably a Guillermo del Toro film, exhibiting his attention to detail and his tendency for observed, held moments.
Even without these amendments, many of Guillermo’s dominant themes and motifs feature prominently in Mimic, notably his fascination with mechanisms and insects, which are presented almost like living mechanisms. By cloaking his creatures in protective camouflage as faux humans, Guillermo urges us to consider humans as organic mechanisms, too—this visual alignment becoming a paradox that mixes physical sameness with spiritual difference.
“Insects are really well-engineered by nature,” Guillermo observes. “They are awe-inspiring, but I don’t find them admirable in their function, socially or spiritually. And I think that’s why we fear them, because they have a complete lack of emotion. They are the true living automatons of nature. That’s why they work as symbols of so many things…. They’re completely alien.”
The character of the little boy Chuy (Alexander Goodwin) also raises this question of what defines humanness. Due to his autism, Chuy is unlike other people, and at first he quietly observes the giant insects and reacts with curiosity, rather than disquiet or fear. The film itself takes a similarly ambivalent perspective on the creatures, showing them in both understandable and repulsive ways.
As in Cronos, central to the story is the emotionally moving child/grandparent relationship between Chuy and the shoeshine man Manny (Giancarlo Giannini). The other main relationship is between Susan Tyler and her husband, Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam). While the human couple struggles with issues of fertility, the faux-human insects have no such difficulties or doubts and multiply at a staggering rate.
Interestingly, it was because of Mimic that the public got its first glimpse of Guillermo’s notebooks. Guillermo and Mira Sorvino were on the Charlie Rose show promoting the film. “Mira said, ‘You should show him your notebooks,’“ Guillermo recalls. “And I showed the book for the first time in that interview. I actually made a fool of myself. I think they edited it out, but I was really nervous about Rose putting a thumbprint on it. I’m very anal-retentive about my stuff. I was telling Charlie Rose, ‘Oh, give it back to me.’ And I’m like this stupid guy who had no idea how to behave in media or whatever.
“People reacted very well on seeing the origins of those things, and eventually the notebooks became a really strong point of contact with the people that like my movies. However small that group is, it’s a very devoted, very loyal group that likes the freaky stuff I do, and they love the notebooks.”
In the notebook pages that follow, we see Guillermo first wrestling with some of the key notions and images for Mimic before the film was actively in production. Most spectacular and central of all is the image of the man prostrating himself before the godlike figure of the man-shaped insect, a shaft of sunlight sweeping diagonally across them from on high, as if God were passing judgment. This single image presents the core atmosphere of the film—mystery, awe, the unknown, the mystical, and the subtly horrific.
The Mimic notebook pages make clear that light is very important to Guillermo, as are dramatic tableaux. On certain pages, Guillermo might weigh a certain shot, a segment of storyboard, a snatch of dialogue, or how the mechanism of the insect’s face makes it appear human. Interspersed are Guillermo’s thoughts about other projects, especially Mephisto’s Bridge, an unmade film based on the novel Spanky by Christopher Fowler.