* Someone appears by dissolve while walking along.
* Are you drunk? I—uh—oh (looks at the bottle) uh, yeah, this things, the glass is too thick….
* I feel on the verge of tears, explain that 2 me. o/Could you explain to me then, why i—why I
* Shadows on paint puddle MIMIC
* Window shot droplets in FG. Foc.
* Track along a heavy textured wall “a la” nightmare
* MAGIC narrative about images without orig. AUDIO.
* Things that have been set in motion.
* Sometimes I think you don’t care… about anything. About image of someone who is totally distracted
* Chuy looks at a very rare and violent image (Saint Cecilia or Sacred Heart).
* Chinese man with glasses on
• MSZ: The grandfather figure in Mimic is interesting because there’s a resonance with the grandparent/grandchild relationship in Cronos.
GDT: I wanted Federico Luppi to play the character (you can see it in the art), but his English was not very good. When we talked with him, we realized he would have trouble with abundant dialogue. So we had to cut a lot of the vignettes between the grandfather and the grandson in the original screenplay. In one, he said, “This god cannot see,” and he cut his own throat. It was too much for him to see the kid that he loved sort of happily living with the insects. And the grandson didn’t react to the grandfather’s death in the script, which was doubly shocking. They were good ideas, but I don’t know if I would’ve gotten away with them even in the best of circumstances.
MSZ: That’s interesting, because in Cronos, I think of the relationship as the granddaughter observing the grandfather, as opposed to the grandfather watching the grandson.
GDT: I love the idea of somebody watching a loved one doing something unforgivable but still loving them. Or in Hellboy, I love the fact that Liz Sherman comes to terms with who she is by allowing Hellboy to be who he is. I think that’s a very beautiful love story, better than the “Beauty and the Beast” idea of the beast having to look like a prince. Instead, the princess has to accept her own bestiality so the love story can happen.
• GDT: A big, big win for me was that Jeremy [Northam] would wear glasses. The idea was that his character was a scientist—an arrogant guy who thought we could control everything. So then his glasses break, and he cannot go to the optometrist. There was a great line that we shot, when Mira Sorvino was putting the hormones all over Jeremy, and he says, “All I need is a pair of pliers.” And the problem is that they’re under the sink at home. And it just gives you an instant idea of how screwed they are. They are close to home, but the pair of pliers is just so far away. He might as well be in Moscow.
MSZ: Looking at your later work, a strong motif is the absence of eyes, including the covering up of eyes with lenses.
GDT: I like the idea, maybe because I wear glasses. But the most effective use of glasses is in Lord of the Flies, with Piggy and his broken glasses. And then you have Battleship Potemkin. Broken glasses are just a great image of downfall for me. I use it again and again. Or an aneurysm in a single eye—I love bloodshot eyes, but only on one side.
* A counterfeiter quit. He couldn’t make enough money.
* LOTTIE watches Marty dance by himself.
* Martyn has an archive on LOTTIE.
* Sheets FLOAT in pool with Ray
* Ben Van Os: Orlando, Macon, Vince & Theo
* Dennis Gassner: B. Fink, Miller’s Crossing.
Jeremy’s broken glasses
* Blind, he gropes along the wall.
* No end to doubting.
* MUSIC OVER image in silence and slo-mo.
* There is no end to doubting Martyn
* Boot
* WATER drips through old planks.
* Bewitched, MARTYN watches his heater (or the hospital’s)
Electric resistance
• MSZ: What was this image of the crutch for [opposite, top]?
GDT: I’d been wanting to do an artificial limb since Cronos, to show the inhuman elements of a human character. I like the idea of showing how imperfect mankind is. The insects in Mimic were all organic, but mankind needed glasses, artificial limbs. The mimics are the perfect ones; not us.
That’s why I tried to populate the church with statues covered in plastic, almost cocooned, like the eggs of a cockroach, which are translucent. I work instinctively by finding elements that rhyme, and I just organize them in my movies as elements that echo each other, not necessarily intellectualizing the resemblances. I think that the whole of art can be summed up in the two concepts of symmetry and asymmetry. And I am very attracted to playing with both. I love symmetric images. But I also love the asymmetry of a design, like one broken glass, one bloodshot eye, one missing arm.
On Mimic, I was very into symmetry and wanted to have the guys who secure the place, the ones who wear the gas masks, look a little like the insects. So here you see me playing with that visual rhyme and the question of who is more human, the insects or the guys? Then there is this composition where I put Chuy between two insects. It’s like the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. I wanted to put Chuy in the middle and make it look like a religious icon of a holy family of the future.
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE
“I WANT TO DO A FILM ABOUT SOME KIDS in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War—and oh yeah, one of them’s dead.” So Guillermo describes his studio pitch for The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and one would be hard-pressed to think up a synopsis less likely to enthuse a Hollywood executive. However, with The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo planted his flag, declaring himself something other than a Tinseltown work-for-hire—he was a true writer-director.