• MSZ: So now, is this [above] The Devil’s Backbone? Because I noticed a similarity, but I wasn’t sure what you were illustrating.
GDT: At this point, I didn’t know exactly what the story of The Devil’s Backbone was going to end up being. In one incarnation or another, it had been with me since the 1980s, when I first wrote it. And then I attempted it again in 1993, after Cronos. So it was something I had been working on for over a decade. This is just one attempt, then, at the ghost of The Devil’s Backbone.
I had been toying with the idea of a translucent ghost for a long time. I wanted to do a heat distortion around the ghost, and I wanted to see the ribs, and the femur, and the pelvic bone. There was also this idea of it being framed by a door. I really don’t know if I was thinking of a teardrop shape, or a Gothic door that is out of whack in a crumbling building.
MSZ: How did you eventually pull off that translucency?
GDT: Ultimately we were able to do it fairly easily because by the time I shot the movie, CG was much more advanced. So what we did is we made the bones visible only when he crosses a haze of light, a little ray, a little beam of life. And they were able to animate a skeleton inside of the body.
MSZ: And the blood coming out of the ghost in the final film, was that also CG?
GDT: That came later. Originally I wanted the distortion in the air, like shimmering, and that’s what the drawing indicates. But a little later I came up with the idea that he had drowned with the injury to his head. The blood was easier to produce with particle effects.
I really wanted him to look like porcelain. Here [opposite] he is still a corpse, but then one day I said, “Well, why doesn’t he look like a broken doll?” Because it doesn’t have to make sense. And DDT, the effects guys, they really, really resisted the idea. They wanted very much to do a rotting corpse, and I understood them, as sculptors and all that, I understood their impulse.
MSZ: It goes back to an idea we’ve talked about previously, which is that every really great monster is beautiful. Grotesque and beautiful.
* M.C. perhaps [?] with paint by HAND on the rock. Cave painting.
* Rain of burning ash in slow motion.
* Jose Maria Velazco’s slow journey through the sky until discovering the [?] there in the distance with a cloud of dust.
* The apparition of little Joey.
* Valley of Geysers/Holy waters in the desert M.C.
* Pigeons/bats in the marina-cave, support with a very strong beam of light.
* M.C.’s cell slowly consumed by the dusk’s lengthening shadows.
* “Raging sea” scenes after this shot EVERYTHING in slow motion.
• MSZ: So here [opposite] is a drawing of Santi, a more elaborate one.
GDT: You can see how it evolves. The first one featured a crumbling edifice, or another alternative was for there to be a curtain. But I wanted something that felt womblike, like the fetus in the jar, the baby in the womb, the kid in the pool, amniotic fluid, amber water, all that stuff.
MSZ: So how did the design evolve from here?
GDT: I sent this drawing to DDT. You can see now the eyes are black, the iris is white. Now he’s a porcelain doll. And DDT and I made a very long chain of emails, sending drawings and literally, literally counting the number of cracks. I would say, “Take this one out, put one over here.” We art directed exactly the number of cracks, exactly the position of the tear.
You know, I say to people, “We deliberately made the ghost a figure that evokes things that are fragile.” And there are echoes in the movie: the shell of an egg, the broken porcelain of a childhood doll, and it has tears of rust. I mean, it’s a crying ghost. All those things are meant to evoke your sympathy rather than your terror. The ghost can function as a horrifying figure only very briefly in the beginning, but then, by repeatedly showing him, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is not a pernicious presence.
And the heart at the bottom is from Blade II, which you can see only in the outtakes. Then, because it didn’t make it into the release of Blade II, I took it and put it in The Strain.
But in another way, the jar ended up being the jar of tears in Hellboy. That’s exactly the design of the jar. I remember reading Raymond Chandler in his entirety and realizing that he cannibalized his stories. He would take a paragraph from his first detective, who was called John Dalmas, and he would reuse that paragraph, and make it better, like fifteen years later. He’d change one comma, or one adjective, and it was completely different. And I always think I have a similar way of cannibalizing ideas over and over.
Santi in The Devil’s Backbone
Damaskinos keeps his heart preserved in a small glass urn. Sometimes he looks at it to remember what it was like to feel. He now lives in a stainless-steel funeral chamber kept at 0° centigrade
–Hellboy calls Liz to read her a letter he wrote. He goes for a coffee with Mayers.
–The story’s basic triangle in Hellboy is that of the student who falls in love with his teacher’s wife. Hellboy is, above all, a noble and primitive guy.
–How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his “black” hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy. Marisa, blonde, dressed in black, with two canes and yellow glasses. The children all in uniform, the school made up of arches, the empty, dead landscape. And God, like the sun, screws everything up, and completely burns everything He doesn’t.
–I’ve found that simply being with my father is 200 times better than speaking with him. My mom, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent. She’s my soul mate. Even in her sins.
• MSZ: So now we come to this page [opposite] with the bomb from The Devil’s Backbone. You write, “How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his ‘black’ hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy.”