GDT: What is funny is all that went away. I wanted Luppi, like Professor Aschenbach in Death in Venice, to have black hair that he put shoe polish on, because I wanted him to be bleeding black, and because I wanted him to be really fastidious about his appearance. And that’s in the movie. He’s very fastidious. He presses his ties with books. But we made a budget, and we made a schedule, and we started breaking it down, accounting for the cleanup time with bleeding hair versus not-bleeding hair. And it went away.
The moment we started color-coding the movie, I realized Marisa’s hair needed to be red, not blonde, and that’s because the color of the school, the mosaic, and the doors, would look really, really narrow if you had a blonde. Then I said, “I’m gonna give her only one wooden leg, so I’ll give her one single cane.”
Everything evolves. It was the same thing with the kids. We started thinking about school uniforms. But with the reality of the Civil War, we found that uniforms would exist only in a private school. So out they went. And the only thing that remains is God and the sun.
The same with Hellboy. Here I wrote, “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.” There was a time when there was a different story for Hellboy.
MSZ: What about this great image of the little boy with the bomb?
GDT: An earlier incarnation of the bomb was that I wanted it to be rotting in such a way that you could see the mechanism inside. And then you do research and realize that’s impossible, and you go, “Oh, all right.” The only thing that remains of that, which is a complete fantasy, is that it ticks.
MSZ: So what was the research that proved that you couldn’t show the mechanism?
GDT: We started doing the research, and the bombardment in the Civil War was done by the Condor Legion, which were German planes, and they were testing blanket bombing in Spain. And the bombs were very small. I mean, size-wise, they were very small. But I had this image in my head of the American blanket bombings and Dr. Strangelove, with a giant bomb and the dropper. So it’s inaccurate. The planes were not able to have that dropping system. And I said, “You know what? To hell with it. It’s a great image.”
What I explained to the designer is that the bomb is the mother of the children. The bomb is like a fertility goddess, and that is the way the children see it. It’s huge. And they put little flower pots around it. In that way, it’s like the head of the pig in Lord of the Flies, something totemic. And it’s the size they’ll remember it. The bomb is the size they’ll remember it. But it’s entirely inaccurate. There were no bombs of that size. I always say, “You can break the reality as long as you know.” If somebody tells you, “There were no bombs that size,” you can’t go, “Holy shit!” But you can say, “I know,” and it’s fine.
The opposite is true in Pan’s Labyrinth, where people say that the raids are inaccurate. But they are not. We did research that proves they were, and exactly at that time, and exactly in that area. The guy that gave us all the research had studied extensively. He was obsessed with Fascist campaigns. And he was not a guy on the left, with an agenda. He was a historian who was obsessed with the Spanish Civil War not from the side of the Republicans, but of the Fascists. And the fact is they won; the Republicans won some skirmishes in the north because they were using guerilla tactics, which were very, very new. It’s fascinating to me that some people say, “Oh, he took too many liberties” about Pan’s Labyrinth. But nobody has said that of The Devil’s Backbone, which took the most enormous liberties with history.
BLADE II
“BLADE II WAS DONE, partially at least, to be able to do Hellboy,” Guillermo readily admits. “And then because I loved the idea of the bad vampires, the Reapers. I mean, literally, my agent at the time called me and said, ‘Do you want to make Blade II?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do Blade II.’ And he said, ‘Do you ever want to do Hellboy?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, if you want to do Hellboy, you gotta do Blade II, because no one’s going to hire you to do Hellboy based on Mimic or Cronos.’ And he was absolutely right.”
Guillermo elaborates, “The way it happened was great because they wanted me to do Blade, but I never met with them. Then they called me for Blade II, and I liked Blade all the way, including the ending. Especially that phrase, ‘Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill!’”
Guillermo knew he could not take on Blade II (2002) without finding a way to dive into it heart and soul. He needed to balance the demands of working on a studio film with his need to express himself artistically, to explore the images and ideas that ignite his passions. At his first meeting with executive producer and screenwriter David S. Goyer and star Wesley Snipes, Guillermo proposed his notion for the Reapers, a new group of voracious supervampires whose mouths would split wide open, revealing horrors within.
This reflected Guillermo’s desire to present a vampire unlike anything seen before. He’d been mulling over this notion since his childhood in Mexico, watching films and reading about vampires in legends and folktales from around the world, including the strigoi of eastern Europe. From the first, Guillermo displayed a morbid fascination with the biological minutiae of how the vampire actually functioned—how it infects, how it feeds, how it survives—peering closely at what others might avoid or gloss over.
In his twenties, the ideas developed further, as he fashioned Cronos around a most unlikely vampire. “The vampires in Blade II came from me figuring out vampirism for Cronos, and also for a pitch that was not successful for I Am Legend,” Guillermo explains. This was years before the 2007 version that was ultimately produced starring Will Smith.
“I went to Warners,” Guillermo recalls of his I Am Legend pitch, “and I met with a junior executive, first of all, which means that no one else ever heard the pitch. It didn’t travel on. He said, ‘Arnold [Schwarzenegger] is attached as a star.’ And for me, that is the opposite of the novel because Richard Matheson makes his hero the everyman, makes a point of making him a common man, because that’s the monster. He is the monster to the vampire race because he could be any man. He’s not meant to be extraordinary. And Arnold is, in every way, extraordinary. So I am a guy who just did a movie called Cronos, a twenty-eight-year-old twerp from Mexico, and I do a pitch for I Am Legend, and I say, ‘I don’t think Arnold is right.’ Not exactly the way to get the job.”