When I made this portrait of Hellboy, I thought it would be used as the basis for an oil painting by Basil Gogos, but it looks as though this isn’t going to happen. Yesterday I thought that Mignola might be able to do the Monte Cristo comic because his style lends itself very well to the Gothic. I think the mechanical hand might be very interesting visually. What would happen if I proposed to do Mephisto with Ted McKeever. I think it might be a good idea.
Señor HB at age of 101 yrs.
GDT: This drawing [opposite] is a variation on Mignola, because Mignola does the sloping gorilla shoulders [above]. The reason I drew this was I was already thinking of Ron Perlman in the role, which meant the shoulders needed to be human. I wanted to see how he would look. Some of the stuff that ends up in the movie is already there. You can see he’s wearing pants, whereas Mignola’s Hellboy wears shorts. This is already my way of finding Ron in there.
This drawing is also important in the sense that it was right at the time where I felt, “It’s going to happen.” So I drew Hellboy because I felt, “Well, I gotta learn to draw him before I make the movie or I won’t be able to understand him.” So this was an attempt.
Another version of Hellboy drawn just to kill time or so I don’t forget.
Agoura Hills on 25/11/2001
–Domu, he’s mugged in the subway and kills every one of them there.
–She and him are able to do the fastest reading of books and files.
–It takes I blackout to go back to the Middle Ages in any city anyplace.
–“Fuck you. I have more taste on my dick.”
DAOD —Dad please get me out of here. I’m so, so tired. Get me out.
–You have a choice: You can believe her or simply think that she’s having a total nervous breakdown. Either way her mother will help her calm down.
H.B. running
–Climbing the rose trellis.
You’re telling me that something reached out through that fireplace and pulled them through the hole?
–I only know what I’ve been able to piece together over the years. He opened the fireplace. But it was already there…
Smoke. Dissipated with wings
MSZ: The evolution of how you approached Hellboy is interesting. I remember there’s a note in this notebook where you say initially you were thinking of doing Hellboy as CG, and then maybe having close shots of a real person. But, of course, that evolved and that wasn’t how you approached it.
GDT: Well, that shift came out of a conversation with Jim Cameron. I was saying to him, “I want to create a giant puppet like Mighty Joe Young,” because I love gorillas, and I thought, “Hellboy could be kind of King Kong–ish—a big, ten-foot-tall brute.”
I visited Rick Baker, and I saw the controls of Mighty Joe Young, and I said, “It’s absolutely possible.” I asked Jim, “What do you think?” And Jim said, “That’s a great idea, except there’s one thing you won’t be able to do.” And I said, “What?” “The love story. Because you can make the girl kind of like the monster, but the really human love story, that’s not going to play.” I said, “That’s absolutely right.”
So I went back and talked to Rick. He said, “Well, there are these two guys, Chad [Waters] and Matt [Rose], that are obsessed with Hellboy, and they want to do a test for you where he’s Ron Perlman.” And I always wanted him to be voiced by Ron regardless—I always wanted Ron to be the face of the character. So they did that bust on the stairs at Bleak House [above right], Matt did, and it was clear to me it was going to be a prosthetic job.
One-year embryo
Sammael as a fetus
Reversible arms for Sammael.
“Reversible” legs for Sammael
Fingers can turn in any direction
Mouth with outside tongue.
GDT: The two creatures that have taken the longest to figure out in my films are Sammael and the plant guy on Hellboy II. They took the longest. Sammael went through—I’m not exaggerating—probably thirty or forty iterations, at the very least. Full on, “Let’s go this way… No, no, let’s go that way.”
The elements I wanted were always there: bone, limbs that can change, a really long tongue. And here [opposite] I was just doing some anatomical sketches. The thing on the bottom right is the tongue. I was playing with the idea of limbs that could switchblade out of themselves. It’s not very clear in the rendering, but the bone is in the middle of the forearm, so you can extend the forearm. And I was trying to figure out how he would roll the tongue inside of the thorax. Like, how much space the tongue would occupy, if I could put human fingers at the end of the tongue. Silly stuff, but I was trying to figure it out.
MSZ: It’s great. And then are these little nonsensical annotations mixed in with Spanish?
GDT: Yeah, yeah, I liked them because I’ve always been in love with the idea of the Necronomicon.
MSZ: So, where does this fit into the design phase? Does it start with you doing something like this and then bringing it to your design team?
GDT: Yeah. This was done before I had Wayne Barlowe, or Mignola, or anyone.
MSZ: So this represents the beginning of the process.
GDT: Yes. In general, the more notes in the notebook, the less of a team I had.
