–Ilsa is given a small diary In it is written eveything that will happen in the years to come. “The book of sand.”
–Photo of R.(6–1916)
–Facts are far more damaging than lies. Sometimes truth is the tool to use to bring a man down.
–Jackets for Monte Cristo.
MSZ: So Rasputin, of course, had the long, black hair, but he’s bald in Hellboy.
GDT: Well, that comes from the comic. I think Mike did it because he wanted to purposely imply more of a reborn magician.
You know, I read every book on him. I found fascinating theories of how he resisted death. There’s one theory that says that Prince Yusupov, who was supposed to kill him, and supposedly tried to kill him for twenty minutes, was actually giving him a blowjob. So he came out and said, “I cannot kill him!” [laughs] Well, he was trying, but it was a very slow method. [laughs] It would take a long time. Another theory was that the cyanide in the food was a small dose. There was one book that literally explained, step-by-step, how it was just a really botched attempt at both a blowjob and an assassination.
But among the facts I found that were interesting was the fact that the explosion in Tunguska Forest, the famous explosion of an object that was never recovered, was like the equivalent of an X-File in tsarist Russia. I put that in the movie, in the director’s cut. The storm came from that explosion. I tried to come up with a great backstory for Rasputin, which is not in the movie. He’s a convert, and he really believes he’s bringing about the end of the world for good, because this world is too corrupt, and so on, and so forth.
–Room in which Kroenen opens the trap in the floor, leaving HB hanging from a rope. Abe, or a rucksack, falls on the spikes below
–A hospital for children of the war. “Thousands of children came through these doors in the 1930s. Bad vibe”
– Some of us are like this cylinder of wax. We can replay whatever happened.
–Open-air Chinese pharmacy with an anatomic model
–Patterns on the floors for the TOP-SHOT
– In HB’s room, the pick-up “bed” is where he saw Liz for the first time.
–Cartoons and movies are playing on HB’s televisions.
–The Baby Behemoth’s birth
–Tentacles emerge from his eye whenever anyone says “Hellboy” to him! “Child…” “Look what you have done”
GDT: There’s a piece of architecture on the top here [opposite] that I thought would be intriguing. We never made it on Hellboy.
On the right is the sort of trap door with spikes that ended up in Kroenen’s lair. I just wanted to have that really pulpish feel. I love Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. The great thing about the Fu Manchu novels is how inventive the traps are. To this day, my favorite trap in a Fu Manchu novel is, there is one where they say, “This is his deadliest weapon.” And they go, “Oh, my God,” and then they prepare the revolvers, and they go, “At the count of three, open the door,” and they open the door. They enter, and it’s an empty room. There’s nothing. And they go, “Nothing happened.” And then all of a sudden, a giant mushroom blooms from the mouth of one of them, and the other one starts screaming, and a mushroom blooms from their noses, mouths, eyes, and they realize the room is full of spores. I love that. Anyway, that’s the spikes.
And then at the bottom, you can see a thing that is ultimately in the movie, which is like a Cthulhu creature being birthed out of the midsection of Rasputin. [laughs]
–What are you reading? Words, words, words. What’s it about?… ? He tells him his own story.
–You can’t take anything from me hut my life.
–Ofelia returns the jack-in-the-box engagement ring to him.
* Carefuclass="underline" beyond this. He: You don’t love me. Marry someone handsome.
–With the pig’s head, after looking for him in its nostrils (to be or not…) the doubt
–The traitors RG.
–I must be cruel only to be Kind.
+THE TRAP, the duel with his friend.
–The fly that accuses.
+Ernie’s farewell.
–Fight and bullets.
T* The face of daddy-God (without the shell.)
GDT: These illustrations [opposite] were done closer to production, but not yet in production. And, again, I knew that Mignola drew the shoulders more sloping, and I knew that there was no way to do that to a human silhouette, because the thing that determines how you do the architecture of monsters is the articulation points. That’s the only thing you cannot change in a human body. You have a joint, or you don’t have a joint. I didn’t know how to make the shoulders more like the drawing, so I came up with the idea of a Civil War–type of coat, with the little cape on the shoulders. And I was praying that it would work in leather, and it came out very well, I think. I was trying to see if it was still Hellboy with big boots and pants, because in the comic, again, he doesn’t wear boots—he has hooves—and he has short pants.
Then on the top right I knew I wanted him to rip off a sword, a sword from a statue, and use it to battle a tentacled monster. And that’s in the movie.
There’s some other stuff that didn’t make it into the movie, though. Some compositions—him silhouetted by the moon, certain roofs, and stuff like that.
MSZ: There’s these little arches again, these pointed arches.
GDT: Well, I always like architecture that frames the characters, if I can do it.
MSZ: Also, there are references to Wind in the Willows throughout these notes. Was that a project that you were working on?
GDT: Well, it’s a project that I wrote with Matthew Robbins for Disney, and I think it’s a really good screenplay. We tried to make it really, really as true to the book as possible, and then we went to Disney and they said, “Could you make Toad skateboard?” And I left the project.