Then there is the lock on the safe that needed a triangular key. It ended up being different in the movie, but it’s similar, and the key is triangular.
Then Mignola has Hellboy with sort of a ponytail. And in 2001, ponytails were, like, really for porn producers. So I gave Hellboy a Japanese sumo wrestler haircut that kind of indicated he had some fighter training. And, also, Mike has Hellboy with male pattern baldness, and I felt that was not very sexy, so I gave him the scalp shaving of a Japanese warrior. He shaves his head. So, all in all, I wanted Hellboy to keep to the comic but to be a little sexier.
MSZ: You’re dealing with so many design elements from the film right here in this one little compact area. As well as different parts of the film.
GDT: And there’s things from Mountains of Madness, too. Now, in Mountains of Madness, they wake up and time has been altered. A potato has sprouted. That’s in the movie. Cthulhu in the fog. It’s always more than two projects.
MSZ: That’s something you’ve alluded to—that when you’re working on a multitude of projects, if anything falls through on one, you’re, in a way, somewhat insulated because you’re working on multiple things.
GDT: When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked. What I find—and I’m not saying this works for everyone—is that the promiscuity of having four or five things online actually makes them feed each other. And you go, “Aha! That idea is great for Madness. That idea is great for…” And you keep them alive. It’s a dialogue.
–IN AMOM, they wake up to find time altered. Potato, etc. without realizing it
WOUND
CAUSED
BY
KROENEN
Follows Liz.
Hellboy door lock
Apocalypse
Kroenen
Toshiro hairstyle
–Cthulhu in the mist. Above it, rising like an Everest of pale, corrupt flesh.
–How long has it been? Hours—days.
–Pulsating vein CGI in HB’s neck.
–She is dead, her power depleted.
–Your love for the girl. How could we have foreseen that??
PAN’S LABYRINTH
PAN’S LABYRINTH REPRESENTS Guillermo at the crossroads, “trying to redefine my life, creatively,” and choosing the right path—one of his own devising that led to a movie he needed to make. At this point in his career, he was turning down many top Hollywood offers, films that would have netted him millions of dollars. Instead, he chose financial struggle and artistic triumph.
In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), everything Guillermo had been working toward came together in a grand panoply that is by turns brutal, gentle, intimate, and majestic. The notebooks he kept during this period reveal his consuming passion for the project. As he evolved the storyline and visual world of Pan’s Labyrinth in the notebooks, he laid bare all the specifics of the film, like a photograph emerging in a developing tray. He reflected on casting, historical background, specific shots, dialogue, sets, characters, costumes, and creatures. In these pages, Pan’s Labyrinth comes alive in glorious detail.
As Guillermo notes, paraphrasing and building on Heraclitus, “One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice.” He considered possible variations of every element of Pan’s Labyrinth and struggled to determine “which would the public understand more readily?” In this, Guillermo clearly grasps the difference between presenting mysteries that intrigue and beguile and simply failing to communicate one’s intent and confounding an audience.
“It’s only through art that you’re able to glimpse otherness,” Guillermo wrote, and everything we see in these detailed sketches and notations serves the goal of helping us see the alien as personal, familiar, and meaningful. In our daily lives we often insulate ourselves from what is unlike us, viewing otherness as threatening and ultimately rejecting it. But safe in our homes and theater seats, Guillermo’s art encourages us to consider the repulsive and the rejected with compassion and empathy—to expand our definitions of ourselves by encompassing the range of human (and even inhuman) experience.
In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo ruminated on plot motifs drawn from folk and fairy tales and classic children’s literature—enduring rites of passage that help children make sense of strange and unfamiliar things. Some of the imagery this evoked, such as the mandrake root that comes alive, remained virtually unchanged from notebook to film. On the other hand, the loathsome, terrifying Pale Man morphed from a wooden doll in a tree to an old man with eyes floating queasily in liquefied flesh, to the figure’s final, unforgettable state as a visionless face with eyeballs snatched off a plate and inserted into stigmata wounds in its palms.
Lost along the way, but captured in these pages, are such tidbits as children “that the well swallowed up,” a changeling brought by elves to replace the baby they’ve stolen, gold rather than food arrayed on a tabletop to lure Ofelia, and perhaps most disturbing of all, “the dead children who eat fairies.” Any of these items might have worked individually, but the totality would have presented a storyline that was “ungainly,” as Guillermo puts it. His goal was to craft a film of elegance and inevitability.
Even in his marginalia we see his concern over making “the other” intelligible, as Guillermo grappled with translating the title of the film into English. He strove for more recognizable and compelling wording for an American audience and eventually settled on Pan’s Labyrinth—although Pan is nowhere to be found in the film.
Everything in Pan’s Labyrinth is rich with multiple shades and layers of meaning, including the main character’s name, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), which hearkens back both to Hamlet’s dreamy, doomed lover and to the daughter of Roald Dahl, one of Guillermo’s favorite writers. Taking shape in these pages are such iconic images as the ominous dead tree with its “fallopian nature”; Ofelia’s dress, like Alice’s “but with different colors”; and the Faun, who at first looks like a muscular, goatish variation on Hellboy before becoming the lean and lyrical being in the film. Indeed, throughout these pages, Guillermo was also hashing out Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which he was writing at the same time, while “working on deadlines, juggling projects.”