Hot on the heels of the critical and financial success of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo dove into his sequel to Hellboy. In truth, the film might have been called Guillermo del Toro’s Greatest Hits, as Guillermo reexamined and revisited virtually every one of his major character, story, design, and thematic elements, from Cronos on. Audiences and critics responded with widespread (if not universal) enthusiasm. Hellboy II is an undeniably delightful ride, a wild rush of moments and details burnished to a high sheen by a writer-director drawing on everything he loves and delivering it to his audience with creative relish.
Guillermo says, “I think that Hellboy II is a sister movie to Pan’s Labyrinth in many, many ways, texturally, spiritually.” This occurred as much out of practical necessity as artistic choice, for Guillermo was working on both projects simultaneously. On both, he says, it was “me jamming ideas. Mind you, I’m writing Hellboy II as I’m writing Pan’s Labyrinth. As always, I was multitasking: (a) in order to meet deadlines and (b) because Pan’s Labyrinth had no deadline. I was not making a living on Pan’s Labyrinth, so Hellboy II was sort of sustaining me through Pan’s Labyrinth. The way you’re paid on a script is commencement, delivery of first draft, revisions, and production money. So I essentially lived on the commencement money for a year and a half or more, and I needed to deliver in order to pay quickly mounting debts.”
Immediately upon finishing Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo leapt into preproduction on Hellboy II. Although he and his family were living in a suburb of Los Angeles at the time, he found himself shooting everywhere from Spain with Pan’s Labyrinth to Budapest for Hellboy II, and then moving to New Zealand for two years to work on The Hobbit, which he was originally slated to direct. As Guillermo said at the time, “I live like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I fold in a suitcase and I go.”
One thing Hellboy II exudes is confidence, for by now Guillermo felt assured in his instincts and choices, his interests and predilections. As with the first Hellboy, Guillermo brought Hellboy creator Mike Mignola aboard to work on designs and story ideas. Mignola found it a very different experience from the first time around. “The second film was much more a del Toro picture, so a lot of my influence, it’s there but it’s buried under layers of other people’s stuff,” Mignola revealed to Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “The Hellboy character in that second picture is so far away from my version of hellboy…. In fact, there was a moment in one of the meetings where I said, ‘well, Hellboy wouldn’t do that.’ And del Toro said, ‘Your Hellboy wouldn’t. Mine would.’”
Despite such boldness, Guillermo had concerns about the logistics for Hellboy II. “It was not a gigantic-budget movie,” he notes. “Hellboy II was eighty-five million bucks. But we tried to make it luxurious and luscious.”
He also had to make it fresh—a daunting challenge, since every fantasy film of the decade, from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, was exploring similar terrain. But Guillermo was not intimidated. He searched far and wide for unusual designs that could bring a new inflection to the Celtic-dominated visual language of contemporary fantasy. “We did a very careful study,” he explains. “If you look at Balinese architecture, and then you look at really Nordic, Slavic architecture, if you migrate, you find shapes that echo one another, like curved ceilings, curved rooftops with pointy edges. With Hellboy II, what was fascinating was that, when you start twisting the Celtic knot, and you toy with it, it becomes a Chinese symbol. And if you tweak it a little more, it becomes a Hindu symbol. It is extremely easy to manipulate. There is a very fluid, universal language in the Celtic design that is fascinating, and you can find it in Slavic design. So we tried to explore it and move it away from any sort of rigidity.”
Guillermo adds that in Hellboy II, “I wanted to have a quality that is sensual,” especially in the case of the giant elemental forest god Hellboy kills. “It has the moss on the chest, a lot of leaf foliage, but then, if the tentacle moves, you see the substrata. It feels like a juicy vegetable, translucent. It was like celery. And we went to great lengths. I think that everything needs to be painterly and sensual, and you need to be aware of the texture. For example, in the corridors of the BPRD [Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense], even then the concrete surface needs to really feel like concrete.”
In the notebook, Guillermo developed a variety of the striking images found in the film, adding layers and lushness to visions that echo his earlier works. The cracked blue-white marble skin of the vampiric Jesús Gris in Cronos (where, Guillermo admits, “the makeup was not good enough”) morphed into the cracked porcelain head of the ghost-child Santi in Devil’s Backbone and the tombstone-white face of the overlord Damaskinos in Blade II, until finally becoming the delicate, pale visages of Prince Nuada and his sister, Nuala, in Hellboy II. “It was not marble by then,” Guillermo points out. “It was ivory.” Hellboy II’s eyeless Angel of Death, eyes scattered across its wings like stars in the night, recalls not only the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth, but Guillermo’s work on Mephisto’s Bridge and tropes from his beloved symbolist painters, too.
Johann’s helmet, Liz’s cross, the bestial Mr. Wink, Cathedral Head, the vast gears that fill the elfin throne room, the Golden Army—golems opening like gigantic Cronos devices—are all lovingly rendered in these pages. Most detailed of all is the bustling Troll Market, full of wonders at every turn.
Initially, Guillermo envisioned a trilogy of Hellboy films, but now he thinks a third Hellboy movie won’t happen. If Hellboy II: The Golden Army is Guillermo’s swan song to the franchise, he feels well satisfied. No film is ever perfect, or could ever fully transmit every notion or realize every detail, but with Hellboy II Guillermo is unconcerned, he says, “because I like it so much. I’m in love with what we got. I cannot be objective. I don’t want everybody to agree. I’m just declaring that, for me, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve done.”
GDT: This [opposite] is a test of the Prince Nuada makeup. Curiously enough, this is me drawing it over an actor. That is Charlie Day, who was one of the two guys I had in mind for the part; the other was Luke Goss. But I tried it on Charlie, and it looked to me like it was too extreme and made the prince too hard. Blood makes the prince exquisite and kind of delicate in a good way.