Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

The less said about the actual design work I did on that film, the better. Although del Toro and I like a lot of the same things (art, books, movies, etc.), when it comes to design I am sort of a minimalist, a “less is more” guy. He is very much a “more is not enough” guy. Often I would start a design and then he would hand it over to one of the other designers (usually my genius officemate, TyRuben Ellingson) to add a whole lot of stuff that would light up and spin around. The running joke was that if you could get steam to spurt out of the thing (whatever it might be), del Toro would really like it. The great artifact I have from that time (along with a bug-eyed, green vampire puppet) is a particularly terrible drawing I did of an autopsy table. It was so pathetically simple that del Toro was actually at a loss for words. He gently took my pencil from me and drew in Elmo and Big Bird standing behind the table. The look on their Muppet faces spoke volumes. That was Blade II.

Of course, we did go on to work together on both Hellboy films. On those I got to be there from the beginning (Hellboy II literally started with the two of us sitting in a room having no idea what we were going to do), through preproduction (I contributed a bit more on these films), filming, postproduction, and all the strangeness that comes after. I not only got to have Guillermo del Toro adapt my comic book character to film (which in my world is pretty much like winning the lottery) but I got to watch him do it. It was an amazing experience. And if I never set foot in another production office or sit on another film set, it will be okay, because I’ve done it—and I got to do it with him.

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Floor is white ash

The Temple of the Angel of Death.

BIGGER!

Jupiter. Machine Vox Von K.

The pendulum of G.A.

–[?] bottles in the eighteenth century

It was a handicraft similar to that of “ships in bottles” with scenes of daily life or religious motifs.

–Law Hand. Trained to write legal documents.

–UNUS MUNDUS. A unitary world (everything is everything).

–Every day is an opportunity to affect the world—

–The human species can he divided into two types: “the tragic man” (introverted) and “the conqueror man” (extroverted). Socially, each one has tools to ensure the continuity of his own type and survive. MARTYR/TYRANT

–“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” Hamlet.

VFX-BOOTS, BAGS, TRAINING, WARP GEARS, PROPS, JACKET. ROOF in the LOCKER ROOM

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Pigeons or crows in the meeting—

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–In April Navarro will pass through London. We talked about scouting in Ireland for the final scene

Gas comes out of J

GDT: Here [above], you can see Johann emptying himself, literally, on the floor of the locker room, next to a photo I bought of a dead baby. I bought a bunch of old photos in Budapest, and one of them was a dead baby. And it was really, really disturbing.

Also on this page is the entrance to the Angel of Death’s place, a detail of a mechanism of the Golden Army, and on the bottom right is a mechanical voice box created by Baron von Kempelen, who created the Turk, the mechanical chess player. There was an exhibition of his machines in Budapest, including a reproduction of the Turk.

The device was meant to reproduce the human larynx, and I just made a sketch of it. I don’t take pictures. I don’t think I’ve taken more than two dozen pictures in my entire life. I don’t like still cameras. If something is very important, I’d rather sketch it.

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For the TROLL MARKET, vertical light sources in the middle, in 1:85 high resolution, for example with the Striders passing by there.

–I must make LHOD now. It’s time. But with Bardem in Argentina.

–WORMS. In the excrement of certain urban pigeons there can be found a particularly pernicious type of worm. It deposits its larvae/ eggs subcutaneously and has a special predilection for the tissues of the eye.

Mechanism for the fight.

–Agent Krauss—Yes, I read about him” Abe says, “in a book related to ectoplasmic activities—late nineteenth century—” HB: “go on” “He suffered a dramatic—” Manning: “Oh—he’s here…”

–Slipping on the floor on water and soap.

–With the idea of the old-fashioned TAPEWORM. A boy is walking around downtown and a pigeon shits on him. That night, in a five star hotel, the boy wakes up screaming. The parasites have already devoured his right eye.

Yellow fuzz.

–Design for Fragglewump UROE!!

GDT: It took us the longest time to come up with the design for the gears in the palace [opposite]. We fought with everyone, and finally I came up with this layout, which Francisco Ruiz Velasco made better, and which is the one that is in the movie. It was very difficult to design that set, the idea being that the whole chamber was like a windup mechanism for the armor. You started these big gears, and then they started more stuff.

^{Del Toro’s idea for the giant gears that set the Golden Army in motion was refined into the design for a real working mechanism before being built as a set, here pictured with Johann (John Alexander), Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), Hellboy (Ron Perlman), and Liz (Selma Blair) in the foreground (ABOVE).}

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–MUD and gauze for the “extras” in the J.M.—

–Mar/4/2007 A strange thought: the Academy ballots were turned in on the 20th (I went to television station) and were counted over the course of the next few days. In other words, the 20th is ahead. I, PC, W, and AW had already “lost” and it didn’t matter at all. Once the statistics have been made manifest they do not matter. I’m surprised that I am so calm.