When Tamara Deverell, the production designer on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” first strode across the nearly finished set of Victor Frankenstein’s lab, she couldn’t help herself.
Deverell had by then spent countless hours toiling over the film’s central set, a massive laboratory perched atop an old Scottish stone tower, with a massive round window letting light in on a workshop full of ornate apparatus and a malformed body splayed out on the operating table.
“I walked into the lab set when we were just finishing it,” Deverell says, “and I was like, ‘It … it’s alive!”
In making “Frankenstein,” metaphors are hard to resist. Moviemaking, itself, is a Frankenstein art. Each element of production — the costumes, the set design, the lighting, the music — is brought together like appendages stitched into one body.
Del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th century gothic novel, in particular, is a feast of filmmaking arts, cobbled together with old-school Hollywood craft. Del Toro called on many of his most regular collaborators to turn his long-held vision of “Frankenstein” — “the lament of the monster in its granddaddy form,” as he calls it — into a living, breathing reality.
“I wanted a handmade movie of an epic scale,” del Toro says. “The sets are massive. The wardrobe and design and props are handcrafted by humans.”
But to make “Frankenstein,” all the pieces needed to evolve in synchronicity. Costume designer Kate Hawley could make the most lushly colored dress, but if it didn’t read with the lights chosen by cinematographer Dan Lausten, it wouldn’t work. Mike Hill, creature designer, couldn’t fashion Frankenstein’s monster without shaping it around actor Jacob Elordi.
“It’s one big group of monster makers,” says Hill. “A lot of Victor Frankensteins on the set.”
A monster mash
In “Frankenstein,” a $120 million epic for Netflix (it opens in theaters Friday and begins streaming Nov. 7), del Toro sought to honor both the frenzied spirit of creation epitomized by Victor (Oscar Isaac) while exalting the monster (Elordi), a character that del Toro has felt a profound kinship with since childhood.
Hill first worked with del Toro not on a film but on a piece for the director’s private collection: a model of Boris Karloff sitting in the makeup chair for 1931’s “Frankenstein.” In del Toro’s films, creatures are often the very soul of the movie. For the Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water,” Hill crafted the suit and prosthetics of the film’s central blue-green amphibious humanoid played by Doug Jones.
For “Frankenstein,” Hill and Del Toro didn’t want a stitch-covered monstrosity. They wanted a newborn.
“I knew that if we made his face too garishly horrible, when you’re in a tight close-up on this character, if you’re looking at wounds and gore, you’re distracted. You have to keep the soul here,” Hill says, gesturing at his eyes.
Hill and del Toro’s monster differs in several ways from the 1931 original. There are no nuts or bolts. He has nothing mechanical about him. He looks more like a flesh-and-blood first draft.
“I didn’t want a Cyberpunk look to this creature in any way,” Hill says. “I respect the nuts and bolts from the original version, but we’re not doing that. We’re doing Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s book. So I wanted to streamline him a little.”
Hill is quick to credit others in the production, but he knew everything was riding on the electric moment when the creature sits up. “It’s like waiting to watch Superman put on his costume for the first time,” he says.
One of the most striking features of the creature in “Frankenstein” is the tattered hooded cloak he wears in periods of the film. Hawley, the costume designer, first worked with del Toro on his ultimately unproduced treatment of “The Hobbit.” Del Toro, a notorious sketcher, saw her piles of Goya art books and various notebooks of inspiration and told her, “We share a common language.”
For “Frankenstein,” Del Toro wanted the costuming that didn’t feel like a period piece. “His first brief was to me, ‘I don’t want any (expletive) top hats,'” Hawley says, laughing.
So extensive was the work on the creature that Hawley had an entire team devoted to clothing and wrapping him. Throughout the film, the creature’s appearance evolves, and goes through a gauntlet of mud, snow, wolves and dynamite.
“It became a huge monster, in itself,” Hawley puns.
Hawley’s work, like her previous films with del Toro (“Pacific Rim,” “Crimson Peak”), heavily features splashes of rich, vibrant color that communicate as much about its characters as the dialogue. Reds and greens, as they often are in del Toro’s films, are prominent. But costumes like the regal blue dress worn by Mia Goth in the film took honing.
“The blue dress probably took four months to get right,” says Hawley. “You’d think you’d be going for the most intense colors, but the way it worked on camera, through camera light, it needed a lot of experimentation. So everything’s an alchemy.”
“Not afraid of the darkness”
Dan Lausten, the cinematographer, reckons that much has stayed the same since he and del Toro first collaborated on 1997’s “Mimic”: single-source lighting from the windows, crane-aided camera movement, in-camera effects whenever possible and a predilection for wide angles with deep shadows.
“We’re not afraid of the darkness,” Lausten says, with pride.
In “Frankenstein,” Lausten even lit numerous scenes using candles. The film shared one location, the 1753-built Wilton House with Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” a movie famous for its candle-lit scene captured with NASA lenses. But that wasn’t the effect Lausten wanted.
“We’re not soft light guys. The light should have a character,” says Lausten. “We like to have more contrast in the light.”
Together, Lausten and del Toro have developed such a shorthand that they often instinctually have a sense of how shots will be spliced together and how movement is blocked — even if Lausten tries to get del Toro out of his comfort zone sometimes.
“He has a very strong idea about left to right in his blocking. Sometimes I try to push it right to left because the light is better,” Lausten says. “He says, ‘Lausten, you’re killing me, you’re killing me.’ But we like to be on the dark side of the actors. We want to shoot against the windows.”
Together, they’ve crafted exquisitely atmospheric scenes, often with Lausten pumping as much smoke or steam into grand gothic spaces as possible.
“Sometimes, he thinks I’m trying to burn the set down,” Lausten says, smiling.
The sets were built in Toronto, where del Toro has been based for the last two decades, while on-location work took place in the U.K. Deverell’s travels with del Toro through Scotland doubled as research trips. They dipped into art museums, trod up and down old towers and visited an old sewage plant adorned with Victorian ironwork, Crossness Pumping Station, in London.
“I don’t talk a lot with Guillermo about the movie,” Deverell says. “We speak in visuals, in paintings and other films. He’ll say, ‘Watch this film.'”
There are numerous extensive sets in “Frankenstein,” including a giant, fully built waling ship lodged in Arctic ice. But the laboratory is the piece de resistance: a sprawling stage for Victor. The big round window, part of a circle motif extended through the film, is also a nod to a similar window in “Crimson Peak.”
“Guillermo wanted it big,” says Deverell. “I think he was designing it in his head for Oscar, who can move beautifully.”
The final notes
Alexandre Desplat, the composer, considers “Frankenstein” the third of a triptych with del Toro, following “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” For each, Desplat has conjured lyrical, emotional scores that articulate an unspoken yearning in the central characters: the creature, the puppet and the monster.
“I need to bring out their unspoken voice, their unspoken emotions,” Desplat says. “That’s why in the score there’s a large orchestra that plays big sometimes, with restraint sometimes. But on top of that there’s a beautiful violin player, the violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing from Norway, for whom I wrote very pure lines which expresses the most beautiful emotions of the creature.”
For the scene where Victor is building the creature from pieces of corpses, Desplat was initially unsure of how to score it. Should it sound gothic? Or violent?
“But very quickly we came up with this idea that it would be viewed from Victor’s point of view,” says Desplat. “He’s in a creative trance in that moment, like any painter or sculptor. That’s where we decided to play a waltz.”
On “Frankenstein,” Desplat, like his colleagues, could easily identify with the film’s creator protagonist. In the multifaceted craft work of film production, everyone is Victor Frankenstein.
“Yes, though I don’t have that many pieces of corpses at home,” Desplat says, chuckling. “I have some ice in the fridge.”
