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.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 39A
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).
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 28A
–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.
GIANT
–Chihuahua WITH COLLAR—at the auction.
–and then they find the hones that have been gnawed on.
BANNERS F/TH
Two headed shop owner. He hand puppets the 2nd head.
Rusty duct and lots of tubes in cement
Vapor type
Fluorescent Light Tubes which blink on and off in the T.M./steam.
Papers on the walls, put —everything along the way.
Hellboy B.P.R.D.
–Blood on the floor of the entryway to the Troll Market
MSZ: And on this page, are these sketches to the right initial concepts for the giant?
GDT: Only the one in the little vignette. Wayne Barlowe really created the design for the giant. I wanted very much the center of the door to look like a keyhole—I have a thing with keys and keyholes, visually. I’m sure Freud would have no problem explaining that, but it’s something I go to a lot. It’s in Devil’s Backbone, and it’s in Pan’s Labyrinth, and it’s in Crimson Peak. I just like the idea of portals, doors, and keyholes.
The image to the right of the giant is actually a ghost for Crimson Peak. See the two initials at the bottom—“CP?” I sometimes put little initials next to each image to remind me which film it is for. So the image of the giant has an “H” next to it, which is Hellboy II. And “F” means I wanted to find an alternative use for an idea if I didn’t get to use it in a film. I drew the other “H” image—the pattern of pipes—here for the BPRD. But those actually show up in the Troll Market, in the scene where Wink beats up Hellboy.
MSZ: Next to it are some Lovecraftian symbols, kind of like the ones you drew in the first Hellboy notebook. Except here they’re contained within a frame.
GDT: That is troll writing for the map shop. I think it’s one of my favorite sets, because it had every sort of paper—all sorts of maps and atlases—covered in troll writing.
Del Toro’s idea for the threshold giant was developed by Wayne Barlowe into a finished concept that informed the final computer-generated creation.
Sketch of a door to a Jaeger Conn-pod from del Toro’s fifth notebook.
Concept of Gipsy Danger, the heroic American Jaeger, by Oscar Chichoni.
Storyboard of the Kaiju Knifehead attacking Gipsy Danger by Rob McCallum.
Concept of the Kaiju skull temple in Pacific Rim’s futuristic Hong Kong by Doug Williams.
Concept of Mako Mori on the Shatterdome ramparts by Keith Thompson.
PACIFIC RIM
AS GUILLERMO GAINS GREATER FAME and scrutiny, and as security on the tentpole films he crafts becomes ever greater, the notebooks have become a two-edged sword. They are valued as works of art in themselves, but could also become liabilities by revealing great secrets if lost or stolen. In addition, these pages reflect not only the changing nature of Guillermo’s life and art, but also the changing relationship between him and his audience. He is no longer a fledgling unknown clamoring for attention but a celebrity operating in public view.
Even today, Guillermo is reluctant to acknowledge his widespread popularity and vast influence. “I’m still not on the world stage. There are people who care for me. Still, the large majority of people don’t know who I am. I’m not a household name; I’m an acquired taste.”
Genuine modesty aside, Guillermo has learned the need for ever-greater caution regarding the notebooks. He must constantly be mindful of them. He became sharply aware of this on The Hobbit (2012); he was originally scheduled to direct the film series, and on the first film he shares cowriting credit. “The problem with the notebooks is, there was a very fractured relationship with them during The Hobbit. I kept a lot of notes, but I was very paranoid of them being lost because that was a supersecret project. To this day I’m very paranoid about that book, which is not finished; I’m still writing in it. So I pull it out less often because if it gets lost, if I reveal anything that’s stayed in the movies, it’s legally very, very binding.”
Once Guillermo was on board as The Hobbit’s director, financial difficulties with MGM led to the film’s delay. After two years cooling his heels in New Zealand waiting for production to begin, Guillermo ultimately left the project, intent on making up lost time and getting back to work.
Back in the United States, Guillermo met with James Cameron, who asked him if he was still interested in making a film of H. P. Lovecraft’s novel At the Mountains of Madness—because, if so, Cameron wanted to produce it.
Guillermo had been making notes—and notebook entries—on Mountains of Madness for more than fifteen years, and with Cameron fresh off the billion-dollar-plus success of Avatar, it seemed at last the stars would align to bring Guillermo’s most avidly desired project to fruition. Tom Cruise and Ron Perlman were cast in lead roles, and many months of intense preparation began, including astonishing creature designs, breathtaking production artwork, detailed storyboards of the entire film, location scouting, and more.
Then, at the last moment, the studio pulled the plug. No R-rated, two-hundred-million-dollar film had ever been greenlit to production, and the studio feared that the movie wouldn’t turn a profit without the child and teen audience. Heartbroken, Guillermo leapt into another film he’d been developing with Legendary Pictures, Pacific Rim—the ultimate giant monster-versus-giant robot movie.
“I think I’ve been preparing for Pacific Rim all my life,” Guillermo says. “When I was a kid, I saw The War of the Gargantuas in a shitty theater in Mexico, and I got a glass of pee thrown on my head from the balcony, and I stayed to finish the
movie. That’s how much I love kaijus, you know?”
Pacific Rim was the perfect remedy for all the emotional and psychic wounds Guillermo had suffered while trying to make The Hobbit and At the Mountains of Madness—then emerging without a picture to shoot after four years. As he puts it, “Pacific Rim has been the best experience for me in producing and directing a movie that I’ve ever had.”
Best of all, this big summer movie embraces many of Guillermo’s favorite themes and motifs: the balancing act between the forces of chaos and order, darkness and light, human and mechanism entwined, duking it out with gigantic weird creatures from another dimension—much like H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones.
Filled with new creative fervor, Guillermo returned to working out designs and ideas in his notebooks. “Pacific Rim has a number of pages, which means a lot,” he relates. “If I have more than two pages on a movie, that means I’ve been at it for a long time because I don’t write that often in the book anymore.”
He hasn’t written in the notebook since completing Pacific Rim, but he adds, “Now that I’m doing [the TV version of] The Strain and Crimson Peak, I may restart. But I really want to finish this volume, so I can put it in a safe place, and I can start carrying a new notebook again. Once I’m not working on a supersecret project, I’ll be relaxed.”
What of the future? For a writer-director with such dark visions, Guillermo’s outlook is enduringly hopeful. Paraphrasing science fiction legend Theodore Sturgeon, one of his favorite writers, Guillermo observes, “There’s the famous Sturgeon’s Law, which is, ‘Ninety percent of everything is shit.’ Now the way I live my life is the del Toro Law, which is, ‘Ten percent of everything is awesome.’ You know what I’m saying? I agree with Sturgeon, except I think that it’s amazing that we get ten percent.
“All I know is that hatred makes life so much shorter and bitter. And every time you can give love, give love, if you can—and you can’t all the time, I mean I’m not a candy-ass Teletubby, I’m a human being, you know. I hate people and I love people. But whenever you can, just fucking love. If you can choose, choose love.”
Kaiju concept by Guy Davis.
Concept of Stacker Pentecost in his office in the Shatterdome by Vicki Pui.
Film teaser poster art by Hugo Martin.
Mako Mori (Mana Ashida) is rescued by the Jaeger Coyote Tango.
Sketch of the Chinese Jaeger Crimson Typhoon by Francisco Ruiz Velasco.
Concept of a Precursor by Keith Thompson.
Concept of the Kaiju Knifehead by Wayne Barlowe.
Del Toro applying some more patina to the Alaskan wall set during shooting.
NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 7
–Ultra Primes (T1.9) 14, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 40, 50, 65, 85, 100, 135, 160 mm for each unit Macro Primes (T21) 16, 24, 40 mm, VariablePrimes (T2.2) 16–30 mm 29–60 mm, 55–105 mm zooms 15–40 mm, 28–76 mm, 17–80 mm 24, 290 mm, each unit.
–Cold colors in the Tokyo FB except for the shoe in Mako’s hand.
–Rain of slow, gray ash
–On the battlefield everything is blood and mud. The strongest lines are the horizontal ones and in the forest and the castle the most powerful lines are vertical. The cannons destroy the forest when they try unsuccessfully to halt the advance of the enemy troops.
–The confusion interrupts the battle, putting both armies in a constant state of alert, sensitive to the slightest sound.
“Mako on the stairs”
–Use the clock of war to mark time with news in last third of the film.
–“Don’t let your feet touch the ground” by Ash Koley.
–The Beast was afraid of becoming vulnerable. He isolated himself from the world, poring over his books and maps.
NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 10
–When is the right time to say good-bye? How can we know if we’re unaware of the host’s identity? How to know if we are midway through the meal or if it has already come to an end?
–I’m a father but I still feel like a son, I’m an adult but my fears are those of a child. I’m alone but I live among many, I feel like time is running out when everything is just getting started
–The dark fairy hated the prince because she loved him with a passion.
–Always say what you think, always do what you say, and know what makes you happy. Live or die abiding by firmly made decisions, doing what you think is the right thing.
Mako in the rain, sans helicopter
Del Toro’s notebook sketch of Mako Mori’s first appearance, alone in the rain, inspired costume designer Kate Hawley.
MSZ: So Pacific Rim is part of a new notebook, which includes notes you made while working on The Hobbit, correct?
GDT: Well, what happened is, I lost a lot of the rhythm of working in the notebooks during The Hobbit, because I was so afraid—I’m still afraid—of carrying that notebook. I used to grab my notebook and travel with it everywhere and make annotations, but with The Hobbit, secrecy was so paramount I was paranoid about leaving it behind in a coffee shop. So I stopped carrying it. And to this day, I have it at home, but until I finish that notebook, I cannot carry a notebook, because the three movies haven’t come out yet.
MSZ: How did you get back into working in the notebooks for Pacific Rim?
GDT: I was really, really invested in this image of the girl with the red shoe [opposite]. Because it’s something that I felt was very iconic, and it defined the entire palette of the movie for me. The movie is incredibly saturated with color, but I wanted Mako’s flashback to have few colors and feel almost monochromatic. Blue is dominant in her memories and it permeates her in the present—her hair is streaked with that blue. She is marred by the past. I also wanted her introduction scene [above] to be monochromatic and we art directed that whole introductory sequence in the rain to be only concrete gray, cyan, and gold. So the two sequences are linked.
But once Mako and Raleigh connect, more colors begin to be associated with them. The first Drift they do is all in blue. After that, when they are fighting in Hong Kong, all these colors start coming in, and we end up with them immersed in a sea of red. And the red is the same red as the red of her shoe.
I think that if you’re going to go crazy with colors in a movie like we do in Pacific Rim, you have to have peaks and valleys; you have to have places where the eye can rest. And so we have that regular red, for when Raleigh and Mako connect. And then when they are not connecting, or when they are alone, they each have another color. Mako’s palette is cold, while Raleigh’s color code for when he is by himself is rust and grime and amber.
NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 9
–The world is rapidly becoming a more and more vile place that celebrates vulgarity and brutality in the abstract but that hypocritically demands absolute moral perfection in public
–Sooner than you might think, with noise comes emptiness. The explosion occurs when emptiness trumps substance
–How pleasant is the sensation of absence. What a pleasing assassin is silence
–Absolute inconsequence, empty gestures, distance. To be so close and yet so distant from others; to fade away without thunder, without a roar and without fury. Without a vessel, without meaning, without a clear direction; without a destiny, finding nothing but echoes in the voices of other people.
–To which one of the voices should we pay attention? To the one that says “keep going, keep going”? To the one that speaks of tedium? What is the purpose of the gears? Entropy overcomes and guides us as we lurch along toward our cosmic destiny; perhaps, the most we can do is end our days as tiny discharges of energy. Positive, negative? What difference does it make? Murals made by ants, crushed under the feet of a man trudging along, part of an incomprehensible, indecipherable cosmic joke.
NOTEBOOK 5, PAGE 5
The code in the Kaiju’s viscera should he fascinating. Blues, iridescence; translucent and opalescent. Bioluminescent blood should come from the glow sticks; this would help with the FX brain
–Before the written langua
ge in Cluva events were recorded by knotting cords or making notches on a stick (SINOGRAMS is what the symbols are called) 6 categories. XIANGXING, ZHISHI, HUIYI, XIESHENG, ZUANZAU, and JIAJIE —PICTOGRAMS.
–Wide-angle lenses to capture the CHARACTER and the SURROUNDINGS in the same frame 18 mm
–For Beauty and the Beast, the Age of Reason, which is the period during the eighteenth century in which reason is enthroned above spirituality, which witnesses the birth of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. It’s in this spirit that the United States is born as a new country.
–Perhaps it might also be worthwhile to set it in the following period: during the Napoleonic Wars, when reason has been abandoned but spirituality has not been recovered or reclaimed.
–BOXING FIST FIGHT in the middle of a battlefield in F.
–Gathering pages from her encyclopedia Bella finds something ancient and magic.
“Sprouting Boy”
MSZ: What can you say about the flower here [opposite]? Does it resonate at all with the flower in Pan’s Labyrinth?
GDT: The idea in both films is that the flower tells the story. But I abandoned the idea in the middle of shooting Pacific Rim because I thought we wouldn’t have time. When we started shooting, the screenplay was about 130 pages long. That meant at least a 2-hour-and-45-minute movie for me.
But the idea was that the entire command center would be made of concrete and metal. And I wanted Raleigh and Mako to talk about themselves to one another, in the heart of the rubble. Originally, they were going to talk on a ledge outside, and she would notice a flower that was blooming in the concrete and she would say, “Oh, the poor thing, it won’t live.” And then, at the end of the movie, we would go back to the flower, and it would be blooming.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Page 23
