Guillermo del Toro hopes he’s dead before AI art goes mainstream
Take your heart Loves a challenge Nothing this 61-year-old director does can be called “half-assed” and each of his films is meticulously planned, scripted and storyboarded.
Such discipline in Frankensteinhis adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. This is a movie that del Toro has been trying to make for years and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes—as well as some of Shelley’s story embellishments—could only be the work of someone as in touch with his source material as he is.
Raised in a deeply Catholic family in Guadalajara, Mexico, del Toro was fascinated by 1931. Frankenstein He told NPR that at the age of 7, he decided to make Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature his “personal Christ.” Since then, he has transformed the so-called “monsters” into heroes – from kaiju Pacific Rim To fish man from The shape of waterThe latter brought him the Oscars for Best Director and Best Film.
FrankensteinCurrently playing in select theaters and coming to Netflix on November 7th, it represents Del Toro’s latest and possibly weirdest love letter to the wrong monsters. WIRED went to Zoom with the director to talk about artificial intelligence, tyrannical politicians, and the fateful summer of 1816 during which Shelley was inspired to write the book he holds so dear.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: I want to start at the end. you close Frankenstein To quote Lord Byron “The heart will be broken, but the broken will live.” You are adapting Mary Shelley. Why do we give Byron the last word?
Guillermo del Toro: Well, for me, the film is an amalgamation of Mary Shelley’s biography, my biography, the book, and what I want to talk about with romantics. One thread that I felt was missing, but was very much there, was war. Essentially, the metronome of their lives is in many ways the Napoleonic Wars, and this is part of Byron’s poem for Waterloo. There is no better way to express the theme of the movie than with that quote. This comes from a very personal experience for me. The fact that your heart breaks, you crumble, and the sun rises again, and you have to go on living.
Byron is also the one who inspired Shelley to write the book. He was at Lake Geneva with him and Percy Bysh Shelley and writer John Polidori competing to write the best horror story. He came out with what was probably the best of the bunch.
