XL Cover Story: Hellboy's Infernal Combustion
For director Guillermo del Toro, working with the comic's creator wasn't hellish
By John DeForeApril 1, 2004
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Let's get the sad stuff out of the way first: Proud Austinites who tally these things may be under the impression that Guadalajara native and "Hellboy" director Guillermo del Toro still lives (at least between productions) in our town. Though he misses our barbecue dearly, it's no longer true.
"In Guadalajara, you have very gentle seasons, basically an eternal spring. Austin was too brutal for them, they didn't want to play out in the heat, and they were very cold in the winter. L.A. (where the filmmaker now resides) was a climatic compromise."
When it comes to his work, though, del Toro has worked hard so that he need compromise very little. Back when he was promoting the haunting "The Devil's Backbone," the director confided to me that it was possible the only way he'd be able to make "Hellboy," a dream project for him, was to cast Vin Diesel in the lead. Then del Toro's "Blade II" opened to strong business, putting him in a better position to insist on his ideal actor.
"We had basically one meeting with Vin Diesel," he recalls now. "Everything went well and the right things were said, but after sort of courting the idea for a week, I decided to go back to Ron Perlman. And I really felt that this time it would be important not to waver." He got what he wanted.
Casting Perlman wasn't simply a matter of loyalty to an actor he had worked with in the past. It was part of the filmmaker's passion to capture (as much as a live-action film can) the look of a series that is some of the most visually striking stuff to hit comics in decades. Del Toro, who describes himself as "sort of a frustrated illustrator," bent over backward to get the film's style right, from limiting its palette to colors used in the series to digitally timing every single shot, intensifying the blacks and creating a contrast that echoed the comic's chiaroscuro.
Most importantly, he enlisted the artist himself, Mike Mignola, who joined the team to help with production design: "I made it clear to the producers that he was a guy without whom I would not make the movie, and I wanted his blessing and for him to know what we were doing from the very start."
It will interest the comic's fans -- who will note many ways in which this adaptation is not letter-for-letter -- that Mignola approved every bit of the screenplay:
"Everything that is in the movie is there because he and I agreed," del Toro says. "Early on I said, 'Your duty is to not agree to anything that you feel is not organic, and my duty is to not agree to anything that I don't feel is good for the movie.' So we had many friendly but heated arguments; sometimes I won and sometimes he did, but I really think that we kept that deal. Until we were both convinced about something, we wouldn't put it in the movie."
"And Mike said 'You're insane!,' " del Toro laughs. Eventually, the artist convinced him to drop the idea by bribing him with four pages of original art.
But other changes made it in, planted to generate emotional interest to supplement the thrill of, well, seeing a guy who looks like a red ape smash up a lot of dragon-things.
"If you approach the material as a fan, with the right intentions," he explains, "I don't think there's much room for the fans to complain. I mean, with the history that Hollywood has with comic book properties, we could have easily seen a normal-looking guy calling himself Heckboy and running around in the Heckmobile, you know?"
"If we adapted the perfect Hellboy graphic novel, then we probably would be doing a disservice to it. I feel that 'Seed of Destruction,' the one we chose to adapt, is by far the least well-developed. It was the first, and I felt there were some aspects of it we could enhance and change, and still preserve the spirit. Someone said in the past that to adapt anything, you have a better time adapting something that could use a change, you know?"
According to both men, the working arrangement was like a meeting of long-lost brothers. Both welcome the idea of a sequel if this film succeeds, but del Toro expects any such project to be at least a year and a half away:
"I would love to make another movie in Spanish before doing anything else. A film called 'Pan's Labyrinth.' 'Devil's Backbone' was a metaphor for the civil war in Spain, and this is a metaphor for the Fascism period. Franco has won, we're in the 1940s, and we find this Fascist family that moves into an ancient house in the north of the country. They find an abandoned topiary labyrinth at the back of the house, and the oldest daughter at night is visited by a faun, a little satyr, and she starts doing the satyr's bidding.
It's a bit of a fairy tale, but a horrific fairy tale."
Sounds like a story that could use a five-story Gothic crib carved out of dark wood, rocking slowly against the night sky.
More: Hellboy for Dummies
More: 'Hellboy' Reviews & Showtimes
