Guillermo del Toro spent a long time crafting The Shape of Water. There were three years on creature design alone—and as much as a lifetime figuring out how to construct a narrative that's both an against-all-odds love story and an allegory deconstructing the fallacy of the American Dream. The film is a lush visual spectacle with tremendous performances and exacting attention to detail. It walked away from its debut at the Venice Film Festival with the Golden Lion, and the rapturous response it's received at both the Telluride and the Toronto Film Festival portend good things to come for this December 8 release, starring Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, and Octavia Spencer.
GQ sat down with del Toro to understand just what was on the 52-year-old auteur's mind when he set out to craft his latest movie.
This movie feels like the salve we all need right now—a movie about love and about loving the other. Does the timing feel prescient?
I do feel like this is like an ointment against cynicism, fear, hatred, and all that stuff. It has a pure heart. I was trying to talk about love in sort of an ideal way, but an adult way. It's not a romantic notion of love, only. It tries to have humor, which is a saving grace. And it is very much about invisible people coming together—the other. I think it is very much about 1962, but also about today.
Why did you set the film in 1962?
I'm always very, very careful when the movies happen and where they happen. Alfred Hitchcock said about location, "A movie that happens everywhere matters nowhere." And the location should inform your storytelling. He does that brilliantly in Vertigo. He does it in Psycho. He does it in Frenzy. He does it time and again, and he says it shouldn't be casual. It's equally important when. For example, The Devil's Backbone [del Toro's 2001 film] was set towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. Pan's Labyrinth is after the war. The war has been won. There are skirmishes, but it's important that it's not during the war.
For this one: When America says, "Let's make America great again," they are dreaming of 1962. Why? They are dreaming of a time when cars have jet fins. Kitchens are super practical and fast. People are moving to the suburbs. Wives have time, they are coiffed with huge hairspray locks and petticoated skirts, and kids are watching TV. TV dinners and Jell-O, and everyone is talking about the future. Sputnik and the space race.
It was a very optimistic time.
Kennedy is in the White House. There is a little war starting that is going to end really quickly, called Vietnam. Then, at the end of '62, Kennedy is killed and the disillusionment begins. It's the other Camelot, crystallized in the American imagination as the ideal time. But it was [only] ideal if you were a WASP—a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. If you were anybody else, it was not that great, which is very similar to what we are experiencing today. And a lot of the things we thought we had progressed past, we haven't.
What was the original germ of an idea that began this story?
It started when I was six and I was watching The Creature From the Black Lagoon. When the creature swam under Julie Adams, I fell in love with Julie Adams, and I identified with the creature. I was six, so I couldn't verbalize what I was feeling, but it was incredibly powerful. I was also overwhelmed by the beauty of the image. Forever in my mind, monsters and beauty were fused since Frankenstein—but this movie was the other moment of fusion, spiritually, beautifully. And what I felt when I watched the movie for the first time, I hoped they ended up together. And they didn't. I felt, "Oh, gosh. If only they had a chance."
It's amazing to me that that movie and character stayed with you all this time.
Oh, yeah. The creature from the black lagoon—I drew that creature almost every day, two, three times a day, for probably my first ten years of life, you know.
So when you began making this movie, did you start with that creature?
No. It's the same thing I did on Pacific Rim [2013]. We are not going to go see Kaiju movies. They are already in our blood, in our DNA. If you design a giant gorilla, King Kong is going to be in your DNA no matter what, so why study it? That would be a mistake. I told the designers, "Let's go to nature, and let's go to different sources." I went to Japanese engraving. To an engraving called "The Great Carp," which shows a black fish with stripes of color. And I said, "Let's pattern the color work on the creature off of this." We are not doing a movie creature but a leading man. Let's construct him as a beautiful work of art. Let's not build him as a creature, but as something that looks precious. Something that, if you look at it the right way, you want it to live. You want it to exist in our world.
You have to understand how Sally Hawkins' character could fall in love with it.
We spent three years designing the creature. Perfecting the shoulder-to-butt ratio. The butt is really, really constructed. [laughs] And I knew I didn't want to draw the creature. I felt it was a mistake to start with sketches. I said, "Let's sketch in clay." And I hired the two guys I thought were best for this out of my pocket for a good chunk of time. And they sketched a bunch of clay sketches. And I hired Legacy [Effects] to do a composite sketch of those sketches on another, and then a paint job that used the usual blues and the usual greens. Then I hired Mike Hill, an English guy who I think is the best at monsters right now. I said, "Let's throw the face away. Let's start from scratch." He came to my house, and we would have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we would sculpt all day. I'm not a great sculptor, but I can sculpt, and I can criticize in 3-D. And then we did about 20 studies of color. We would move the eyes one millimeter to the left, one millimeter to the right. We did sketches of color. And then we chose a palette. We layered about 20 layers of transparency to make one color that looks solid to you. It's actually freckles—stencils and then on top of the stencils, dotting. The creature is incredibly complicated to paint.
Was Doug Jones [the actor who often plays del Toro's creatures in his films] always going to be your creature?
Oh, yeah, I wrote it for Doug, for Sally [Hawkins], for Octavia [Spencer], and for Michael Shannon. But it all started with Sally. The first thing I saw her in was a TV series called Fingersmith. She falls in love with a woman, and they have wonderful sex, but it was not titillating or kinky or prurient. It was very matter-of-fact. We love each other. We have sex, but that's not all we do. We are two women in love, we have a complicated relationship. It was a murder mystery, and sex was part of the component. I knew in this movie it was important for them to have sex, but to treat it without the nudge-nudge, hand-wringing factor. It was more, "They love each other, and they screw." Then I saw her in Happy-Go-Lucky and I thought, "Oh, my God, she can really have a blissful state of grace." Then I saw her in Submarine and I thought, "She can really pop out without words." And then I saw her in Blue Jasmine and I thought, "This is a movie star…and I better get going."
And why make her mute?
There were three reasons: One: The thing you find out at the end is morphological. Two: I think when love happens, it happens in a way that renders you speechless. And three: To me, movie love is about looking. I think looking is the essential act of loving. Brothers, fathers and sons, lovers, whatever. What you do when you love someone is look at that person as that person is. Also, I wanted her to be on equal ground with the creature. That they weren't going to talk about it. They just recognized each other's essence.
What about writing for Octavia and Michael?
Michael, for me, has great humanity. People say to me, "Oh, Michael is very scary." To me, he's not. He's incredibly human. I wanted a guy that—if we had seen this movie in the 1950s—he would have been the hero. He would have been the guy that saves the day and rescues the girl from the clutches of the monster. And I think that's the guy. He's really the most perverse character in the movie, because he's the guy that wants to control everything, and therefore he loses control of everything. I saw everything of his. He can be both scary and vulnerable in Take Shelter. He could be very moving in Shotgun Stories, and yet he had a hard edge. And in this one, I thought, "I want a guy who—in the middle of the movie—I give the audience one or two or three scenes in which they almost feel for him." Where you see that he's also under incredible pressure. I thought he could do it. The way I casted the movie was eyes. I wanted Octavia Spencer's eyes, Michael Shannon's eyes, and Sally's eyes. And the creature's eyes.
Issues of race line the periphery of the film. You don't address it head-on, but it's definitely a factor. Can you tell us a little about how race plays in the film?
When you think about race being one of the components of the other, the way we are controlled is by made-up differences. You're American, I'm Mexican. Really? Okay, language. But geography and politics are completely invented. The division that works the best is race. It's the one that is used blatantly. The central figure [in the film] is a composite of everything other you can think of—the alien, this dark slimy creature that came from South America. Race is a component of otherness, and the idea of this [movie] is invisible people coming together to save this other.
Has the positive response to the film surprised you?
When people say, "When did you know [this was going to be a hit]?" you never know. I always set myself a trap to fail. Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching Pan's Labyrinth: An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy. This was a thriller-musical-romance between a woman and an amphibian man set in the Cold War. Nothing easy. All those are tonally very hard to combine. Every time we were on the set, I would look at [Richard] Jenkins. Is this going to work? I don't know. It works for me. So everything has surprised me. I'm very happy. The one thing I learned on [2015's] Crimson Peak—which was a gothic romance, but sold as a Halloween movie—was make them for the right number, and they will sell them for what they are. I will not force the studio's hand to sell it to a wider audience and therefore the audience will be disappointed. So I said let's do it for the right number. That was the difficult thing, to make this movie for $19.5 million but make it look like $60 million.
You could have spent that much just on creature creation.
I saw the budget for a Western the other day: $70 million. I go, "Wow." And I've done huge movies—but I think what you learn on the big movies is how to make the small movies. It's a paradox, but it's real.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.