Guillermo Del Toro On His Lifelong Quest To Create ‘Frankenstein’

While Frankenstein filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has directed several beloved movies over his three decades-plus in the business — from Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and its sequel and Pacific Rim, to Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley — perhaps nothing has been more satisfying to the three-time Oscar winner than his work in the past three years.

In 2022, del Toro, along with fellow director Mark Gustafson, finally realized his lifelong vision as a stop-motion filmmaker with the Best Animated Feature Oscar winner Pinocchio. Now, on Friday, del Toro — a proud “Monster Kid” who grew up watching Universal Studios monster movies — gets to present to audiences another story he’s been waiting his whole career to tell with his big-screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.

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Netflix — the studio behind del Toro’s Pinocchio — released Frankenstein in New York and Los Angeles last week before it expands to theaters nationwide on Friday. Frankenstein will next debut on Netflix on Friday, Nov. 7.

While at first blush it would appear that the stories of Pinocchio and Frankenstein couldn’t be any further apart, ultimately, they are very similar because they’re stories about fathers and sons, del Toro explained in a recent Zoom conversation.

“They’re kind of the same myth. I’ve always said, ‘I’m going to shoot Pinocchio like Frankenstein and Frankenstein like Pinocchio.’ My version of Frankenstein has elements of fairy tales, and my Pinocchio has some elements of horror, so I think they are very related,” del Toro said. “They’re ultimately about different fathers sending an inadequate, strange kid into the world, which every misfit and every Monster Kid can relate to. They are very much sister or sibling movies.”

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Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac as Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as The Creature, not Frankenstein’s Monster, as the famed character is often labeled. After all, it’s Victor who has this monstrous idea of bringing the dead back to life after a deep personal tragedy in his youth, while The Creature is ultimately an innocent whom the scientist ultimately rejects.

The film also stars Felix Kammerer as Victor’s younger brother, William, Mia Goth as William’s fiancée, Elizabeth Harlander, and Christoph Waltz as her uncle, Heinrich Harlander — a wartime armorer who funds Victor’s daring experiment of reanimating the dead.

Building A Different Version Of ‘Frankenstein’

Of course, the gold standard for any fan of Frankenstein growing up — including Guillermo del Toro — is Universal Studios’ 1931 version directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as his tragic creation.

Yet while the central theme of Mary Shelley’s source material remains intact in both Whale and del Toro’s versions of Frankenstein, the films are decidedly different in that del Toro’s version is the most faithful adaptation of the author’s novel.

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As such, the version of Jacob Elordi’s creature has no real resemblance to Karloff’s version, partly because Universal Studios copyrighted legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce’s designs. Even more noticeable is that The Creature speaks in del Toro’s version of Frankenstein, while Whale only had Karloff grunting and groaning in the first film (although he subsequently began to speak in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein).

If anything, del Toro’s version of The Creature is much more akin to Michael Sarazzin’s eloquent portrayal of the character in the two-part television movie Frankenstein: The True Story, which first aired on NBC in 1973.

“Michael Sarazzin’s Frankenstein: The True Story is really beautiful,” del Toro said in admiration. “It was written by Christopher Isherwood — of Cabaret fame — who was one of the great writers of the mid-20th century. He imbues it with a lot of subtext and power, a lot of gay themes and a lot of themes of beauty and decay, and the terror of aging.”

Still, the story of Frankenstein: The True Story as a whole doesn’t quite follow Shelley’s writings the way del Toro did.

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“It’s very faithful to the spirit of the book and has nothing to do with the book, except the main anecdote,’ the filmmaker observed. “Christopher’s version takes half and creates a mesh of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein and [the works of] E.T.A. Hoffmann. It’s a very literate adaptation and Michael Sarazzin is heartbreaking.”

Guillermo Del Toro Was Thrilled To Include Scenes Involving The Icy Shipwreck In ‘Frankenstein’

Like Frankenstein: The True Story and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1994, one of the major set pieces in Guillermo del Toro’s version of the tale is a ship locked in ice in the frozen North, where Dr. Victor Frankenstein recalls his monstrous tale of creating The Creature.

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For the director, realizing the shipwreck set was an essential part of his version of Frankenstein.

“Visually, the icy landscape with the ship is something I always wanted to do in a grand scale, like Caspar David Friedrich paintings or [Ernest] Shackleton photographs,” del Toro said. “I wanted to give the movie a bigger scope than any other version. I wanted it to feel epic and monumental.”

While some of del Toro’s scenes in Frankenstein may resemble what came before it because of similar interpretations of Mary Shelley’s story, there are moments from the book that have never been interpreted on film.

Chief among them, del Toro noted, is a scene that comes after the birth of The Creature. In versions like James Whale’s Frankenstein, The Creature clearly comes to life in the laboratory. In del Toro’s version, however, Victor thinks that his experiment has failed, leading him to fall in exhaustion onto his bed — until something unexpected happens.

“It’s one of the pivotal moments [from the book], when Victor is waking up and The Creature is at the foot of his bed,” del Toro said. “It is one of my favorite passages in the book and it had not been rendered by any version at all.”

Rated R, del Toro’s Frankenstein expands to theaters nationwide on Friday and makes its streaming debut on Netflix on Nov. 7.

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Note: Some of the quotes in this “Frankenstein” interview feature were condensed or edited for clarity.