Del Toro also talks about his new movie Crimson Peak!
Last year at Comic-Con, Guillermo Del Toro was in the Hall H asking 6,500 fans what they thought of the idea of Hellboy 3. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough in the crowd to bring the third movie to production. But at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, Del Toro showcased his new big-budget film Crimson Peak. Even though Del Toro is hopeful that Hellboy 3 is still an option that can be explored, Del Toro will need a lot of help in order to make that happen.
“The hard fact is that the movie’s going to need about $120 million and there’s nobody knocking down our doors to give it to us,” he told The Daily Beast ahead of his Hall H return, where a new Crimson Peak trailer earned an enthusiastic reception. “It’s a little beyond Kickstarter,” he laughed. “It would be great to complete the trilogy,” he said, “But in a way I don’t see the world—the industry—supporting that idea.”
Legendary Pictures told Del Toro that they would contribute to Hellboy 3 if he makes Pacific Rim 2 a huge hit. Before this year’s Comic-Con, Del Toro had to make a decision between Justice League Dark and Pacific Rim 2. Del Toro chose Pacific Rim 2, which is currently in pre-production and is scheduled for a 2017 release.
“Warners liked the script, they were very enthusiastic and wanted to green-light it but they wanted it to coincide with the shoot of Pacific Rim 2,” he said. “I was put in a very difficult place facing a difficult choice, and I chose to do Pacific Rim 2.”
The biggest struggle between Del Toro and the studios he partners up with have been movie ratings. Del Toro was desperate enough to sacrifice part of his salary to keep Crimson Peak an R-rated movie.
“You have to make a movie because you want to see it,” he said. “And the fight that comes with that, the fight for the right rating, is part of that. You don’t want the right movie with the wrong rating. I gave up about 30 percent of my salary and my entire back-end in order to keep Crimson Peak R-rated. And it was very clear, from a business perspective. Legendary told me, ‘Look, these are the numbers on PG-13. These are the numbers on the R.’ And I chose R.”
Crimson Peak features Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain). The story takes place in the 19th century when Edith marries Sir Thomas and together, they move into a mansion where Thomas’s sister, Lady Lucille, lives. Edith doesn’t think everything is right with the mansion when she moves in. When asked what the difference would be between an R-rated Crimson Peak and a PG-13 rated Crimson Peak would be, Del Toro took offense to the comparison.
“A PG-13 Crimson Peak should not exist,” he said, vociferously. “Everything about the movie for me is adult. The theme, the tone, there’s some pretty brutal scenes in the movie and some reasonably sexy scenes in the movie…I think they are all necessary for the tale.”
When describing the movie, Del Toro gave a specific example of what he thought it was; a classic Gothic romance with a variety of colors.
“I designed it, in a way, like a fairytale,” he said. “We color-coded it in certain moments to feel like Technicolor—it’s saturated in color and drenched in luxuriant textures. America is in gold and tobaccos, and the Old World is in cyans and blues and rust. There’s a scene that I call the Beauty and the Beast moment, which is the first morning Mia [Wasikowska] puts her robe on and goes down the steps. It’s Beauty waking up in the castle of the Beast. It’s completely gorgeous.”
Del Toro’s early work consisted of Spanish-language movies, in which the main characters are on the opposite side of the rest of the cast because of a social issue. Del Toro’s movies, when he moved to Hollywood, have been themed the same way, but based off gender and ethnicity.
“I feel that every decision you make has some political or social position,” he said, pointing to his Pacific Rim heroine Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi—a lead character who battles alongside men and doesn’t share an onscreen romance with her male counterpart, even if some fans ‘ship it anyway. “It’s incredibly important to me to have a female protagonist in Pacific Rim that doesn’t come out in skimpy shorts and a wet T-shirt and is a sex object, that really holds her own in battles.”
“The reason I made the movie was Mako,” del Toro continued. “And I made the decision that the central male and the female characters are going to get the least amount of lines, because they’re closed-in characters who don’t want to talk to anyone—except they want to talk to each other. As friends, as colleagues.”
“The political decision about making a movie about giant robots and monsters is that there’s no single country saving the world. It is the world saving the world, and you end up with an African-American guy, a Japanese girl, everybody saving the world. Those are political decisions for me. When you get jingoistic and ‘hip hip hooray’ sort of militaristic action, that’s a different political decision.”
At Comic-Con in Hall H, Avengers Director Joss Whedon talked about his own work with feminism by giving Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) an anti-feminist role in Age of Ultron. Del Toro, who is a father of two girls, spoke of Hollywood’s “secret gender war” to fans at the Legendary panel.
“To me, gender is politics,” he told me. “There’s a secret war against gender in the world, and it’s important for me to write substantial parts for female actors that they don’t get that often. Gothic romance is perfect for that. It was important to me to make a damsel-in-distress movie where the damsel ultimately kicks ass. Most of these tales end up in marriage and the marriage is the end to the horrors. In Crimson Peak, the horrors start with the marriage.”
Del Toro is a Guadalajara native who moved to America in 1997 after his father was kidnapped in Mexico. He prefers to talk about his interests in America, such as superheroes, monsters and haunted houses. Although Del Toro wants to continue making movies in America, which he has dual-membership for a few months, Del Toro wants to produce movies in Mexico, including a documentary about “the current climate of corruption.”
“I think that we hold very seriously the responsibility to keep talking about the situation in Mexico, not only when we go there but when we are here,” he said, his usually jovial tone turning serious. “It is urgent because of the social decomposition of our country by the drug trade. The tragedy of that is that a leisure drug trickles down, and it destroys a country.”
“In order to sustain an addiction, you’re killing people all the way from South America to North America. Every time somebody uses drugs, it’s like having a gun. They’re killing someone, period.”
Crimson Peak is set to be released in October 2015!
