Notebook 3, Pages 4A and 4B.
Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when trying to find an American distributor for the film.
Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) and Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) in Gris’s antique shop.
The bottom of one of the original Cronos device props.
A sketch of the aging Dieter de la Guardia by del Toro.
Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) examines the statue of the angel while his granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath), looks on.
CRONOS
WATCHING A FILM in a theater holds a unique power. Guillermo del Toro works and has worked in many media, but he prefers movies because in the theater the image is vast, all-encompassing, inescapable—forming the totality of the viewer’s experience in that moment. In a theater, the audience is propelled along a time frame that the director dictates. Unlike at home or in other contexts, viewers can’t pause the story, step away for a few minutes, read a paper, call a friend, and then return at their convenience. Guillermo is a maestro who insists on full attention and immersion, and this is what the movie theater provides. In addition, film allows Guillermo to unite all his artistic proclivities in one singular vision, and so movies became his medium of choice.
Cronos (1993) was Guillermo’s first foray into feature film. For many novice filmmakers, their first film is an embarrassment they want to put behind them. Commenting on Fear and Desire, his first feature, Stanley Kubrick once said that he didn’t want the film to be remembered or shown again because it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise… a completely inept oddity—boring and pretentious.”
Not so with Guillermo and Cronos. This astonishing film reveals an already-mature visionary. It is a personal, profound philosophical rumination on the choices unconditional love demands when faced with the facets of our nature we cannot control—sexual obsession, hunger, mortality. It forces us to ask where we draw the line on our actions.
A vampire film where the word vampire is never used, Cronos presents a merciless world where mercy survives in the face of uncontrollable appetite but only at a grave cost. The characters face hard choices and are pushed to ever more extreme actions. All of it unfolds in a fantasy realm that blends the Jalisco of Guillermo’s youth with the Grand Guignol world he soaked up from books and films.
In the film, it’s initially easy for Aurora (Tamara Shanath), like any granddaughter, to love her gentle grandfather, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), who stays reassuringly the same. But what do you do when your grandfather inexplicably gets younger, more vigorous—and then, astonishingly, returns from the dead, growing ever more horrific looking? In Aurora’s case, you see the soul within and cherish it, regardless of outside appearances. You tuck him into your toy chest with your plush bear; you shield him from the light and witness his final moments of existence. As for Jesús Gris, who is transformed by the exquisite, monstrous Cronos device into a deathless addict, he chooses to destroy both himself and the device rather than sacrifice his granddaughter on the altar of his need.
With these characters, their monstrous circumstances, and their difficult choices, Guillermo confronts his audience with an inescapable truth of life: that those we love, and we ourselves, will ultimately be made horrible by either accident or illness, and certainly by death. Constancy and devotion are possible only by virtue of love, which alone endures.
Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) succumbs to the device in Cronos.
In his first film, Guillermo announced his singular aesthetic: his desire to utilize classic horror tropes to strip away artifice and show us clear reality—albeit his reality, his world. With Cronos, Guillermo gave voice to the world inside himself.
Guillermo took ten years building the makeup and special effects infrastructure (through his company Necropia) that would allow him to make this film, and its production was fraught with trouble. At one point, financing collapsed during shooting, and Guillermo had to tell star Ron Perlman, whose agent advised him to quit, “I can’t pay you now, but I promise you will get paid.” The time and attention to detail paid off. In Cronos, many of Guillermo’s major themes are on display, particularly child/parent and especially child/grandparent relationships, the fragility of innocence and its inevitable dance with corruption, and the sociopathic impulse that spoils for an excuse to let loose unbridled violence.
While working on Cronos, and as he would do with all his films, Guillermo kept a detailed notebook full of his illustrations, concepts, and thoughts. These are suggested by the storyboards, sketches, and production stills that follow, but none of this artwork is from the notebook itself.
For that, blame James Cameron.
“When I was finishing Cronos, Jim and I went to an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica,” Guillermo explains, “and it was a very, very, very dire time. I was staying in a hotel that was three hundred dollars a month, so it was very, very economical. With that hotel, most of the time the plumbing did not work, so I had to go to another hotel every three days and rent a room just to take a shower—or I could have a hot dog at Pink’s. Those were my choices. The day I took the shower, I couldn’t eat lunch.
“So when I met Jim Cameron, I was really filthy. I was a disaster. And he said, ‘Order what you want.’ And I thought, Oh my God, I’d better carve up for the whole week. I ordered like a madman, and wine kept pouring, and I got completely bloated and drunk. I said to Jim, ‘I want you to have my notebook for Cronos’, which was a Day Runner full of notes. I gave it to him, and Jim received it, and I think he was also not completely sober.
“The end of the story is that the notebook—he says that he placed it somewhere. He still lives in the same house, so I have hopes, but he says that he hasn’t been able to find it since.”
As a result, the pages that follow can only hint at what the Cronos notebook held, at what it still holds, like a snippet from a lost work of Sophocles quoted in a play by Aristophanes or snapshots of the Ark of the Covenant that is itself crated and buried in the closing-credits warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
What’s clear from the surviving Cronos storyboards and sketches is that, from the beginning, Guillermo possessed a bold creative vision and the ability to communicate it. In the years to come, Guillermo would make bigger films, more ambitious ones, but from the first he staked out a territory that was all his own.
The top of one of the original scarab props.