Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when looking for an American distributor for the film.
GDT: I did this illustration of the Cronos device tearing into the skin [above] to show a possible idea for a poster for the film’s release. At the time, we were sending the movie out to American distributors, and I wanted to convey the idea that Cronos could be marketed. I was particularly happy with this image and the distributor, October Films, liked it, but they changed it for an image of a woman—like a girl having an orgasmic reaction to the device.
And the storyboards here [right] are rare—very few storyboards for Cronos survived. These particular story-boards were for an original prologue that I discarded, which was to start in the dark and then show the alchemist harvesting the insects.
MSZ: I know storyboarding is something you do on an ongoing basis while you’re working on your films. Can you talk a little bit about how you use them?
GDT: I now just doodle because it serves the same function as a more elaborate drawing. Even if you’re just using shapes, you can still communicate how you want to organize the frame—you’re still able to share the composition. I’ll give my doodle to someone who can interpret it and make it useful for preproduction. For example, if it’s for a VFX shot or a makeup effects shot, they’ll do a better job rendering the scene for budgeting.
I also use storyboards when I’m shooting. I call it the poor man’s Avid. Because I can edit on the page while I’m shooting. If I have sixteen or twenty setups I can put them all out on a sheet of paper and decide if I want to go from this one to that one, or if I have to skip one—you know, as time gets tighter. Storyboards are a great tool for making decisions like that.
MSZ: But this particular storyboard seems much more detailed. Was there a time when you drew more elaborate storyboards?
GDT: This one is so detailed because we were trying to budget for the effects we needed. I wanted to show the insect moving in the foreground, but I didn’t want to show its shape. So the storyboard was important for communicating how much we really needed to reveal to my guys at Necropia.
One of the few surviving storyboards for Cronos, this one for an unfilmed introduction to the film.
Concept by del Toro of the scene where Jesús Gris bites Dieter de La Guardia and drinks his blood.
MSZ: And what is this color piece over here [above]?
GDT: That is a preproduction painting I did to show what I wanted to happen to de la Guardia when Gris bites him and drinks his blood. I wanted it to be all in blue and red, but I didn’t know how to do it with the budget we had.
MSZ: The colors are reminiscent of the contrast of the red and the blue in Hellboy, of Hellboy and Abe Sapien.
GDT: I normally mix a warm color with a cold color. I think red and blue is a color scheme that is a lot more 1990s at this point. But I also like to combine cyan with gold or amber, because there is a lot of gold in cyan. And if you use the right shade of amber, there’s some green in it, so they can be complementary colors.
MSZ: Something I noticed in this artwork—in both the poster and the color pieces—is the signature.
GDT: The signature is my take on Will Eisner’s signature. I’m a big Will Eisner fan, and I tried to combine his name with my name, because you know “Will” and “Guillermo” are the same name. And I used to add that little comic book bubble, too.
Excerpt from the manual that describes how to operate the Cronos device.
These pages, designed by Felipe Ehrenberg, influenced del Toro’s approach to his future notebooks.
GDT: These pages are from the diary in the film, which were drawn by Felipe Ehrenberg, who did a fabulous job. I’ve always been obsessed with the props in my films looking the right way, and this prop was perfect.
MSZ: Each film of yours seems to have a special book.
GDT: I try to put books in all of my movies so I can keep them. This particular one also has patterns I ended up using in my diary.
MSZ: Yes, I wanted to ask about that because the Cronos book prop predates the diaries you acquired in Venice and your new approach to recording your thoughts in the notebooks.
GDT: I love the contrast of the crimson and the sepia, which comes from medieval and Renaissance diaries. I tried to adopt that in the first Hellboy notebook.
MSZ: And what about the storyboards [opposite], which depict the alchemist making notes in the book?
GDT: These are for the sequence in the movie where we show the alchemist in his workshop. Originally, we were going to go to a monastery to shoot the scene. But we didn’t have the money to pay for transportation to go to a separate location. So the final alchemist scene, if you want to call it that, ended up being shot against a backdrop in the same house where we shot the rest of the movie. And all we had was a piece of fabric and a stove. So it was much less elaborate.
MSZ: You’ve spoken, too, about admiring Vermeer and his compositions. There seems to be a strong resonance here, particularly in this first frame of the storyboard.
GDT: I wish! We tried to do this sort of beam of light but we realized that we couldn’t, because you need distance for the light to travel to produce that effect. The light needs to have enough of a “shoot,” and you need to have atmosphere on the set—to put a lot of smoke in the set—to get that “ray of light” effect. I wasn’t able to do it here. I was able to do it when Gris encounters the sunlight upstairs in the attic, though, when all the little holes create pins of light. The lights on that set were very, very high.
Storyboards by del Toro of an unfilmed scene introducing the alchemist who originated the Cronos device.
Concept by del Toro of the final scene where Angel de la Guardia and Jesús Gris face off in front of the massive sign at the top of the de la Guardia family’s building.
Gris (Federico Luppi) and Aurora (Tamara Shanath) walk along the sign in the final film.
GDT: This [above] was done in preproduction, and it was supposed to represent what I wanted for the sign in the finale. I wanted these guys to fight in front of a huge, broken clock, to show that Gris is immortal.
Also, in the drawing, Gris’s hair is black. Originally, the idea was that he would use black shoe polish to paint his hair, and in the end the front of his hair would be all white and the back would be all black, with tears of black streaming down his face. But that would have meant a lot of time in the makeup chair, which we didn’t have.
MSZ: Is there any association between the stopped clock and the gears of the Cronos device?
GDT: Yes, of course. Cronos is about immortality and how we want time to stop. All these characters are seeking immortality or fearing it, but the only immortal character, in a sense, is the granddaughter who simply does not care about it. Therefore she is immortal.