He showed me his notebooks, and this time I understood more of what I was seeing. He explained the way he chose a specific palette for each film. He would start with colors; the colors that would become the keynotes for the film. There were words. There were drawings and paintings, so haunting, so resonant. It was as if Guillermo had made a secret film, and that everything the audience would ever see was only the innocent, jutting-out top of an iceberg. They would never know how huge the Titanic-sinking world beneath was; the world of Guillermo’s imagination, filled with fairies and demons and insects and clockwork—always clockwork.
Often I suspected that the true art, the place the real magic lived and lurked, was in those notebooks, because the stories in them seemed infinite, fragmentary, perfect. And if I was sure of anything, it was that nobody would ever see the notebooks, because the notebooks took you backstage, into another world. One of the world’s rarest and oddest books is the Codex Seraphinianus. I found a copy in a rare bookstore in Bologna in 2004, having looked for it for years. The Codex Seraphinianus is a strange book written in unreadable code-like writing, filled with pictures that almost make sense, and reading it is like dreaming while awake. Guillermo’s notebooks are stranger than that.
My conversation with Guillermo feels like it began, in a dream, in Austin fifteen years ago and continues, in the manner of dreams, in strange places across the world. The last time we spoke, unless I dreamed it, we were in Wellington, New Zealand, in a café, and we talked about everything under the sun. We were older, and the food was not as good as the food that Guillermo’s wife cooks, but we were the same people as when we first met; even if, these days, I have had a secret pocket sewn into my jacket to allow me always to carry a notebook of my own.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 16B
– Use objects in the foreground to create black “wipes” for a continuous dolly shot and change the angle during the shot!!
Brick archways painted white and black ironwork.
Window is a CURVING SHAFT.
“Window” is really a curved shaft.
See EdTV in Austin with Robo.
–1645 Mary Kings Close Bubonic Plague
All residents are bricked in there and died of hunger and disease. No food. Local butchers were hired to quarter and dispose of the corpses. This happened on a street in Edinburgh (according to the frightful bartender upstairs) called “Mary Kings Close.” The residents of this street were infected with the bubonic plague. A decision was made to seal the street off with brick walls and let the people inside die from starvation and the cold. They weren’t given water or food
18:43 seated p. EdTV in the Paramount.
• GDT: This is me trying to find a look for the ghost in The Devil’s Backbone. And there were many, many different iterations of the story. There was an iteration where the ghost was the caretaker. It was an adult character. Because there was a version where they killed the caretaker halfway through the film with the lances, like a mammoth, and then he came back as a ghost. With many projects, you’re talking two or three years, and you go through many, many things that don’t make it. So this [above] was the rendering of the caretaker as a ghost, and it’s already veering away from a real corpse in that it’s really desiccated, and it has some of the features of the final ghost, with its black eyes and clear irises, but it is not yet porcelain.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 13B
The boy ghost from “The Devil’s Backbone” is semi-translucent.
–Rasputin’s rules are: No more lives for nothing. Our sole purpose is to feed the gods. R. wears dark glasses
–Throws something in the air and Hellboy catches it. When he looks back, he/she’s already gone.
–Rasputin died in 1916: cyanide, gunshots with steel bullets. He froze to death.
–I will not burn alone…”
–R. doesn’t have eyes. They’re made of glass.
–Art is always changing, the world just repeats itself…
–Morgue filled with frogs…
–Behind his “eyes,” R. has a web of tissue in constant motion…
–We’ve bred a brand new world of couch potatoes.
–He makes Liz angry so that she’ll explode.
–Rasputin 30-meg 100 of square miles of pine forest: ball of fire, black clouds, black rain. Glowing clouds June 30 1908.
• MSZ: So now, is this [above] The Devil’s Backbone? Because I noticed a similarity, but I wasn’t sure what you were illustrating.
GDT: At this point, I didn’t know exactly what the story of The Devil’s Backbone was going to end up being. In one incarnation or another, it had been with me since the 1980s, when I first wrote it. And then I attempted it again in 1993, after Cronos. So it was something I had been working on for over a decade. This is just one attempt, then, at the ghost of The Devil’s Backbone.
I had been toying with the idea of a translucent ghost for a long time. I wanted to do a heat distortion around the ghost, and I wanted to see the ribs, and the femur, and the pelvic bone. There was also this idea of it being framed by a door. I really don’t know if I was thinking of a teardrop shape, or a Gothic door that is out of whack in a crumbling building.
MSZ: How did you eventually pull off that translucency?
GDT: Ultimately we were able to do it fairly easily because by the time I shot the movie, CG was much more advanced. So what we did is we made the bones visible only when he crosses a haze of light, a little ray, a little beam of life. And they were able to animate a skeleton inside of the body.
MSZ: And the blood coming out of the ghost in the final film, was that also CG?
GDT: That came later. Originally I wanted the distortion in the air, like shimmering, and that’s what the drawing indicates. But a little later I came up with the idea that he had drowned with the injury to his head. The blood was easier to produce with particle effects.
I really wanted him to look like porcelain. Here [opposite] he is still a corpse, but then one day I said, “Well, why doesn’t he look like a broken doll?” Because it doesn’t have to make sense. And DDT, the effects guys, they really, really resisted the idea. They wanted very much to do a rotting corpse, and I understood them, as sculptors and all that, I understood their impulse.
MSZ: It goes back to an idea we’ve talked about previously, which is that every really great monster is beautiful. Grotesque and beautiful.
BLUE NOTEBOOK PAGE 145
* M.C. perhaps [?] with paint by HAND on the rock. Cave painting.
* Rain of burning ash in slow motion.
* Jose Maria Velazco’s slow journey through the sky until discovering the [?] there in the distance with a cloud of dust.
* The apparition of little Joey.
* Valley of Geysers/Holy waters in the desert M.C.