The opposite is true in Pan’s Labyrinth, where people say that the raids are inaccurate. But they are not. We did research that proves they were, and exactly at that time, and exactly in that area. The guy that gave us all the research had studied extensively. He was obsessed with Fascist campaigns. And he was not a guy on the left, with an agenda. He was a historian who was obsessed with the Spanish Civil War not from the side of the Republicans, but of the Fascists. And the fact is they won; the Republicans won some skirmishes in the north because they were using guerilla tactics, which were very, very new. It’s fascinating to me that some people say, “Oh, he took too many liberties” about Pan’s Labyrinth. But nobody has said that of The Devil’s Backbone, which took the most enormous liberties with history.
BLADE II
Concepts of Chupa’s death by Mike Mignola.
Blade (Wesley Snipes) pursued by Reapers in the sewers.
Concept of Nomak’s fight with the security guards by Mike Mignola.
Concept of Blade, enshrouded in the mist of a disintegrated Reaper, by Mike Mignola.
Nomak (Luke Goss) scouts the sewers.
“BLADE II WAS DONE, partially at least, to be able to do Hellboy,” Guillermo readily admits. “And then because I loved the idea of the bad vampires, the Reapers. I mean, literally, my agent at the time called me and said, ‘Do you want to make Blade II?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do Blade II.’ And he said, ‘Do you ever want to do Hellboy?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, if you want to do Hellboy, you gotta do Blade II, because no one’s going to hire you to do Hellboy based on Mimic or Cronos.’ And he was absolutely right.”
Guillermo elaborates, “The way it happened was great because they wanted me to do Blade, but I never met with them. Then they called me for Blade II, and I liked Blade all the way, including the ending. Especially that phrase, ‘Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill!’”
Guillermo knew he could not take on Blade II (2002) without finding a way to dive into it heart and soul. He needed to balance the demands of working on a studio film with his need to express himself artistically, to explore the images and ideas that ignite his passions. At his first meeting with executive producer and screenwriter David S. Goyer and star Wesley Snipes, Guillermo proposed his notion for the Reapers, a new group of voracious supervampires whose mouths would split wide open, revealing horrors within.
This reflected Guillermo’s desire to present a vampire unlike anything seen before. He’d been mulling over this notion since his childhood in Mexico, watching films and reading about vampires in legends and folktales from around the world, including the strigoi of eastern Europe. From the first, Guillermo displayed a morbid fascination with the biological minutiae of how the vampire actually functioned—how it infects, how it feeds, how it survives—peering closely at what others might avoid or gloss over.
In his twenties, the ideas developed further, as he fashioned Cronos around a most unlikely vampire. “The vampires in Blade II came from me figuring out vampirism for Cronos, and also for a pitch that was not successful for I Am Legend,” Guillermo explains. This was years before the 2007 version that was ultimately produced starring Will Smith.
“I went to Warners,” Guillermo recalls of his I Am Legend pitch, “and I met with a junior executive, first of all, which means that no one else ever heard the pitch. It didn’t travel on. He said, ‘Arnold [Schwarzenegger] is attached as a star.’ And for me, that is the opposite of the novel because Richard Matheson makes his hero the everyman, makes a point of making him a common man, because that’s the monster. He is the monster to the vampire race because he could be any man. He’s not meant to be extraordinary. And Arnold is, in every way, extraordinary. So I am a guy who just did a movie called Cronos, a twenty-eight-year-old twerp from Mexico, and I do a pitch for I Am Legend, and I say, ‘I don’t think Arnold is right.’ Not exactly the way to get the job.”
Fortunately for Guillermo, the work he did to develop a new kind of vampire for I Am Legend was exactly what he needed to bring a fresh take—and monster—to Blade II. Guillermo saw the challenge of the Reapers in Blade II as a series of surprises. “You think you know the Reapers. You know what they look like, and then the jaw opens. It’s a completely new shock. Then when we see them in the sewers, they’re upside down. Every time, they evolve. I think that it’s very important not to make the creatures a single entity, but have aspects of them that you discover. You need to really play with perspective and have layers that open and reveal something else.”
At that first meeting with Goyer and Snipes, Guillermo laid his cards on the table. “I said to Wesley Snipes, ‘I don’t understand Blade at all because, if I met those vampires, I would like them. You take care of Blade; I’ll take care of the vampires.’ And that’s the way the movie was shot. I never told Wesley what Blade would do or not do, because I didn’t know. I was like, ‘Whatever makes you tick. I don’t understand you.’ But Nomak, Luke Goss’s character, I directed with all the love I could, as sort of a Frankenstein’s monster, tragic. For me, Nomak is the hero of that movie.”
Unlike Mimic, where he submerged key aspects of his nature to try to dance to Hollywood’s tune, Guillermo deliberately made Blade II into the kind of film that would have delighted his teenage self. And so Blade II is exuberant, vivid, unrestrained. Feelings are intense, actions full-out, colors comic-book lurid.
The same goes for his Blade II notebook. A pasteboard of youthful enthusiasm, these pages chart the evolution of the Reapers from their earliest incarnation many years before into a spectacular, near-final design for Blade II. Also featured are snatches of dialogue, discarded vampire guard uniforms, colorful tattoos, Gothic architecture, drawings of the Prague sewers, suggested action sequences, and thoughts for composing shots.
In the end, only the smallest percentage of what Guillermo had in mind was put into Blade II. But seven years later, he and Chuck Hogan collaborated on The Strain trilogy of novels, painting a grim vision of the vampire apocalypse Guillermo had been meditating on for decades. “I’m very surprised and happy that they were successful,” Guillermo says of the books, “because I wrote them with Chuck, I wrote them for our own pleasure, and I wrote them because I wanted to put all that stuff on paper.”
Concepts illustrating how a Reaper disintegrates when hit with silver nitrate- and garlic-infused bullets by Mike Mignola.