Not every bold idea planned for Hellboy made it into the final 2004 film. “Originally, the idea for Hellboy was that the whole movie was going to be told with When Harry Met Sally–type of interviews,” Guillermo explains. “So people would be saying, ‘I saw Hellboy over here. I saw him jump,’ and a kid saying, ‘I saw him on the rooftop.’ Now everybody does it, but back then it was 1997, ’98, and I thought that was a great idea. That was the first thing we cut out of the shooting schedule because [the studio executives] didn’t understand it.”
Even after being narratively domesticated, Hellboy provided fertile ground to plant seeds from earlier unmade projects. In the notebook pages, we see Guillermo drawing heavily on design elements from his unrealized film adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness (from the novel by H. P. Lovecraft), Mephisto’s Bridge (from the novel Spanky by Christopher Fowler), and The Left Hand of Darkness (a version of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas).
In Hellboy’s villain Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), the steampunk aesthetic of The Left Hand of Darkness was given a Third Reich twist. The studies Guillermo created for Mephisto’s Bridge yielded Kroenen’s face, devoid of eyelids and lips. And from the nightmarish Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness, Hellboy’s demon Sammael (Brian Steele) was birthed.
Amid simulated blood splotches and arcane symbols reminiscent of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, Guillermo explored design elements for all Hellboy’s main characters. He was particularly intent on rendering both Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his sidekick Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) vivid and—for all their peculiarities—human. Most notably, Guillermo strove to evolve Hellboy from the creature Mignola devised into something Ron Perlman could play, drawing him as a hundred-year-old Victorian, an elegant creation in long pants, or cloaking him in a U.S. Civil War–style leather coat. He wrote in the notebook’s margin: “Hellboy has lots of cats running around everywhere.” All these embellishments, Guillermo relates, were “my ways of finding Ron in there.”
Many of the notebook’s concepts made it into the film, while others were abandoned due to budgetary concerns, production logistics, or in the interest of gaining a PG-13 rating. In one case, though, Guillermo jettisoned a fish mouth intended for Abe Sapien because a horrified Mignola offered to give him any four original Hellboy comic panels if he would abandon the notion.
In the end, Hellboy shares the signature trait of all Guillermo’s English-language, studio-sponsored films—Guillermo himself, who throws his entire self into every film wholeheartedly. “Everything about me is consistent,” he observes. “People have a saying in Mexico, ‘The way you eat is the way you dance, the way you dance is the way you fuck,’ and you continue like that.
“I haven’t made eight movies. I’m trying to make a single movie made of all those movies. To me, it’s like Bleak House. I’m building room by room, and you have to take it as a whole in a way. Does that mean that maybe Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth make Mimic a little less terrible? I think so. Or the echoes of those may make Blade II more interesting? I think so.
“The one thing I can say is that, inarguably, I may go three, four years without shooting a movie here or there, but everything I’ve done I’ve done on my own terms. I’ve never had to stray from what I believe is right.”
The notebook containing del Toro’s notes on Hellboy (Notebook 3), opened to pages 15A and 15B, which contain an early iteration of the demon Sammael with wings.
Basil Gogos’s portrait of Hellboy as a Victorian gentleman, commissioned by del Toro.
GDT: What is funny is that he is dressed like a nineteenth-century gentleman, and he is supposed to be a hundred years old. Mike plays with the universe of Hellboy, and I was fascinated by the fact that Hellboy can be in a samurai context, or he can be in a Victorian context, and there’s no explanation given. I just like the idea that his sideburns are like Victorian sideburns. There’s no explanation. I just wanted to do it. I also wanted to find a way to work with the stumps of the horns because Mike does them so quickly they are like goggles on top of his head. I was trying to figure out, “Are they jagged? Are they… ?” This was the first approach, where they are rolled, but that didn’t work. We ended up grabbing a piece of ivory, breaking it, and doing those surfaces.
MSZ: In the notes on the page, you mention Basil Gogos—that you had hoped he would do a painting of this.
GDT: He did. It’s upstairs at Bleak House. It’s a funny story. I had not met Basil or contacted him. It was the early days of the Internet, so I went through the white pages, and I just found, like, four Gogoses in New York. There was a “Gogos, B.,” and I called, and he picked up, and I said, “Are you Basil Gogos?” He said, “Yes.” And I commissioned the painting. At the time it was so expensive for me. I don’t know how I paid him.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 19B
Del Toro’s illustration of Hellboy at at advanced age.
–During the [?] they disconnect the phone, but she has the cell phone so he hears her whole plea. They cut the power off. They lock the windows and the doors, and open a window to blow out a candle.
–The tape is about the adults’ failure and absence
–Someone discovers one of them trapped in one of the mousetraps. It’s bleeding!!
When I made this portrait of Hellboy, I thought it would be used as the basis for an oil painting by Basil Gogos, but it looks as though this isn’t going to happen. Yesterday I thought that Mignola might be able to do the Monte Cristo comic because his style lends itself very well to the Gothic. I think the mechanical hand might be very interesting visually. What would happen if I proposed to do Mephisto with Ted McKeever. I think it might be a good idea.
Señor HB at age of 101 yrs.
Del Toro thought to cloak the character in a duster that would hide the dissimilarity of square human shoulders to the sloping arms of Mike Mignola’s original character. Mike Mignola, Hellboy’s creator, endorsed the idea by drawing Hellboy in the long coat.
This drawing is also important in the sense that it was right at the time where I felt, “It’s going to happen.” So I drew Hellboy because I felt, “Well, I gotta learn to draw him before I make the movie or I won’t be able to understand him.” So this was an attempt.
The idea was implemented in the costuming for the film.