Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 30B}

^{to help ensure an actor could play Hellboy.}

Another version of Hellboy drawn just to kill time or so I don’t forget.

Agoura Hills on 25/11/2001

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 18A}

^{One of the challenges del Toro faced on Hellboy was minimizing the ape-like qualities of his protagonist}

–Domu, he’s mugged in the subway and kills every one of them there.

–She and him are able to do the fastest reading of books and files.

–It takes I blackout to go back to the Middle Ages in any city anyplace.

–“Fuck you. I have more taste on my dick.”

DAOD —Dad please get me out of here. I’m so, so tired. Get me out.

–You have a choice: You can believe her or simply think that she’s having a total nervous breakdown. Either way her mother will help her calm down.

H.B. running

–Climbing the rose trellis.

You’re telling me that something reached out through that fireplace and pulled them through the hole?

–I only know what I’ve been able to piece together over the years. He opened the fireplace. But it was already there…

Smoke. Dissipated with wings

^{By making the character more human, the love story between Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair) would be believable.}

MSZ: The evolution of how you approached Hellboy is interesting. I remember there’s a note in this notebook where you say initially you were thinking of doing Hellboy as CG, and then maybe having close shots of a real person. But, of course, that evolved and that wasn’t how you approached it.

GDT: Well, that shift came out of a conversation with Jim Cameron. I was saying to him, “I want to create a giant puppet like Mighty Joe Young,” because I love gorillas, and I thought, “Hellboy could be kind of King Kong–ish—a big, ten-foot-tall brute.”

I visited Rick Baker, and I saw the controls of Mighty Joe Young, and I said, “It’s absolutely possible.” I asked Jim, “What do you think?” And Jim said, “That’s a great idea, except there’s one thing you won’t be able to do.” And I said, “What?” “The love story. Because you can make the girl kind of like the monster, but the really human love story, that’s not going to play.” I said, “That’s absolutely right.”

So I went back and talked to Rick. He said, “Well, there are these two guys, Chad [Waters] and Matt [Rose], that are obsessed with Hellboy, and they want to do a test for you where he’s Ron Perlman.” And I always wanted him to be voiced by Ron regardless—I always wanted Ron to be the face of the character. So they did that bust on the stairs at Bleak House [above right], Matt did, and it was clear to me it was going to be a prosthetic job.

^{An important part of this process was finding star Ron Perlman in Hellboy’s features.}

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 19A}

^{Figuring out how to make the creature’s limbs changeable.}

One-year embryo

Sammael as a fetus

Reversible arms for Sammael.

“Reversible” legs for Sammael

Fingers can turn in any direction

Mouth with outside tongue.

^{Wayne Barlowe created the first successful concept that addressed this need by incorporating a hidden bone spur into the demon’s forearm,}

^{which Mike Mignola then depicted in his signature style.}

^{One of del Toro’s main concerns was the design of Sammael.}

GDT: The two creatures that have taken the longest to figure out in my films are Sammael and the plant guy on Hellboy II. They took the longest. Sammael went through—I’m not exaggerating—probably thirty or forty iterations, at the very least. Full on, “Let’s go this way… No, no, let’s go that way.”

The elements I wanted were always there: bone, limbs that can change, a really long tongue. And here [opposite] I was just doing some anatomical sketches. The thing on the bottom right is the tongue. I was playing with the idea of limbs that could switchblade out of themselves. It’s not very clear in the rendering, but the bone is in the middle of the forearm, so you can extend the forearm. And I was trying to figure out how he would roll the tongue inside of the thorax. Like, how much space the tongue would occupy, if I could put human fingers at the end of the tongue. Silly stuff, but I was trying to figure it out.

MSZ: It’s great. And then are these little nonsensical annotations mixed in with Spanish?

GDT: Yeah, yeah, I liked them because I’ve always been in love with the idea of the Necronomicon.

MSZ: So, where does this fit into the design phase? Does it start with you doing something like this and then bringing it to your design team?

GDT: Yeah. This was done before I had Wayne Barlowe, or Mignola, or anyone.

MSZ: So this represents the beginning of the process.

GDT: Yes. In general, the more notes in the notebook, the less of a team I had.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 38A}

^{For a while during preproduction, Sammael had horns…}

–Kroenen’s room. A dirty mosaic. Filled with pipes and black hoses

MOUTH on his “hand”

Structures made of bars on every street and in all the cavities of the buildings.

HB.

TWO OR THREE NIPPLES ON ONE SIDE

Sammael must be asymmetric like a crab or a malformed foetus. He has 2 eyes on one side and a big ass on the other one. A small claw on one arm

He should be an ornate creature much like H.B markings. Call him “brother”

He has double-jointed legs if Mike Elizalde thinks so.

Bigger claw with a Haialai basket of boney tissue.