The initial concept for the massive grinding machine in the Troll Market.
–Video Feed in the truck—
–“Heavy, heavy load” Tadpole V.
–Reverse the dialogue in a pair of scenes. Give Liz dialogue and share the “FOCUS”—H.B. and Johann.
Water Kick USE the CHI
–The water and the fire flow freely. They’re not any one type and they’re shapeless
Wink hits Abe.
–Wink uses the magic/hand to “bring” H.B. and Abe to him and then push them.
–Little bits of glass are scattered when Wink crushes him. They’re scattered around his head like little pieces of TEXAray.
–Corkscrew turn around the same shot and break a 3-D patch on the Butcher Guard??
–I will kill everyone in this room.
Abe Sapien
and then lifts him off the ground, smacks him against the floor, the column, and the wall.
–Bolero in Wink’s hand.
“Abe vs Wink”
Vent.
If possible, the smoke should come out here.
Angle to hide his head. —
Black metal. Blue steel type
Design of Liz’s necklace
Johann
–I LOVE YOU SQUIRREL, you and my GIRLS.
The idea of putting steel around columns is for the Troll Market, because we found this abandoned quarry, and that’s where we shot the Troll Market. I didn’t like how flat the columns were, so I said, “Let’s put iron clamps around them and have the iron bleed outside so that they look a little more textural.”
Then you see the final proportions of the helmet of Johann. We came up with the idea of a funnel so that the actor would have a little more leeway. Still, it was a killer. The first or second day, John Alexander, the actor, wore it; we removed the helmet, and it was like a crown of thorns. He had punctures with blood. He said, “I cannot wear it like this anymore.” We had to create some padding. And we had to hire a second actor because John could only wear it for so long.
Then, in the middle of the page, Wink is hitting Abe. I never filmed this particular moment. We tried to do it but couldn’t. It was going to be a big fight between Abe and Wink, but part of our budgeting process was losing it. So Abe never fought, really. We had Wink putting his hand on top of Abe’s head, when he says, “I’ll take care of this,” and then he goes, “Oh, dear,” and we cut.
Some of del Toro’s notebook pages include a critical mass of near-final designs. This page features strong concepts for Mr. Wink [Brian Steele], Johann’s helmet [John Alexander], and Liz’s necklace [Selma Blair, with Ron Perlman as Hellboy].
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 25A
(1) Closed
[?] the opening
(2) Open
The [?] below is the jaw
Contains eggs or a cocoon
The plates on its shoulders open.
They open like an egg toy.
–For the moment, as of today, we’re 99% in Rot.com with 73 positives and 1 negative, what joy for P.L.
–If Abe realizes that Liz is pregnant before even she does, then it would create a situation a little earlier
Princess c/c with set.
Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called “märchen.” These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the “Logic of the Fairy Tale.” In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are. What I’m trying to do is create a more complex moral dilemma. The faun’s ambiguity [continued page 231]
The plates express emotion
–Negative space in the ribs pops open
Red Hot gears and hot oil lubricate the insides
“Amber” column with interior illumination.
–Scene of the princess escaping when they discover about the tooth fairies and then, once they’re in the box, Abe touches her belly. That’s when he says that he knows. The trick is how to [?] HB.
NOTES FOR P.L.’s AUDIO commentary.
On the right [opposite] is one of my favorite designs, which is Cathedral Head. It says, “The man with the city in his mind.” It was one of those designs that just came out fully formed in my head. I did a sketch, and it’s very similar to the way it came out in the movie.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 25B
would be unusual in “marchen.” These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as “types” in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these “types” can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story
In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe. Once man began to live in an organized way, with a “social contract,” an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man’s inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man’s soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by fauns and ogres and fairies
“The man with the city in his mind.” 11/1/06
MY DAYS WITH DEL TORO
MIKE MIGNOLA
An early sketch of Rasputin from del Toro’s third notebook, Page 10B.
I’M A LUCKY BOY. I first worked with del Toro on Blade II, sometime in late 2000. We’d met a few years earlier when he was first trying to get Hellboy up and running. We’d stayed in touch while he took all kinds of meetings—meetings he kept me out of because (as he told me later) I would not have survived them. He was almost certainly right. Anyway, when it became clear that this Hellboy thing was going to be a hard sell, he took on Blade II and brought me along. I’m pretty sure this was mostly to see if we could work together, on the off chance that Hellboy would actually happen. It certainly was not because I knew anything about being a preproduction artist. Though I served no real function (my title was “Visual Consultant”), he brought me with him to Prague to scout locations. It’s that trip that I’ll always remember: discovering the wilds of eastern Europe together for the first time; wandering through endless ruined (and yet somehow still functioning) factories; wondering if (or when) our very scary driver was going to pull over into the woods and shoot us; hunting for a really good Kafka puppet (I still maintain that he should be wearing a hat); descending into the Prague sewers (which we discovered are coated in semi-transparent living goo); and just laughing like crazy about a whole lot of stuff I can’t repeat here.