Guillermo del Toro‘s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein launches at the Venice Film Festival today and the filmmaker, cast and backers Netflix were at the film’s Lido press conference.
Oscar Isaac stars as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature (Jacob Elordi) to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
Oscar winner Del Toro was asked by a journalist — sitting a row back from Netflix chief Ted Sarandos — whether he would have liked more than a three-week theatrical run for his big-budget spectacle?
Del Toro quipped initially: “Yeah. I mean, look, look at my size. I always want more of everything,” before adding of the $120M movie: “To me, the battle we are going to fight in telling stories is on two fronts, obviously the size of the screen, but the size of the ideas is very important. The size of the ambition. Can we reclaim scale, and reclaim scale of ideas. It’s a dialogue, and it’s a very fluid dialogue. I’m very happy. You never know what’s going to happen….To reach more than 300 million viewers, you take the opportunity and the challenge to make a movie that can transform itself and that evokes cinema.”
Del Toro said of his inspiration for making the movie: “It was a religion for me. Since I was a kid — I was raised very Catholic — I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world.”
Del Toro was asked about the danger AI and technology poses to humanity: “We live in a time of terror and intimidation, certainly. And the answer, which art is part of, is love. For me, forgiveness is part of love and so many other things. And the central question in the novel from the beginning is, what is it to be human? What makes us human? And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time where everything is pushing towards bipolar understanding of our humanity…I think that the movie tries to show imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect, and the right we have to understand each other under the most oppressive of circumstances. It is very biographical to me, but it is, I think, biographical for anyone that tries to preserve their soul in the times we’re living in. And to me, artificial intelligence I’m not afraid of; I’m afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant.”
Oscar Isaac described the journey he had been on since meeting Del Toro about the part two years prior: “I can’t believe that I’m here right now. I can’t believe we got to this place from two years ago, sitting at your table [looking at Del Toro] eating Cuban pork; just talking about our fathers and our life too…It was like a fusion. I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well.”
Elordi said he poured his whole being into the role of the monster: “It was a vessel that I could put every part of myself into. From the moment that I was born to being here with you today, all of it is, is in that character. And in so many ways, the the creature that’s on screen in this movie is the sort of purest form of myself. He’s more me than than I am.”
At Netflix’s Tudum event earlier this year, Del Toro called the film “the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life,” adding, “Monsters have become my personal belief system. There are strands of Frankenstein through my films.”
Coming off his third Oscar win for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, another literary adaptation for Netflix, Del Toro’s Frankenstein also stars Mia Goth (X), Felix Kammerer (All Quiet on the Western Front), Lars Mikkelsen (The Witcher), David Bradley (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds).
Del Toro directed from his own script and produced alongside J. Miles Dale and Scott Stuber.
