Guiller­mo del Toro: ​‘Per­ver­si­ty is always in the eye of the beholder’

The man who adds a dash of dark whim­sy to his every project returns with a Cold War-era fan­ta­sy saga about the roman­tic pair­ing of a mute clean­ing lady and a humanoid fish crea­ture. The Shape of Water is Guiller­mo del Toro’s remark­able tenth fea­ture, and it has been a long and wind­ing road since his extra­or­di­nary debut, Cronos, in 1993. We speak to the icon­ic direc­tor about his fond­ness for mon­sters, old movies and under­dog outsiders.

LWLies: How do you define a monster?

Del Toro: Rather than defin­ing a mon­ster, let me define the mon­ster movie. A mon­ster movie is a movie where the mon­ster is not hid­den or hint­ed at, but dis­played. It’s right there in front of you. Not only as a crea­ture that is a part of a sto­ry, but as the sto­ry itself. And also, this mon­ster sym­bol­is­es the cre­ative act of mak­ing the movie. There’s part of the final prod­uct that is like, ​‘Look, we made this gill man, or this Franken­stein, or this killer alien’. And in turn, this affects the design of the movie as a whole. The design work in The Shape of Water is a bulls­eye. You have the out­er core – cin­e­matog­ra­phy, pro­duc­tion design, wardrobe, colour palette and all of that. And right at the cen­tre, is the mon­ster. Every­thing else serves the mon­ster. That’s a mon­ster movie.

What oth­er types of mon­sters are there?

The real mon­sters are peo­ple who are per­verse about their func­tion in life. Like a politi­cian who is sup­posed to serve the peo­ple, and serves any­one but the peo­ple. A priest who is sup­posed to preach peace and solace and wis­dom, and is an agent of cor­rup­tion, bru­tal moral­i­ty and destruc­tive guilt. These are mon­sters for me. An army that doesn’t pro­tect a nation but defends the inter­ests of the rich. A mon­ster is also an extra­or­di­nary crea­ture who exists above nature, or below nature. Those are the mon­sters for whom I have empa­thy. Unlike a politi­cian, these char­ac­ters sug­gest the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there are more things in heav­en and earth than your imag­i­na­tion can con­jure. Yet the moment they step in, what you see is what they are. Giant goril­la. Giant lizard. That’s what they are.

Do you find there’s a dif­fer­ence when you’re writ­ing male and female characters?

I write it like a human. It’s a human char­ac­ter who is known to me through 53 years of exis­tence. I try to put myself in a place that is not my own. It’s empa­thy. Always. I write for the bad guy, Strick­land, with great empa­thy. I think he is less smart than he thinks he is. I wish he was smarter. He is in above his head. All he under­stands is bru­tal­i­ty. But I write from my own expe­ri­ence. There’s a sequence where he has a con­ver­sa­tion with an army gen­er­al. I’ve had that con­ver­sa­tion with stu­dio exec­u­tives. With Sal­ly, I see every­thing she has done. I look and lis­ten, and I try to cal­i­brate the text for her. It’s like writ­ing a song for a singer. If you think of ​‘Over the Rain­bow’, it’s as if it was writ­ten for Judy Gar­land. But if it’s writ­ten for Tom Waits, it’s different.

The recre­ation of 1962 – what were your pri­ma­ry research sources?

I looked every­where. Main­ly from the late ​’50s to the ​’60s up to the death of Kennedy. It was cru­cial that the sto­ry hap­pened pri­or to that date, even if it was months or days. It’s the moment where Amer­i­ca crys­tallis­es the notion of a dream that nev­er came to be. It’s post-war, mon­e­tary abun­dance, a jet-finned car in every garage, TV din­ners, TV in the liv­ing room, self-clean­ing kitchen, wives with hair­spray and pet­ti­coats, the Space Race. There is faith in the future of Amer­i­ca, and that’s what every­one in the movie talks about. Then Kennedy is mur­dered, and Viet­nam con­tin­ues, and the dream dies. In fact, the dream lives on, but as a ghost. It haunts the nation. It fans hubris. It’s that ghost which is telling peo­ple we should make Amer­i­ca great again.

Was the main loca­tion – Elisa’s apart­ment she shares with Giles – always above a cinema?

Yes because I always want­ed the light and the dia­logue to come through the floor. I thought that was real­ly neat. She always has these movies play­ing. She’s silent, so I’ve got to give you an idea of what’s show­ing in her head. And I’ve got to show that she makes eggs, mas­tur­bates, shines her shoes and dreams of water. She loves musi­cals. She has very few pos­ses­sions. Those things end up defin­ing the characters.

Was there a par­tic­u­lar film of Sally’s that made you think to cast her? I, per­son­al­ly, am a fan of Hap­py-Go-Lucky.

Yes, that was key. The three key movies for me were… Actu­al­ly, the first one is not a movie. I saw the series Fin­ger­smith, the BBC series, which is remark­able. She falls in love with a woman and they have beau­ti­ful lov­ing sex, and I thought, I love the way she did it. There was no tit­il­la­tion. There was no sparkle in the eye. It’s just that she likes to have sex with a woman, and that’s the way it is. It’s a piece of char­ac­ter, it’s not the point. I love that. And I love the way she han­dled it. I didn’t want to do a bes­tial­i­ty movie that was per­ver­sion and school­yard gos­sipy sali­va­tion. They just love each oth­er. It doesn’t mat­ter that he’s an amphib­ian man or any iter­a­tion of the oth­er. The impor­tant thing is that they fall in love and they make love. Period.

Then I saw her in Hap­py-Go-Lucky and I thought she can achieve this state of grace. She is bliss­ful, but alive. Then I saw her in Richard Ayoade’s Sub­ma­rine, where she’s a sec­ondary char­ac­ter. The way I cast actors is not through the way he or she deliv­ers lines, it’s the way he or she lis­tens to the lines being spo­ken by oth­ers. Or by the way they look at the the oth­er actor. I just thought, this is it. If I cre­ate a great crea­ture and she looks at it like a man in a rub­ber suit, the film dies. If she looks at it like a crea­ture, it lives. She had such a mas­sive crush on the crea­ture. For real. Sal­ly, not the character.

It’s strange for you to say ​“bes­tial­i­ty” as, on a cold tech­ni­cal lev­el, there is that ele­ment to the story.

It’s not a term that’s present. There’s no sex­u­al act in the world that is per­verse unless you make it per­verse. I think there’s much more per­ver­si­ty in a Vic­to­ri­an kiss on the cheek than in a cat­a­logue of posi­tions involv­ing peo­ple who care pas­sion­ate­ly for one anoth­er. Per­ver­si­ty is always in the eye of the behold­er. It goes beyond ques­tions of good or bad taste. They’re obvi­ous­ly not graph­ic. They’re done with such love and such belief that it’s the right thing to do. There is no oblique emo­tion­al tit­il­la­tion. And it’s the same way that I treat mon­sters or appari­tions – ​‘Look, there’s a ghost! Look, there’s a faun!’ They make love. It’s up to you to be scan­dalised or not. It says more about the per­son scan­dalised than the act itself when some­body says, ​‘That sex­u­al­i­ty should not exist.’ Why not? It’s there. It does exist. Why is it not human? It’s a posi­tion I sim­ply do not under­stand. Unless it’s a non-con­sen­su­al, vio­lent act or forced. If it’s not that, I think every­thing is. Sex is like piz­za. Bad piz­za is still good. And good piz­za is great.

In the past your films have had this erot­ic ele­ment to them, but it’s rare that you’ve actu­al­ly used a sex scene.

I would agree. There is a sex scene in The Devil’s Back­bone, but it’s very twist­ed and painful. There’s a beau­ti­ful sex scene in Crim­son Peak between Edith and Thomas which I like a lot. It’s dif­fer­ent here, because to show a female char­ac­ter mas­tur­bat­ing… some men have a lot of trou­ble with that.

Your film offers quite a damn­ing indict­ment of het­ero­sex­u­al relationships.

Yes. The idea for me is that there is more pow­er play and more sub­mis­sion in the rela­tion­ship between Strick­land and his wife. He’s screw­ing her and cov­er­ing her face. Zel­da and her hus­band are in sta­sis. She hasn’t talked to him in years. She just cooks. The ques­tion for me is: can we find beau­ty in the alter­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties that life offers us?

Jack Arnold’s Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon feels like an ana­logue to this film. Though it feels unique in the annals of mon­ster movies for the human char­ac­ter to insti­gate a romance with the mon­ster. She’s nev­er scared.

There’s a dif­fer­ence between say­ing the mon­ster got the girl and the girl got the mon­ster. That’s what hap­pens in this one. She res­cues him. The first time she sees him he has a wound on his left hand side, and is bleed­ing. Lat­er, she has a wound in the exact same place. They res­cue one anoth­er. To me, the image that is key in Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon is the mon­ster car­ry­ing the girl when she’s uncon­scious. But that is an image of hor­ror. In The Shape of Water, that same image reflects a sense of great love.

Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon is a very scary film.

Yes, when it attacks the guys in the tent, it’s bru­tal. But also, what I love about that movie, is the moment when the crea­ture is swim­ming right under­neath Julie Adams. That is beau­ty. Pure cin­e­mat­ic per­fec­tion. I fell in love with Julie Adams and the crea­ture when I was six. I watched that film as a kid – and I couldn’t put it in to words at the time – but it’s a home inva­sion movie. The crea­ture is hap­pi­ly liv­ing in his lagoon, and this bunch of hood­lums come in, invade his house and then kill him. For me it’s almost a metaphor for the transna­tion­al inva­sion of South Amer­i­ca. That why I have the ori­gin ele­ment in this movie.

Shan­non is almost iden­ti­cal to one of the guys in Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon.

That was the idea! The idea of the film was to depict a super-secret gov­ern­ment agency, but not show it through the eyes of the sci­en­tist or the peo­ple in charge, but those who clean the toi­lets. It is impor­tant that the peo­ple join­ing togeth­er to save the crea­ture are all invis­i­ble. Sal­ly Hawkins is a woman, a mute and a clean­er. Octavia Spencer is invis­i­ble because she’s African-Amer­i­can. Giles because he’s a clos­et­ed gay design­er whose time of peak artis­tic worth has passed. And the Russ­ian guy can’t even use his own name. His job is to be invis­i­ble. Then you see Ken and Bar­bie and Ken is a dom­i­nat­ing, bru­tal asshole.

At the begin­ning of the film there’s a cin­e­ma own­er and he’s com­plain­ing that no one goes to the cin­e­ma any more. Is there a com­men­tary here?

That’s more or less what was hap­pen­ing in 1962. Fam­i­lies weren’t going to the cin­e­ma because the TV was on. I’m try­ing to say that we’re in exact­ly the same world. The movie is about today. Racism, sex­ism, gen­der issues, dis­crim­i­na­tion, every­thing. They had it in ​’62 and we’ve got it now. It’s still pret­ty good if you’re a WASP, but the minori­ties – no mat­ter who they are – they’re the ​“oth­er”. You also had the Cold War, which is back now in a big way. And also you had cin­e­ma, which was con­sid­ered dying. And it real­ly isn’t. It’s transforming.

I saw it as the mon­ster expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing new. Which might now be con­sid­ered a rare thing in Hollywood.

Yes, he doesn’t under­stand what he’s look­ing at. The scene was a lit­tle longer. I want­ed to have him point at the screen and ask, ​‘What is this?’ in sign lan­guage. But for some rea­son, when he signed, I felt the guy in the suit. I couldn’t risk it. If you do it wrong once, the whole illu­sion is destroyed. The one per­son who actu­al­ly enjoys the movie is the crea­ture. Every­one else is sleeping.

The Shape of Water is released 14 Feb­ru­ary. Read our review.