Guillermo del Toro’s latest opus is, in many ways, about birth. But during a talk at the Marrakech Film Festival in Morocco, the “Frankenstein” director turned his attention toward death.
“Why should you want to live longer?” he asked the crowd of festival attendees, journalists and film students. “I’m a big fan of death … I think death is really good. I’m certainly looking forward to it, because it’s the day you go, ‘Well, tomorrow I won’t have any problems.’”
In a nearly two-hour conversation moderated by Kim Morgan, screenwriter of “Nightmare Alley” and del Toro’s wife, the director discussed the influence of Romantic poets on his filmography, and his 50-year journey to adapting “Frankenstein.”
Del Toro recalled being 7 years old and watching Boris Karloff’s performance as Frankenstein’s monster. “That was religion. That was my church,” he said. “I immediately felt that what my grandmother used to feel about Jesus, I now felt about Boris. And I saw myself in him.” Four years later, del Toro stumbled upon a paperback of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” and he read it in one sitting.
His lifelong goal had been to make his own version of the classic monster tale, which he achieved this year with the Netflix epic starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. Now that the film is behind him, del Toro said he feels “postpartum depression.”
Speaking about the grandness of the film, del Toro said, “I’m Mexican, so emotion is big for me. I think emotion is very scarce right now. We have come to a point in civilization when emotion seems to be something you hide … We are in a horrible moment in which cynicism simulates intelligence. If you say, ‘I believe in love,’ you’re a fool. If you say, ‘I don’t believe in love,’ you’re a wise man. I don’t agree with any of that.”
In the spirit of the Romantic poets, del Toro said he wanted “Frankenstein” to “feel like an opera.”
“The Romantics took a huge step toward the possibility of ridicule,” he said. Then, more than an hour later, he circled back to the idea: “You have to be completely open to failure if you’re ever to experience success … you have to be ready to be ridiculous. So I’m ready to be ridiculous at all times.”
