On the otherworldly Toronto set of ‘Frankenstein’ with Guillermo del Toro: ‘This is my Mount Everest’
But evidence of the iconic creature’s ghastly birth is everywhere: a cavernous laboratory inside a gothic water tower, green glass columns casting eerie light, a Medusa sculpted on the wall and splattered (fake) viscera littering the concrete floors.
Del Toro is in a nearby building, directing another key scene of the film: a reimagined North Pole, where an ice-trapped ship and a horrifying confession and confrontation will bookend the tale.
“This is my Mount Everest,” says del Toro of “Frankenstein,” which is based on the classic 1818 novel by Mary Shelley about humans playing god. The book has fascinated del Toro since he was a child. “It’s been like this all of my life. So I either hit the jackpot now or I never will.”
He also calls the story “my messiah,” no small praise for a man who was raised as a devout Roman Catholic and studied at a Jesuit school.
Del Toro and his team have been at work on “Frankenstein” for several months. Wrapped in a thick cardigan (it’s hot outside but cold in here), del Toro is munching on mangoes, a gift from a crew member. He’s filming at Cinespace Studios near Cherry Beach, a favourite workplace for him, in a shoot, including pre-production, that will total 10 months. (In 2025, a year from this interview, the facility will rename four of its sound stages “The Guillermo del Toro Stages at Cinespace Studios,” at a ceremony where Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow presents him with the key to the city.)
Del Toro is talking about why he’s always wanted to make his own film version of the novel (full title: “Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus”), which has been adapted for big and small screens numerous times, including riffs like “Edward Scissorhands,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Poor Things.”
The story of monster maker Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his stitched-together humanoid figure (Jacob Elordi), called the Creature in the film, has been an obsession of del Toro’s for most of his life because he sees himself in the monster. Neither Isaac nor Elordi is on set the day of the Star’s visit, but co-star Mia Goth, who plays love interest/conscience Elizabeth is spotted walking across a parking lot, dressed all in black.
In this behind-the-scenes photo, a camera crane is set up in Victor Frankenstein’s lab.
“When I saw ‘Frankenstein’ as a kid, I identified with the monster as somebody whose instincts of presence were not normal,” says del Toro, who is bearded, bespectacled and burly. “Because I was a very, very thin blond kid. I felt really like an alien because I was very pale, I was very shy, I didn’t like sports. But then as I grew, I identified with the monster as a teenager, then as a son, then as a father like Victor — and now it’s basically a movie that is talking about fathers and sons, so to speak. For years I’ve been saying ‘Pinocchio’ and this one are like twin movies.” (Del Toro’s darkly gorgeous “Pinocchio” came out in 2022, winning the Netflix-produced film the Oscar for best animated feature, the first time the award went to a streaming service.)
“Look, I’m 60 years old. I have spent, I think, three decades as a filmmaker, as a director. I really think I have less time left than ever before to make movies. And I think it has to be a ‘bucket list’ thing for me to do it. Because if you’re going to be an absent father, an absent husband, an absent friend, if it’s gonna take up your life, it should be on your bucket list. Fortunately, I was blessed with the fact that the relationship with (Netflix co-CEO) Ted Sarandos was that of a patron. He basically said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Pinocchio’ and ‘Frankenstein.’”
Monster maker Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) admires his creation (Jacob Elordi, on the cross) in “Frankenstein.”
Del Toro first tried to make “Frankenstein” 20 years ago at Universal, but it never came to fruition. He also changed how he wanted to approach the story, although he was always in love with Shelley’s ornate original tale, which she wrote at 18.
“Originally, I just wanted to make it about Victor being a father and the Creature being a son. And then I thought, well, what if Victor’s own father was a monster? What makes you human — and also inhuman?”
Del Toro said he’s read the book so many times it’s now “ingested” in his DNA.
“We certainly are doing chapters that have never been done before. We follow a lot more closely the spirit of the book, where the Creature has a journey, becomes articulate and questions his creator. And we do have the framing device of the icebound ship, which is in the book” — and also at Cinespace Studios as a 130-foot replica — “I’m never interested in the modernization of any myth at all.”
“The thing with Jacob is his essence. He has such purity and he has such beautiful eyes that, by the way, work as well in innocence as they work in rage. And when he is enraged in the movie, he is absolutely formidable. And on top of that, he is sculpturally like a Giacometti. He’s a perfect shape.”
The horror titan’s team
Despite the fidelity to Shelley’s plot and prose, the movie feels like it could have been made by none other than del Toro.
“He’s one of a kind,” said J. Miles Dale, an Oscar-winning Toronto film and TV producer who’s worked with the director for more than a decade. “You actually don’t need to see the credits to know you’re watching a Guillermo del Toro movie. He’s his own genre, if you want to call it that. He’s obviously a visualist. He’s a painter, and every shot is a painting. He’s so meticulous in his design.”
Jacob Elordi stars as the Creature in Guillermo de Toro’s “Frankenstein.”
Dale highlights one “big, huge set” in particular as emblematic of this attention to detail.
“We built the exterior of the tower lobby at Markham Fairgrounds,” he says, gesturing around the Cinespace grounds from his chair.
“That interior lobby here, the lab over there, the holding cells where the creature is over there … we built like six levels of this thing.”
Del Toro has many dedicated people working behind the scenes to achieve his grand aspirations. Two of his closest associates are Tamara Deverell, the art director and production designer, and Kate Hawley, the costume designer.
The Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated Deverell helps keep del Toro’s wondrous visions grounded. “I’m more sort of reality based — the history, the period accurateness is more my realm. And Guillermo is into the fantastical … I find that combination of me reeling him in a little bit and him taking me a little further into the fantastical is a really good aspect of our relationship.”
There’s one facet of the novel Deverell is particularly drawn to. “It’s written by a woman,” she says. “Part of the story is about the folly of man and men playing God, and men’s inability to nurture and understand nature.”
Also on the set is Emmy-nominated Hawley, who says she first met the director while working on Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” in her native New Zealand. Del Toro hired her on the spot after peeking through her design books and determining the pair shared a “visual language.”
“When you work for the first time with a director, it’s kind of like taking clothes off on a first date or a second date,” Hawley says with a grin. “It’s a very intimate relationship, trying to understand what they’re wanting and listening to that. People laugh at me and go, ‘Oh, it’s about putting the microchip in their brain and downloading.’ I wish I could download what’s in their head!”
She’s worked with del Toro long enough now to have a good sense of what he’s imagining.
“He always taught me to look at the scale of the architecture and echo that in the garments that I create,” says Hawley. “With ‘Crimson Peak,’ it was very much the house as a living thing, so that was echoed in the costumes and clothes. I’m doing the same here. The background is always important in Guillermo’s films. They’re part of the colour palette, they’re part of the environment. So I try and do what I can there.”
Hawley said many aspects of the production are spontaneous.
“There’s a lot of invention on the spot. Not everything can be planned and everyone’s got a level of skill and talent where they can create stuff. It’s really exciting.”
However the team does it, it works. A year later, the finished version of the film will prove to be the most visually stunning adaptation of “Frankenstein” yet.
Taking it to TIFF
It’s now September 2025, and del Toro is doing press at a Toronto hotel, basking in the warm reception “Frankenstein” received at its official North American premiere two nights earlier at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The movie proves to be a revelation. Rare for such a grim tale, del Toro’s vision of Victor Frankenstein and his monster is as a happy act of creation rather than horrific bodily desecration. Victor jumps naked out of a bathtub when he has a eureka moment and figures out how to give life to the Creature. His piecing together of body parts, collected from the battlefield remains of soldiers killed in the Crimean War, is set to music more appropriate to a formal dance than a dark night of the soul.
“Most people would shoot it like a horror sequence,” del Toro says. “I shot it with a waltz. And it’s a joyous, joyous sequence. Because if you have somebody telling you all his life about giving a concert, you don’t shoot the concert like a funeral. You shoot it like a concert.”
He told composer Alexandre Desplat to write music that made the visceral body-assembly scene a place of happy connections, not horrific ones.
“He understood it, although he wanted to go a little weird. I wouldn’t let him, because there’s nothing weird about it. It’s a straight case of joy, you know? What am I when I’m directing? I’m happy! I am completely inadequate in every other social aspect of my life. I’m a failure. But I’m very happy in the carnival. I’m a freak!”
Did del Toro feel a responsibility to reinvent or rehabilitate the image of Frankenstein and the monster, to save them from the many campy portrayals Victor and the Creature have endured? The question prompts a poetic damn-the-torpedoes response.
“Every person is born to sing one or two songs,” he says. “That’s it. And when you know which song you have, and you know it’s in your key, in your vocal range, it’s gonna be new if you sing it with conviction and purity. When you need to sing that song, go ahead and do it, and let people like it or not.”
He might have more “songs” in him than he gives himself credit for. In this same interview, he muses about possibly doing crime stories or animated films for his next movie projects, taking a break from sci-fi and horror.
Asked to interpret moviegoers’ reaction to “Frankenstein,” his most personal film ever, he grins and offers this assessment.
“You know, I think the movie provides two things: renewal and emotion. The book ends in this beautiful romantic note of melancholy and loneliness as the monster drifts away on an ice floe. I kind of evoke that, but with one element more that I think is necessary in these times. I won’t spoil it, but, you know, go watch the movie!”
