MSZ: And what is this color piece over here [above]?

GDT: That is a preproduction painting I did to show what I wanted to happen to de la Guardia when Gris bites him and drinks his blood. I wanted it to be all in blue and red, but I didn’t know how to do it with the budget we had.

MSZ: The colors are reminiscent of the contrast of the red and the blue in Hellboy, of Hellboy and Abe Sapien.

GDT: I normally mix a warm color with a cold color. I think red and blue is a color scheme that is a lot more 1990s at this point. But I also like to combine cyan with gold or amber, because there is a lot of gold in cyan. And if you use the right shade of amber, there’s some green in it, so they can be complementary colors.

MSZ: Something I noticed in this artwork—in both the poster and the color pieces—is the signature.

GDT: The signature is my take on Will Eisner’s signature. I’m a big Will Eisner fan, and I tried to combine his name with my name, because you know “Will” and “Guillermo” are the same name. And I used to add that little comic book bubble, too.

^{Excerpt from the manual that describes how to operate the Cronos device.}

^{These pages, designed by Felipe Ehrenberg, influenced del Toro’s approach to his future notebooks.}

GDT: These pages are from the diary in the film, which were drawn by Felipe Ehrenberg, who did a fabulous job. I’ve always been obsessed with the props in my films looking the right way, and this prop was perfect.

MSZ: Each film of yours seems to have a special book.

GDT: I try to put books in all of my movies so I can keep them. This particular one also has patterns I ended up using in my diary.

MSZ: Yes, I wanted to ask about that because the Cronos book prop predates the diaries you acquired in Venice and your new approach to recording your thoughts in the notebooks.

GDT: I love the contrast of the crimson and the sepia, which comes from medieval and Renaissance diaries. I tried to adopt that in the first Hellboy notebook.

MSZ: And what about the storyboards [opposite], which depict the alchemist making notes in the book?

GDT: These are for the sequence in the movie where we show the alchemist in his workshop. Originally, we were going to go to a monastery to shoot the scene. But we didn’t have the money to pay for transportation to go to a separate location. So the final alchemist scene, if you want to call it that, ended up being shot against a backdrop in the same house where we shot the rest of the movie. And all we had was a piece of fabric and a stove. So it was much less elaborate.

MSZ: You’ve spoken, too, about admiring Vermeer and his compositions. There seems to be a strong resonance here, particularly in this first frame of the storyboard.

GDT: I wish! We tried to do this sort of beam of light but we realized that we couldn’t, because you need distance for the light to travel to produce that effect. The light needs to have enough of a “shoot,” and you need to have atmosphere on the set—to put a lot of smoke in the set—to get that “ray of light” effect. I wasn’t able to do it here. I was able to do it when Gris encounters the sunlight upstairs in the attic, though, when all the little holes create pins of light. The lights on that set were very, very high.

^{Storyboards by del Toro of an unfilmed scene introducing the alchemist who originated the Cronos device.}

^{Concept by del Toro of the final scene where Angel de la Guardia and Jesús Gris face off in front of the massive sign at the top of the de la Guardia family’s building.}

^{Gris (Federico Luppi) and Aurora (Tamara Shanath) walk along the sign in the final film.}

GDT: This [above] was done in preproduction, and it was supposed to represent what I wanted for the sign in the finale. I wanted these guys to fight in front of a huge, broken clock, to show that Gris is immortal.

Also, in the drawing, Gris’s hair is black. Originally, the idea was that he would use black shoe polish to paint his hair, and in the end the front of his hair would be all white and the back would be all black, with tears of black streaming down his face. But that would have meant a lot of time in the makeup chair, which we didn’t have.

MSZ: Is there any association between the stopped clock and the gears of the Cronos device?

GDT: Yes, of course. Cronos is about immortality and how we want time to stop. All these characters are seeking immortality or fearing it, but the only immortal character, in a sense, is the granddaughter who simply does not care about it. Therefore she is immortal.

Also, I love gears as an image. In Cronos, they are literally time and mortality—the transition between life and death. But I like that they can mean many things: the universe as a mechanical model; the cycle between good or evil; or between creation and consumption. It’s a huge machine, precise but nonlinear and made of flow and flexibility. But like with anything big, if you zoom back enough, there is order in chaos and chaos in order. Gears symbolize that, amongst other things.

For instance, in Pan’s Labyrinth they signify history. And, at the same time, very literally, the fact that the captain is trapped inside his father’s watch—there are these giant gears behind him in his office. In terms of the story, they come from the mill, so it’s logical, but symbolically, he keeps obsessing about this watch, and time, and being remembered, and being important. So gears mean different things in the movies I’ve made.

RESURRECTION

^{RON PERLMAN}

^{A sketch of Ron Perlman as Hellboy from Notebook 3, Page 44A.}

IT WAS TOWARD THE END of the second year of the biggest malaise of my life—which was both artistic and personal. It was a midlife crisis of dynamic proportions. Whatever creative fire had once driven me had long since been extinguished. I wasn’t even answering the phone. Then, a parcel arrived in the mail. It was a parcel that, for me, would come to have near mystical dimension. Inside was a script and a handwritten letter from an unknown Mexican filmmaker asking me to participate in a little experiment that was to be the first film in his oeuvre—Cronos. Up until then, I had been doing esoteric projects that I thought nobody in the entire universe had even noticed, particularly my minor contributions. Then, all of a sudden, this beautiful handwritten love letter arrived describing in minute detail the most subtle nuances of my work in these little fringe projects. I was stunned.

I began reading the screenplay while working out on an exercise bike at the Hollywood YMCA; a fairly prominent indie filmmaker was reading over my shoulder. Aside from complaining that I was reading too slowly, she commented about how strange this little screenplay seemed. What was it and where did it come from? And I said, “Well, it’s the weirdest little vampire movie I’ve ever seen. But it’s also the smartest. Never in a million years would it ever get greenlit in Hollywood. And just for that reason alone, I’m going to fucking do it.”