^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 21A}

–Hellboy calls Liz to read her a letter he wrote. He goes for a coffee with Mayers.

–The story’s basic triangle in Hellboy is that of the student who falls in love with his teacher’s wife. Hellboy is, above all, a noble and primitive guy.

–How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his “black” hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy. Marisa, blonde, dressed in black, with two canes and yellow glasses. The children all in uniform, the school made up of arches, the empty, dead landscape. And God, like the sun, screws everything up, and completely burns everything He doesn’t.

–I’ve found that simply being with my father is 200 times better than speaking with him. My mom, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent. She’s my soul mate. Even in her sins.

^{The undetonated bomb, illustrated by del Toro in his notebook and as it appears in Jaime’s sketchbook.}

• MSZ: So now we come to this page [opposite] with the bomb from The Devil’s Backbone. You write, “How difficult it is to talk with Spaniards about The Devil’s Backbone. It’s easier for me to chat in English than in the Spanish spoken in Spain, the motherland. That said, I’m confident that the fable is universal. The characters are really, really iconic: Luppi with his ‘black’ hair, his little tie, and his handkerchief, is the old, impotent dandy.”

GDT: What is funny is all that went away. I wanted Luppi, like Professor Aschenbach in Death in Venice, to have black hair that he put shoe polish on, because I wanted him to be bleeding black, and because I wanted him to be really fastidious about his appearance. And that’s in the movie. He’s very fastidious. He presses his ties with books. But we made a budget, and we made a schedule, and we started breaking it down, accounting for the cleanup time with bleeding hair versus not-bleeding hair. And it went away.

The moment we started color-coding the movie, I realized Marisa’s hair needed to be red, not blonde, and that’s because the color of the school, the mosaic, and the doors, would look really, really narrow if you had a blonde. Then I said, “I’m gonna give her only one wooden leg, so I’ll give her one single cane.”

Everything evolves. It was the same thing with the kids. We started thinking about school uniforms. But with the reality of the Civil War, we found that uniforms would exist only in a private school. So out they went. And the only thing that remains is God and the sun.

The same with Hellboy. Here I wrote, “The story’s basic triangle in Hellboy is that of the student who falls in love with his teacher’s wife. Hellboy is, above all, a noble and primitive guy.” There was a time when there was a different story for Hellboy.

MSZ: What about this great image of the little boy with the bomb?

GDT: An earlier incarnation of the bomb was that I wanted it to be rotting in such a way that you could see the mechanism inside. And then you do research and realize that’s impossible, and you go, “Oh, all right.” The only thing that remains of that, which is a complete fantasy, is that it ticks.

MSZ: So what was the research that proved that you couldn’t show the mechanism?

GDT: We started doing the research, and the bombardment in the Civil War was done by the Condor Legion, which were German planes, and they were testing blanket bombing in Spain. And the bombs were very small. I mean, size-wise, they were very small. But I had this image in my head of the American blanket bombings and Dr. Strangelove, with a giant bomb and the dropper. So it’s inaccurate. The planes were not able to have that dropping system. And I said, “You know what? To hell with it. It’s a great image.”

What I explained to the designer is that the bomb is the mother of the children. The bomb is like a fertility goddess, and that is the way the children see it. It’s huge. And they put little flower pots around it. In that way, it’s like the head of the pig in Lord of the Flies, something totemic. And it’s the size they’ll remember it. The bomb is the size they’ll remember it. But it’s entirely inaccurate. There were no bombs of that size. I always say, “You can break the reality as long as you know.” If somebody tells you, “There were no bombs that size,” you can’t go, “Holy shit!” But you can say, “I know,” and it’s fine.

The opposite is true in Pan’s Labyrinth, where people say that the raids are inaccurate. But they are not. We did research that proves they were, and exactly at that time, and exactly in that area. The guy that gave us all the research had studied extensively. He was obsessed with Fascist campaigns. And he was not a guy on the left, with an agenda. He was a historian who was obsessed with the Spanish Civil War not from the side of the Republicans, but of the Fascists. And the fact is they won; the Republicans won some skirmishes in the north because they were using guerilla tactics, which were very, very new. It’s fascinating to me that some people say, “Oh, he took too many liberties” about Pan’s Labyrinth. But nobody has said that of The Devil’s Backbone, which took the most enormous liberties with history.

BLADE II

^{Concepts of Chupa’s death by Mike Mignola.}

^{Blade (Wesley Snipes) pursued by Reapers in the sewers.}

^{Concept of Nomak’s fight with the security guards by Mike Mignola.}

^{Concept of Blade, enshrouded in the mist of a disintegrated Reaper, by Mike Mignola.}

^{Nomak (Luke Goss) scouts the sewers.}

“BLADE II WAS DONE, partially at least, to be able to do Hellboy,” Guillermo readily admits. “And then because I loved the idea of the bad vampires, the Reapers. I mean, literally, my agent at the time called me and said, ‘Do you want to make Blade II?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do Blade II.’ And he said, ‘Do you ever want to do Hellboy?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, if you want to do Hellboy, you gotta do Blade II, because no one’s going to hire you to do Hellboy based on Mimic or Cronos.’ And he was absolutely right.”

Guillermo elaborates, “The way it happened was great because they wanted me to do Blade, but I never met with them. Then they called me for Blade II, and I liked Blade all the way, including the ending. Especially that phrase, ‘Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill!’”

Guillermo knew he could not take on Blade II (2002) without finding a way to dive into it heart and soul. He needed to balance the demands of working on a studio film with his need to express himself artistically, to explore the images and ideas that ignite his passions. At his first meeting with executive producer and screenwriter David S. Goyer and star Wesley Snipes, Guillermo proposed his notion for the Reapers, a new group of voracious supervampires whose mouths would split wide open, revealing horrors within.