And this was especially important for the king of the underworld because he is related to trees and all the stuff they don’t have anymore. The idea is that the culture that was given the forests is now living in an abandoned, rusty train station, next to a boiler room. And yet, in their nature, they’re still wood. They’re still the evocation of nature. The elves in Hellboy II are really a displaced tribe. Mignola and I always talked about the prince being like Geronimo, and the elves having received the shittiest reservation thanks to their deal with mankind.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 30A}

–URIA HEEP, CHEVY SLYME, Mr SPPITLETOE, NICKELBY, Mr PECKSNIFF, TOM PINCH, Scrooge, PIP, FAVISHAM, PICKWICK, SMIKE, Newman, Maggi GNOTI SEAUTON–

Bouderby.

GHOST

Liz’s invasion of H.B.’s space is reflected by an overwhelming increase in shoes and clothes that he’ll never wear.

–She confronts the public in order to save him.

King Balor.

–The clothes worn by royalty should be full of fabric, with several layers and shapes, too.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 32A}

A gnome, seen behind the expo of H.

–Jane Eyre has arrived at Sharpe’s mansion without [?], calm. Blessings and congratulations and good fortune for your future.

–The Crimson Peak mansion “breathes” for the children.

–The Alchemical principle of “dissolve and coagulate” as part of the supreme creation can be applied to the processes of the soul/body.

–Wink’s fight is restricted by the space between the columns of the T.M. and I need to use the vertical space above. The problem is that the roof is made of solid stone too. I’ll ask Steve to build a machine that grinds the flesh and bone of the cats in the T.M./ without blood

–THE NUMINOUS

–Leather cowl.

Angel in Castle in Budapest

–King Balor’s visual “motif” should be a circle of Light in the past and in the present.

–By what mythology do we live by? I believe that TAO, HOMEOPATHY, ALCHEMY and JUNG are the 4 pillars.

“The Bone Crusher.”

Mignola left me this card on the tiny desk in the Hotel Sofitel in Budapest after we finished the storyboards for the Golden Army sequence for the film HBII April 8, 2007. This week Dona, Scott, Mike and David came to discuss the proposal and he took 2 weeks. 3 million dollars in key departments. Ydig was lost and we must kill my beloved Wink in the middle of the film instead of doing it at the end.

NUMINOUS, INSCRUTIBLE, INDIFFERENT, MYSTERIOUS, RECONCILIATION, TRANSMUTATION.

–It is the power of art to reconcile us with life and to seduce us with mistery. Or perhaps the other way ’round

–“The decisive question for man is this: Is he related to something infinite or not?” Jung asked himself this in his writings and man combats the void and Cosmic indifference looking for the answer.

^{Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and del Toro in front of the final machine on the Troll Market set.}

GDT: Here [opposite] I sketched an angel I saw in one of the castles in Budapest, where we shot a lot of Hellboy II. I came up with the idea of a circle behind the king like the halo of a saint, and I came up with this design for the grinding machine in the Troll Market, which I just love.

Above is Mike Mignola’s drawing from when he departed Hellboy II in preproduction. He left me this little illustration saying, “Good luck!”

^{Initially green like the elemental, the Troll Market took on more diverse colors in this keyframe by Francisco Ruiz Velasco (ABOVE), eventually becoming a riot of saturated colors in the final film.}

General view of the Troll Market

GDT: Here [left] I’m trying to portray the Troll Market. I originally thought it would be these crooked places, and you could see small doorways next to giant doorways next to normal doorways, with little staircases next to normal staircases. I wanted to do it all in greens and golds.

MSZ: The market and the elemental [opposite] share the same palette. Originally, was there supposed to be a strong visual link between the two?

GDT: The original idea was that the other world was life, so I wanted to make it green, like nature, or red, like blood. But this is a very early idea. We still have a lot of green, but we eventually made it very lively with a lot of colors. What I did is I started evolving the movie toward a more controlled palette in the human world and an incredibly colorful palette in the fantasy world.

So Hellboy lives in the BPRD, which is essentially steel and concrete, straight lines. When you’re out on the street, everything is blue, greenish but with really cold lines. Then he sees the Troll Market and he goes, “Holy shit, you should see this.” He starts to understand where he belongs. Hellboy’s real life and his true nature are in these places.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 29B}

What are you? No, better yet—What am I NOT??

Elemental

Blind

Soft Xenon spotlights at half power, sweeping past the stone columns in the T.M. the whole time.

–ETCHED plaques inscribed with “TROLL” letters on the walls in the T.M. tunnel for the FACELESS CAVE BERSERKER with a lantern.

–A scene in which the victim wakes up with the vampire sucking at his arm, suddenly, without prior warning, like a hold, blind leech.

–Window from Polanski’s The Tenant in the T.M.

–Scene in which the corpse is identified: When you look at it—him, Please forgive me but—have you ever assembled a J. Puzzle? You concentrate on a piece. A finger, lip, brow, beauty mark, Anything you can. Avoid looking at anything else. Concentrate in the particular things, ignore the rest.

–King Balor has a crown of antlers coming out of his own skin.

–The prosthesis should be limited to the upper part.

MSZ: What project was this imperial owl guard for?

GDT: We ended up discarding it [opposite page, top right]. But it was actually a great design for the guards who were guarding the king in Hellboy II.

And then here [opposite, bottom left] is an idea for layering the helmet for Johann to be invisible. Both Michael Elizalde, who was makeup designer on the film, and I are amateur magicians. I’m a terrible amateur magician. He is a great amateur magician. We were talking about creating the helmet as an optical illusion, so we slanted the helmet, creating a lid, raising the shoulders. It’s a really great illusion. It really is a very nice design.