Guillermo del Toro doesn’t just direct movies anymore: He listens to them. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Frankenstein, one of the greatest adaptations yet of the 1818 Mary Shelley novel, dug deep into his faith and spirituality to piece together his very personal take on the iconic story of a man-made monster.
“You work for nine to 12 months prepping a movie,” he tells MovieMaker in early September, a day after the Netflix film’s warm reception at the Toronto International Film Festival. “You have designed everything. You have designed the sets, the world of this and that — the most minute probe you have approved. What are you now courting? You’re courting the accident.
“You’re not courting perfection anymore. You want the movie to be alive, not a statue. So, you’re courting the flinch of an eyelid, the twitch of a hand. And that ain’t gonna happen if you don’t open yourself to breathe. And the way the movie breathes is by doing something.
“Somebody says, ‘We’re losing the sun.’ And instead of panicking, you go, ‘Okay, how can we light it? Bring candles. Let’s do this at night. Fuck it.’ And it comes out better.”
Moments of uncertainty are a voice informing del Toro of the direction the movie needs to go. It’s an awareness he learned from studying a cinematic master from another era, and a more free-flowing approach to the production process that he began flirting with a few years ago.
“I’ve studied certain filmmakers to a really deep degree,” he says. “One of them is Hitchcock, and I do believe that Hitchcock had huge control over 80 or 90 percent of the film, but that 10 percent that he didn’t have control on, he relied on the actors figuring it out. So even him, a master of control, understands his negotiation with the accident — he’s courting that. He’s courting Jimmy Stewart taking a step and falling, a tear rolling down Kim Novak’s cheek, or something like that. He’s open to things. And I think it’s about being present and listening. Listening.”
He says he first struck on his listening approach on the set of The Shape of Water, when he noticed the way actor Richard Jenkins lifted a cup to his mouth.
“I was talking to Richard. I said, ‘I love the way you grab that cup when you raise it and drink from it.’ And he said, ‘Did I do that?’ ‘Yeah,’” the filmmaker recounts. “He says, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I did.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you repeat it?’ He says, ‘Well, I’ll try.’ And I said, ‘You know what? Fuck it. Do whatever you feel is real and then I’ll learn to live with that.’”
The film went on to win four Oscars at the 2018 Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director. Del Toro continued his listening process while choreographing scenes for the 2021 noir Nightmare Alley, which also earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
“I had Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper. Do you tell them exactly where to stand, or do you want to see them come to the scene and then figure out where your camera is going to be?” he asks. “You have two beasts of acting. Do you want to put them in a cage, or do you want to loose them in the wilderness and then figure out where you’re gonna be? Much better to do it that way, so that’s when it started; I became more nimble.”
Before this shift in his directing style, del Toro says, “I was a pain in the ass.”
Oscar Isaac, the man he cast to play his Victorian-era rock star mad scientist Victor Frankenstein, was surprised by how fast and loose del Toro ran the 120-day, $120 million production.
“Because of the exquisite control of the way that his films look visually, I was expecting a much more constricted playground to work in,” he tells MovieMaker. “So, I just was going in expecting the parameters to be tight, and then within that you’ve got to find some vitality.
“I think what was surprising to me,” he continues, “and honestly, I think surprising to him, too, is that he allowed, as he says, the movie to say what it needs, to speak for itself, and to let go of control.”
There’s an interesting dichotomy between filmmaker and film: Victor is maniacally controlling, egotistical and manipulative in his pursuit of a scientific miracle; a man-turned-monster by the childhood trauma that informs the grand tragedy of his life. In his quest to conquer death, his disappointment with his creation poisons his own soul and destroys the lives of those he claims to love.
The horror in del Toro’s Frankenstein is man’s own folly, while the Creature suffers the sins of his creator and only becomes a beast through what it endures after being abandoned by a father too selfish to parent.
Del Toro, on the other hand, loves his characters, stories, scenes and tight-knit filmmaking family so much that he’s willing to let them go, in full faith they’ll come back better than he could have imagined. He begins his moviemaking process by telling his conceptual team to do whatever they want for a week.
“This is your only chance to tell me what you think of the movie, unspoiled, and I give them the first week as a trial. I don’t want to assign anything,” he says. “Show me what attracts you, and then we start the dialogue.”
“To me, the director as dictator makes no sense,” he adds. “The director as prophet makes sense.”
“The movie talks to you,” he continues, “but that doesn’t mean that the rules come out of only you and the movie. People can come and ask the movie, so to speak, if it’s okay if I paint this wall red, and you’re all, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So you know, it’s not you, it’s the movie. The movie talks. The movie absolutely talks.”
Isaac recalls early on in making Frankenstein when he witnessed the movie speak to del Toro through fog.
When the director noticed Mother Nature’s ambient gift was starting to lift, he immediately pivoted to a scene with a younger Victor, whose look had not yet been established, resulting in a frenzy to put on makeup and make some quick decisions that would impact the rest of the movie.
“Originally, he was going to have this white streak of hair. I looked at it and I felt this feels really familiar,” Isaac recalls. “So, I ran out to him as the fog’s going away and I said, ‘I dunno, what do you think? This looks a little like Sweeney Todd, don’t you think?’ And he just looks up and rips the piece off of my head and goes, ‘No, that’s Victor now. Get out there!’”
When del Toro shares his perspective of this happening, he doesn’t even mention the hair. It’s all about the mist, because there was a bigger picture at stake than Isaac could see from his vantage point.
“We were gonna shoot one scene with Victor at the end with the dogs, and he has the beard and the scraggly hair and all that. And he was getting dressed, and I come out of the hotel, and there’s a mist. And I run into the train and said, ‘Dress for the other scene, the one where you chase the monster with the gun into the snow.’ And he says, ‘But we haven’t discussed it.’ ‘Get dressed and get out, or we’re gonna lose the mist!’ And he comes out, we shoot it. He grabs the snow and goes, ‘Arghhhhhh!” and we say, ‘Print!’ and the mist lives.”
“You cannot do that in post,” he adds. “Not really. And the movie is better because of that mist.”
Passion of the Frankenstein
Frankenstein has been calling out to del Toro for most of his life.
The celebrated writer, director, producer and special effects makeup maven was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico in 1964, where he was raised in a strict Catholic household, and began shooting short films at the age of eight on his father’s Super 8 camera.
He attended the University of Guadalajara’s Film Studies Center, and worked through most of the 1980s as a special effects make-up designer — an art he learned by studying with Academy Award winner Dick Smith (Amadeus). Then he made the leap to writing and directing for television in 1988 with La Hora Marcada, a Mexican anthology series presenting horror and science fiction.
He also made 10 short films before his first independent feature, Cronos, debuted in 1992 to critical acclaim. That led to him being hired by Miramax to make his first studio movie, 1997’s Mimic.
Through many successes followed — including the three-time Oscar winner Pan’s Labyrinth and action hits Blade II and Pacific Rim — it took him three decades to find a studio to finance and bring his vision of Frankenstein to life.
Frankenstein and Forgiveness
His love for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster began as a kid while watching James Whale’s 1931 Universal adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel. He began to envision an adaptation that would be as colorful and grandiose as it was spiritual and intimate — and an allegory for the Holy Trinity of Catholicism.
“One of the greatest stories of father and son is the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, right? They are one and the same. But then God, at some point, said, ‘Why don’t I send my Son to go through pain and to go through death. What am I going to learn through that?’” del Toro says. “In theory, if you’re Catholic, Jesus died for our sins. And I think the creature resolves the chain of pain for his father, Victor, and there is a beautiful reflection about the role of pain as a learning tool of humanity.
“I think that’s the mission of Jesus coming to Earth and dying for us,” he adds. “And if you follow the Catholic dogma, it’s very moving, because he has not been briefed. That’s one of the things that the Church and many, many symposiums have to figure out. Because Jesus, who is supposedly of the same essence of the Father, of the same persona, he turns [during crucifixion] and says, ‘Why have you abandoned me?’ So the second instrument of wisdom is doubt.
“These are things that, as a Catholic boy, filled my head. And they were consubstantial to the myth of Frankenstein.”
The film also stars Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s most beautiful monster to date, and Christoph Waltz as the charming arms dealer who finances the creature’s construction. Mia Goth plays the wealthy merchant’s soulful niece, who is engaged to Victor’s loyal younger brother, played by Felix Kammerer. Lars Mikkelsen plays the ship captain who ties the story all together, discovering Victor’s mangled body on a frozen tundra while stranded with his sailors in the arctic near the North Pole.
“I think there’s also something, particularly in Catholicism, that’s quite forensic about the Christ figures that you see in the statues,” says Isaac when asked about the film’s religious parallels. “You know, the martyrdom paintings, there’s so much violence in them. There’s the grotesqueness of what that image is and yet it’s connected with love and peace and understanding.”
Out of the 60-plus film adaptations of Shelley’s story, del Toro’s is among the few that really dive into the Creature’s construction and animation. A significant chunk of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime follows Victor on a waltz around England to build his lab, collect bodies and perfect his science while a romance with his brother’s fiancée unfolds.
But when it comes time to reanimate the body in a lightning storm, it’s a reverse crucifixion, with clear Christian symbolism: a body with a wound on its side, hung on a wooden cross topped by silver thorns.
In the New Testament, Jesus suffers in this position to leave the world, but in del Toro’s Frankenstein, life enters the body on the cross, and the Creature is thrust into the world to suffer the sins of man and learn what del Toro considers to be one of life’s most important lessons: forgiveness.
“It’s never too late for forgiveness. That’s the main message of the movie,” he tells MovieMaker. “I think that act of humility and devotion and love and acceptance in the times we’re living in is harder to accept, because we live in cynical times and we cannot see vulnerability as a strength. But it is.”
Forgiveness is a central tenant to Christianity. Part of the Lord’s Prayer, passed down from Jesus to his disciples in the New Testament, reads: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
If we seek grace from God, we must be willing to give it to others.
“In metaphysics, the rule is very simple: What you give, you get; what you deny, you lose,” del Toro explains. “That’s a simple rule. When you give forgiveness, you get forgiveness. If you don’t like someone, you don’t like something in yourself that you’re projecting on someone.
“If you want revenge, they say dig two graves, right? When you forgive someone, you’re booking two first-class tickets to joy. You’re not giving that person forgiveness, you’re forgiving yourself from being unforgiving. It’s really not that difficult.”
But for the sake of drama, it needs to be difficult for these characters. Victor Frankenstein is, as del Toro puts it, “a motherfucker” in this movie. And though his Creature is pure divinity upon arrival, the blank, angelic canvas is quickly stained by his callous father and the cold outside world.
Guillermo del Toro on Ownership
“The monster kills people. It’s not accidental,” says del Toro. “The creature is truly monstrous, killing the sailors, killing the wolves, ripping the jaw out of the hunter. But he’s also capable of freeing the ship, which is what we all are.”
Filmmaking can also be full of conflict.
“I’m a good fighter. You don’t want to fuck with me,” says the director. “You don’t want to go to a Mexican standoff with a Mexican.”
He quotes some wisdom he picked up from David Cronenberg: “A filmmaker has to have two skins, a thin one for the art and a thick one for the business.”
Del Toro’s first Hollywood film, Mimic, was released by Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films, and he often clashed with the Weinsteins over creative control. He says he rallied the production to his side in the editing room, by sharing footage with the cast and crew every day.
“They said, not only do we like the guy, he cuts fast and he knows what he’s doing,” del Toro recalls.
The early morning ritual continued on the set of Frankenstein, where he invited anyone involved in the production to join him for two hours to watch him stitch together scenes they shot the day before. The practice cultivates the crew’s sense of pride, purpose and ownership in the project — while encouraging a free flow of information.
“As the years go by, you realize that the more you allow others to play, the better the game becomes,” del Toro says. “As opposed to you running with the ball and everybody clapping, to actually enjoy passing the ball and hitting a goal is a proper game.”
“My greatest reward,” he says, “is when somebody says to somebody in their home, ‘Let’s go see my movie, the one I made. It’s called Frankenstein.’ Whether it’s an actor or a crew member, it’s fantastic. They should own it.”
The Future
The question remains in our complicated human saga if we can learn to own our failures and forgive each other in real life.
“I think we often do and we often don’t,” del Toro says. “Look, the fact is, the great wisdom of the yin and the yang is that they take turns. Unfortunately or fortunately, nothing is forever; not the evil, not the good. The very nature of that cycle is that it will never stay put. The fight never ends. And the reason for that is that you have to be conscious forever. You never say, ‘Okay, now I cannot think or not feel.’ Feeling is very important.”
Del Toro has repeatedly made clear that his Frankenstein is about the human spirit and is not intended as a commentary on the threat of artificial intelligence becoming an uncontrollable monster of mankind’s own creation.
But when asked if he is concerned that AI can damage that human spirit, he replies, “Yes, of course I am, because I’m 60.”
“Now, if I was 20, I probably wouldn’t be,” he continues. “I remember being six and my grandmother saying, ‘Don’t watch so much TV. It’s going to ruin your brain.’ Beyond the transhumanism of it all, there is a notion that we are now using technology in some manner, and we are being phased out. A certain generation fades out and a new generation comes in, to which this magic is second nature.
“Is technology a tool, or is it an evolutionary step?” he ponders. “I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to know. If you start looking at the past as the only solution, you will miss the exit signs. You cannot drive with the rear view mirror, man. You gotta use the windshield.”
Isaac also doesn’t pretend to know what the future holds, but from his point of view, with AI on the cusp of disrupting our daily lives and the film industry, he opines, “It looks grim.”
“Within two to five years, there’s going to be quite a shift that happens,” he adds. “But I think I’m optimistic that perhaps personal experience, and the expression of personal experience, still has a lot of value. And perhaps a small group grows and grows that really finds value in human interaction. And as Guillermo’s talked about, there will be, as with the Romantics and Mary Shelley, this kind of rebellion where emotion is embraced, and there’s hope for art in it.”
But as the old saying goes, the future is now, and a story first published over 200 years ago has become the latest critically acclaimed Guillermo del Toro cinematic spectacle available on your TV, at the click of a button. And the director sees a lot through his windshield.
During his busy film festival Q&As since Frankenstein world premiered in Venice, he’s been teasing an “epic” stop-motion movie and reuniting with Isaac on a violent thriller called Fury.
“That’s the point. Film. Making,” he says while musing over the futility of worrying about a conceptual future.
“I remember when I had a particularly loud disagreement with Wesley Snipes on Blade II and I stormed off the set, he stormed off the set. I was calling my agent in Los Angeles under a staircase, and my producer, Patrick Palmer, comes in and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m calling my agent.’ That guy said, ‘Listen to me, you’re a filmmaker. Go make a film.’ I went, he’s right. Fuck it.”
Frankenstein is now in theaters and arrives November 7 on Netflix.
Main image: (L to R) Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Issac as Victor Frankenstein on the set of Frankenstein. Photo credit: Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.