DVD Verdict Interviews Guillermo Del Toro, Director of Blade II

Judge Bill Gibron

July 29th, 2002

Guillermo Del Toro is passionate. He is an outspoken, gregarious, and highly opinionated madman. He has a geek's mentality on everything and anything and an obsessive love for all things terrifying. One of the leaders in the current crop of horror revisionists, he is known for his visceral, organic take on the macabre and the beasts and beings that bring goose bumps in the dark of night. US filmgoers got their first mainstream taste of his primordial panache with the 1997 giant insect film Mimic, featuring Mira Sorvino and some of the slimiest mutant bugs in the history of monster movie mania. But he was already an acclaimed international special effects artist and filmmaker before that, having made a name for himself and a huge splash at Cannes with his 1993 vampire fable, Cronos. 2001 was a busy year for the Mexican born director. Along side the release of his personal, haunting ghost story The Devil's Backbone, he oversaw the creation of Blade II, sequel to the surprise 1998 hit which marked the return of Wesley Snipes as the half man/half monster urban vampire hunter. Not one to mince words, Del Toro has fervent beliefs on many subjects, from DVD to CGI, from Terry Gilliam to a certain atmospheric Fox sci-fi show. With New Line Cinema's DVD release of Blade II (in a double disc Platinum Series version) on August 30th, Del Toro took time out of his busy pre-production schedule for his next film (the cult comic Hellboy) to talk with DVD Verdict and discuss his involvement in the Blade franchise, his ideology of horror, and DVD production.

DVD VERDICT: One of the things that you mentioned in a recent interview was that Kolchak, The Night Stalker was a favorite television show of yours...

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: YES, yes...

DVD VERDICT: Did that have any lasting influence on you, later on in your career?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Yes, I think it was huge. I remember when I was doing Mimic, when Mimic came out, some people in the reviews were saying "It has some of the X-Files creepiness" and I was...well...I don't know how because I've never seen the fucking X-Files. And then finally I watched half an episode a couple of years later and I understood. I mean I've never seen the X-Files complete, not even an episode, but I realize they were doing Kolchak. And what Mimic had was influenced by Kolchak. I really truly thought that the conception of the creatures amongst us was, back then, a very postmodern (even before postmodern) but it was a very postmodern approach to classic mythology. You know I particularly remember as does everyone who watched the series, the episode where Kolchack has to go into a car junkyard and sew shut the mouth of a living zombie. To put a zombie inside a wrecked car in a junkyard in an urban environment is such an incredible feat of genius and not any less genius than putting a vampire in Vegas. So, it's truly, truly...it was a truly inspired creation and it definitely had a lasting influence on me.

DVD VERDICT: I also read that your are, and to use a word we throw around a lot today, a big DVD geek. So are you pleased with the way the DVD package of Blade II turned out?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Oh absolutely. We worked a lot and we worked really hard for it to turn out that way. I think that as a person who buys DVDs, I know how much I hate to buy a DVD and find that it's not special, that it contains the movie and a couple of little extras that mean nothing. That someone didn't even bother to put together anything original and are just giving me the DVD and the electronic press kit and making it pass for special features. I think that for a DVD to be special, someone has to truly conceive an almost immersive experience on the media that you're giving them. We tried to do that. We tried to do that by little details like having me host personally a couple of segments, and say "welcome to these...my name is Guillermo Del Toro and I welcome you to 'X' and here is what we are going to see." By having a very relaxed, but very thorough tone on the commentary tracks. We also are very politically incorrect about most everything. We don't give you the official corporate sanctioned view of making the movie. (Laughs) We're very open about New Line not wanting me to do the movie at the beginning. We're very open about what scenes don't work and why they were taken out of the movie and into the deleted scenes. We laugh out loud at our mistakes. We see a couple of shots we don't like and call them crappy. And I think this is truly...this whole thing creates an environment of this is truly an all access DVD with behind the scenes on creating a creature like nothing you've ever seen. Never, ever.

DVD VERDICT: This was the sequel to an established movie franchise. As you said, New Line was obviously not banging at your door, wanting Guillermo Del Toro to direct Blade II. How did that change your approach to the movie?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: I wanted to do it...to change my set of tools on my registration as a creator, for myself and for New Line to understand that I was the perfect guy to do the sequel. I'm going in, I worked...I truly, TRULY worked my ass off into preparing the movie. It's probably the movie where I have had the least amount of downtime, ever. I went into pre-production immediately after wrapping The Devil's Backbone. I was working the screenplay while I was prepping The Devil's Backbone, while I was shooting The Devil's Backbone and then climbed on board with both feet and started full blown pre-production just after wrapping the shoot. The way to demonstrate that I was the guy to handle the sequel was to do it with a lot of passion. And a lot of care. I think that. Every single shot in that movie was done by first unit, by me. There are no second units. There are no action units. There are no insert units. Everything was first unit. I wanted very much for the movie to feel handcrafted. In the same way that I want the DVD to feel that it's a DVD where you're being hosted by a human being and not a corporation.

DVD VERDICT: On the Blade II commentary track you said it was really important to have a good collaboration between yourself and Wesley Snipes, yourself and (writer) David Goyer. Was that a key to the success of the film?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: YES! Yes, because I don't understand Blade. The character of Blade is a cipher for me. The character of Blade is a character that I have no familiarity with. I love what he does, but I don't know the mechanisms that make him do it. You know? I think he is, basically, a living weapon. And in talking to Wesley I understood a lot of the samurai code and a lot of the warrior code that he has as a background for Blade. And how he has Blade...has the code of serving and being loyal to his master, which is Whistler and the human race. And how he is, basically, ruthless with anything else. And how he doesn't think, he DOES. How he is a character that is, never the less, highly intelligent and very tactical. All these things were nuances that I had no idea existed in the character. As probably no one does outside the creator of that character which is Wesley Snipes and David Goyer. I think they are the ones that hold the keys. But whoever holds the keys, Wesley has the keychain. I tell you, that guy has Blade down to a science.

DVD VERDICT: I know Wesley is very protective of Blade. While he adapted it from a comic book...it's his creation and he's very protective of it. I noticed that in his commentary track and in other interviews I've seen. How did he communicate this to you?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: I think the philosophy behind the fights, behind the choreography, is thoroughly the philosophy that Blade has that is...it's not a martial arts film. It's martial arts combined with street skill. Wesley says that if a particular style of fighting doesn't work, and if there is an empty bottle of beer, he'll crush the empty bottle of beer on your head. And if the beer didn't do it and there's an Uzi on the floor, he'll empty the Uzi. (Laughs) It's all about getting someone down. Also, Wesley taught me something very beautiful in that when we were choreographing and I was choreographing the cameras, he would always tell me make sure that you capture the fluidity of the movement here. Because it is very important for the audience to be able to appreciate the fluid movement of a martial arts move. It's not only about cutting. It might look like the movie is always cutting, but sometimes, it because the camera is moving so fast to capture all the energy of a particular martial arts move. The rhythm of the movie is frenetic. We tried to make the movie brief, fast, unassuming, and entertaining. You know, why call popcorn caviar (Laughs) when you know it's popcorn?

DVD VERDICT: In the Blade II commentary you also talk about looking toward the comic book style in the film. What were some of the tricks you used, some of the little ways you managed to convey that kind of comic book mentality to the film?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Well, the first thing is the sense of design in the movie. It's much more comic book than the first one. The first one was more reality immersed. And it also had a lot of postmodern feelings. It was visually more akin to a Terminator movie or a Kubrick universe or this or that. In this movie, the sense of design on the suits and the weapons and the sets is far more outlandish and far more...closer to the sensibility of comic books. Everything we designed for the movie was a big statement. You know...the guys in their shiny suits, with their shiny armor, and their pistols with blades on them, or four stake shot guns (Laughs) it's just everything is a bit...overblown in the design. Then second to that, the camera angles that we invested an enormous amount of time and money into getting, digitally, are fully, FULLY comic book images. Like Blade flying over the motorcycle before decapitating the guy...

DVD VERDICT: Which I didn't know was done CGI until I listened to the commentary...

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: ABSOLUTELY, and that's the funny thing. There are about 20 percent of the effects in the movie that look like digital doubles, but there's 80 percent of them that you had no fucking idea they were digital...

DVD VERDICT: And that's where I am as the viewer. I'm sitting there, I'm watching the movie. I go back and listen to the commentary and I say, "You've got to be kidding me," because I had no idea. It was done...it was seamless. And I know you also discuss the use of the "L" camera, or the "liberated" camera. You had some trepidation in parts, and at the same time you thought it was successful. Was it something you would use again in the future?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: I am already preparing for it in Hellboy. And the whole point of the thing to me is, I remember being a child and watching Harryhausen movies. I never ever in my entire life as a spectator, believed those monsters were real. But they were very expressive. And they were real in my mind. I always knew they were puppets, that they were stop motion animation figures, cause I read Famous Monsters of Filmland. But that didn't detract from me enjoying it. And I find that special effects, very often, people try to make them perfect and take all the edges off. What I worry about is not how perfect they are, but how expressive they are. I worry about the visual effect. If it makes you go "WHOA!" it doesn't matter if you believed it was real and it was perfectly integrated. If it makes you do that little noise in a movie like this, then it's a good special effect.

DVD VERDICT: As a practitioner of old school physical effects (with your previous work in film) is there something about CGI that puts you off a bit, causes a little internal dilemma? I know I miss that kind of "physical effects" style in movies.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Well I think that the combination of both works very well in Blade II. And that's why to me it was very important on the DVD to include what I believe is the single most important document in the creation of a creature ever put together. You go from concept sketch in my notebook, to clay figure, to mechanisms to outer skin, to operation on the set and the final film. And then on top of that we show you how we did the transition from that puppet to the digital Reapers. To get that, it's very educational for future filmmakers because you get to see that it's not all about CG. It's about selling the reality of the creature as needed. And to me, the only way you can fool the eye is by using modern techniques and old techniques. Everybody thinks that CGI is the golden egg laying goose. It's not. It's just another tool. You do not...no matter how shiny a screwdriver, you don't use it if you need a hammer. You have to use the right tools for the right job. It's like, with Hellboy. With Hellboy, there are some instances where we're doing matte paintings. There are other instances where we're going to do foreground miniatures. (Yells) OH WELL. NO ONE DOES MINIATURES ANYMORE? Who cares?

DVD VERDICT: I totally agree. I look at the current crop of films were everything is computerized, and I go back and look at a film like Brazil. I see all the tools that Terry Gilliam used to realize that world and I think, well, maybe if he had computers back then, it wouldn't be as special as it is...

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: NO, no no. The FLIGHT SEQUENCE? You can not fucking do that with computers. You cannot have the interaction of the wings and the clouds, the way that's done. I totally agree with you. Special effects are an art, as intricate as any other. I for one am a very respectful, studious person of the craft, and I try to experiment with it. You know, even if sometimes it doesn't succeed, you at least get the sense, hey, he was not stepping just on safe ground, he was trying something.

DVD VERDICT: How important was it for you, with Blade II, to be able to advance, or play with the vampire mythology?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: I think that more than the mythology, because the mythology is not a big deal in Blade II, as it wasn't a big deal in Blade. I think Goyer is not about mythology. Goyer has this ultra-scientific rational approach to vampirism. Which is cool by me. But then, if we're going to do that, the science of choice for me is biology.

DVD VERDICT: So it was more a chance to show the biology of horror?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Absolutely. When I was preparing the movie, I said to (producer Peter) Frankfurt and Goyer that if I had my way, the movie would be called Blade II: The Anatomy Lesson. You know because I really wanted to show you how things work from the inside. One of the deleted scenes that I really miss, if you listen to it, was the guy describing how everybody that gets bitten by a vampire dies of a heart attack, because his heart gets swallowed, and strangled by the vampiric heart. And I think that those little insights were very beautiful things. They didn't make it to the movie, but they were in the way of the rhythm.

DVD VERDICT: In the commentary, you discuss the homages you make to people like Hitchcock and personally, I thought what was very clever, Frank Frazzeta. Do you do this on purpose, or is it something instinctual in the filmmaking?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: No, totally on purpose. So much on purpose that in the breakdowns for special effects shots, they were called "The Frazetta shot" or "The Jack Kirby Explosion" or "The Doctor Manhattan Explosion" from Watchman, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of preparation that goes into these little homages. (laughs)

DVD VERDICT: And as you said earlier, your next film is Hellboy. Is it going to be difficult to go from one comic book style film to another one?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: No, no, I don't think it is. Actually, Hellboy is a universe and a set of characters that I know perfectly. I need no guide to wander into the jungles of Hellboy. I know all those characters by heart, and no matter what (Hellboy creator) Mike Mignola says, I AM HELLBOY!