As Guillermo Del Toro prepared to premiere his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a passion project he’d been trying to get off the ground for years, at the 82nd Annual Venice Film Festival, Del Toro was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter. The director talked about why, ever since he was 7 years old, he had been obsessed with making a Frankenstein adaptation, saying:
“Honestly, it’s sort of a dream that was more than that; it was a religion for me since I was a kid. I was raised very Catholic, and I never quite understood the saints. Then, when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that that it needed for me to make it different, and to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world. Now I’m in postpartum depression.”
Del Toro also discussed what led to his decision to make the film with Netflix, saying:
“To me, the battle we are going to fight in telling stories is in two fronts. Obviously, there’s the size of the screen, but the size of the ideas is very important. The size of the ambition, the size of the artistic hunger that you bring to cinema is a matter of can we reclaim scale and we reclaim scale of ideas? Can we challenge ourselves to that? It’s a dialog, and it’s a very fluid dialog.”
Finally, the director briefly stated how he feels about AI’s potential future in filmmaking. “I’m not afraid of AI,” he said, “I’m afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant.”
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein will be released in select theaters on Oct. 17th before releasing on Netflix on Nov. 7th.
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