Guillermo del Toro on Blade 2, Working With Kojima, and Lots of Red Bull

Brian Altano (IGN): From Kronos to The Shape of Water to Frankenstein, it is an honor to be talking to the maestro of movie monsters, Mr. Guillermo Del Toro. It's very nice to meet you. Thank you for coming.

This is the 20th anniversary of Pan's Labyrinth, which makes me feel old. I don't know how you feel about it.

Guillermo del Toro: Older.

Brian Altano (IGN): So, you have been making crazy monsters in beautiful worlds for the longest time. You started off inspired by things like Universal’s monsters, [like the] Creature from the Black Lagoon. What is it about that era that spoke to you then, and continues to resonate with you now?

Guillermo del Toro: I think I was a monster kid, which means that the creatures are important in the storytelling of these fairytales, because I think they're fables or parables or fairytales. And it has to be creature-centric for me to be attracted to it. Everybody says, "Oh, don't show the creature." I think, show it, please. I'm seven years old. I want to see it. I want to love it. I want to see how well designed it is. I want to discover the whole world that comes in with the creature design. Creature design ushers a different reality. So those are important. When Milicent Patrick — who designed the Gill-man for Creature from the Black Lagoon — designed the Metaluna Mutant on Island Earth, when they gave her an opportunity, it came from outer space. She designed the creature. She has a signature, and I can see what her design signature is. And as a kid, it's like meeting a movie star. You say, "Oh, this was Jack Pierce designing this creature. This was Dick Smith. This was the Wesmers. This was all the makeup heroes of mine."

Brian Altano (IGN): So when you saw the sort of less tangible horror, which it's like a fog or a mist or something like that, you're like, "That's cool, but I want a monster."

Guillermo del Toro: Well, that's what I want to make. That doesn't define what I want to watch. I want to watch everything that is good. But as a filmmaker, up until Frankenstein, I'm very creature-centric. I think that has changed now. I don't know what I am or where I'm going. I have sort of a new horizon, but Frankenstein was a culmination of my creature-centric period, which is, by the way, where is it rooted at? Little Red Ridinghood. You need the wolf. The wolf is the creature in that. And you need something that embodies a concept. Good, evil, purity, tragedy. The Creature in Frankenstein is a tragic humanity. Pan is a trickster. The Pale Man is a blind veracity. It's not just that they are cool-looking. It's that they embody the conceptual part of the tale. They actually mean something tangible. Godzilla is absolutely a first large-scale God, the power of nature, the tragedy of atomic energy. It's a concept made flesh.

Brian Altano (IGN): It's not just this wrecking ball that comes in. There's a pain behind it.

Guillermo del Toro: There is the tragic undertones of the design of Godzilla, the fact that they wanted the skin of Godzilla to look like the after effect of a nuclear blast victim. I mean, there is thought on that — the fact that he was this sort of grayish-brown in the original. There is a lot of thought. Jack Pierce designing the Grizzly on Frankenstein — he wanted to sort of retrofit the history of the autopsic work that put it together. The scars, the opening of the skull in a sort of weird, can-of-tomatoes way.

Brian Altano (IGN): You like to get your hands dirty. You like to build stuff. You make model kits. Your Cabinet of Curiosity is a very tangible thing. It feels like a lot of filmmakers are sort of moving around or away from that, but that is something that feels so core to your philosophy of filmmaking.

Guillermo del Toro: Yeah. Each filmmaker is like, I see Chris Nolan completely going to battle for negative and he's entrenched there. I see Jim Cameron exploring beyond capture. He's actually melding actors’ performances with how it translates into digital. Each filmmaker is on a quest, I think. And my quest is handmade by humans for humans.

Brian Altano (IGN): I love that. Christopher Nolan mentioned that you were a big inspiration for a lot of his practical effects in the Odyssey, specifically the Cyclops.

Guillermo del Toro: Cyclops, yeah.

Brian Altano (IGN): Did you see it?

Guillermo del Toro: Yeah, yeah. No, I saw it with him.

Brian Altano (IGN): Oh my God, that's awesome. Guillermo del Toro: He said, "I want to show you the movie." And we saw it in IMAX. We talked after, we talked before. I mean, I think he's just — there is such a signature and such a vision. I mean, the word visionary is thrown a