Mexican director Guillermo del Toro decided to make a Frankenstein movie since he was in puberty. However, he is now grateful that he did not make the production younger, as it would have been too autobiographical.
Guillermo del Toro’s intention arose when he was a child: “I took my bike and went to a supermarket in Guadalajara called Maxi’s, and bought the book. At the age of 11, a kid from the province of Guadalajara read the book, and I was already making his booklets and I said ‘I’m going to make this movie,'” he recalls during the premiere of Frankenstein.
The director’s ideas were clear from the beginning, and from then on he was clear about the kind of film he wanted to make.
The satisfaction he gets from directing the film starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Alordi and Mia Goth makes him feel drunk or dreamy.
He said: “I said: I’m going to write this book, it’s going to be great local cinema, and the fact that I’ve made a film is going to be absolutely amazing. What happened I don’t even know how to describe it. Sometimes yeah, I know it sounds corny, but I think I’m drunk and I’m going to wake up.”
He also stated that Frankenstein became a special project, especially because of the emotions it could convey.
“This film, in particular, is very personal. It became an autobiography in a certain way, not so much what I learned, but what I could eloquently communicate as a 61-year-old. I’m very glad I didn’t make it younger because it could have been about my father and me. Parents may have clean hearts, but they are a very big shadow that is difficult to understand as human beings, and sometimes one passes the same absence on to one’s children. It is a film of great importance that reconciles all my experiences, my autobiography, Mary Shelley’s biography, the book.”
The adaptation alters essential aspects of the original story. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein’s parents are models of affection and stability, highlighting the contrast with the subsequent abandonment of their creation.
The film features an absent father and a mother who falls victim to a marriage of convenience, played by the same actress who plays Elizabeth (Mia Goth). This decision removes the subtlety of Shelley’s text and reduces the complexity of Victor’s character to a direct result of his dysfunctional family environment, loosening the tension between idealism and neglect that characterizes the literary protagonist.
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