Guillermo del Toro wanted to recapture how it must have felt reading “Frankenstein” for the first time — before it became a ubiquitous cultural institution — in his adaptation.
In a conversation with TheWrap’s Steve Pond at the Toronto International Film Festival, del Toro explained that “the book has become second nature to me” and strove to make his film feel as close to what it was like to read Mary Shelley’s iconic horror novel for the first time.
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“It’s a lifetime of stuff in that movie, plus the biographical street that completely comes from my life,” he said. “I cannot parcel it and say, ‘this comes from here, this comes from there.’ Occasionally I can, but it’s about can you renew what it felt to read that book, what it felt to encounter those characters for the first time before they became figures to advertise radiators or cereal cartoons.”
The director added that originally he felt like his “Frankenstein” needed to be two films – with a point-of-view split between both the titular doctor and from the monster. It wasn’t until later that he realized having a “hinge” moment in the middle of the film made the story more exciting than the idea of two separate movies.
“I realized the best way to do it was to actually have a hinge in the middle of the movie, because it would feel more exciting. It would feel like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get to see that,’ which is one part of the book that has rarely been tackled and everything that has been tackled before I wanted to do in a different way. In a way that was renewing it.”
The latest adaptation of Shelley’s classic book premieres in select theaters on October 17 and lands on Netflix November 7. It stars Oscar Isaacs as Viktor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster. They are joined by Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz.
Catch up on all of TheWrap’s TIFF coverage here.
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