Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is now available in a limited number of Netflix theaters, en route to a glut of Oscar nominations, particularly for its craftsmanship. (It’s also rising in the Metacritic rankings.) Before the film hits streaming on Nov. 7, IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” caught up with one of the film’s producers, J. Miles Dale, who joins this week’s episode as a special guest. Dale won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2018 for producing “The Shape of Water” and also oversaw the noir remake of Del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” (2021) as well as the Del Toro-produced “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (2019).
In this week’s episode, Anne Thompson just returned from the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia, which showcased the importance of regional festivals as a building block for Oscar nominations. (Many awards prognostication cabals, including IndieWire’s Marcus Jones, were also in the field.) The audience awards went to Focus Features’ “Hamnet” from Chloé Zhao and Searchlight’s “Rental Family” from HIKARI, both Oscar contenders as we move deeper into the season.
Co-host Ryan Lattanzio introduces AFI Fest, which is currently happening in Los Angeles over the weekend and features films from “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” (which brought The Boss himself for a performance in Hollywood and Highland) to the world premiere of “Song Sung Blue” and beloved indie films like the Bold “Yes” by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid and the plaintive Josh by Max Silverman-Walker. O’Connor “Reconstruction” vehicle.
Recently, IndieWire tapped the AFI Fest programming team to share their picks of the best films to watch.
Our special guest, producer Dale, has worked with Guillermo del Toro since he produced “Mama” (2013), which marked the directorial debut of Andy Muschietti. He also executive produced the FX series “The Strain” for four years. Two period films, “The Shape of Water,” a Best Picture Oscar winner, and “Nightmare Alley,” a Best Picture nominee, prepared Dale and his team for the daunting task of making del Toro’s two white whale films: “Pinocchio” and “Frankenstein,” with a budget of $120 million, both backed by Netflix.
Del Toro saw James Whale’s “Frankenstein” when he was seven and read Mary Shelley’s classic when he was 11, Dale said. They discussed the film for years, as many potential backers passed on it. “When we realized we were going to do it,” Dale said, “we knew it was a hill to climb.” This is because the project was weighted by expectations. Del Toro had been thinking about this for a long time and the bar was high.
Luckily, this wasn’t Dale’s first ride. “My muscles and those of our colleagues have stretched themselves well to be ready,” he said. Del Toro’s philosophy of cinema: There are four legs. The costume design, production design, cinematography, hair and makeup all work together, from the color coding and contrasts to the lighting.
The ball got started with Guy Davis, Del Toro’s longtime designer, as well as illustrations for the book “Frankenstein” by Bernie Wrightson. As always, Del Toro gave his team “a lot to watch for,” Dale said. “Everyone comes together. Del Toro is a craft junkie. We were making fabrics, the paint department was meticulous, the foam team was laying down foam. The design became granular.”
The biggest problem came nine weeks later, when Andrew Garfield was no longer available. All creature models have been customized based on its face and body. Replacement Jacob Elordi was 6 feet 6 inches tall, presenting a challenge for body sculptor Mike Hill, who had sculpted 42 pieces for Garfield. Elordi wanted to play the creature, and brings him enormous empathy here. But he had played a World War II prisoner in Justin Kurzel’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and had lost tons of weight. Now he had to “stuff his face with pizza to become a big, strong monster,” Dale said. “It was something different every day.”
At the start of the film, Elordi, as a black-cloaked creature, is convincingly and terrifyingly large. The production is set on a frozen lake a few hours north of Toronto, where Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) arrives on a sleigh, facing drifting snow (blown by giant Volkswagen engines). The 19th-century sailing ship with authentic rigging was built in a parking lot outside their Toronto studio, with an ice esplanade for access. “It was 130 feet long and must have held 100 or more people, sailors and crew,” Dale said. When you see the creature fall into the lake, it’s a tank. And when he pushes the ship, “it’s real. The ship is on a giant gimbal. It was a major engineering project. It hurts your brain some days.”
The film’s other design feat was Frankenstein’s laboratory. They built a water tower made up of eight different sets. “The giant exterior was built on the fairgrounds, where we had the ‘Nightmare Alley’ carnival,” Dale said. “The setting of the entrance hall, the laboratory, in its various evolutions, the visitors’ quarters, the top of the tower, and where he climbs to the top, the monster’s lair and the escape slide, which is a not-so-subtle metaphor for a birth canal. The exterior, which took four months to build and which we filmed for three days, provided the base of the tower.” Finally, there were also handmade miniatures. hand. Del Toro tries to minimize the use of CG in order to highlight the craft.
The final cut lasts two and a half hours, reduced by over three hours. There was talk of two films, but they decided to stick to just one. It was important to Del Toro to be faithful to the original Shelley. “He identifies with monsters,” Dale said. “He wanted to make sure he had the creature’s point of view. That’s unique in our film. He speaks and articulates.”
Listen to this week’s episode below or on your favorite podcast platform.
