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Guillermo del Toro is known for his painstakingly crafted tales of monsters and ghosts. But the Oscar-winning filmmaker recoils at being called a visionary. “It’s not like you’re in a recliner with somebody feeding you grapes, going, ‘I see a castle,’” del Toro tells his friend Bradley Cooper when they meet in Variety’s midtown Manhattan studio.
The point del Toro is making is there’s a lot of hard, unglamorous work that goes into bringing movies to life — from hiring the right actors to making decisions on the fly when budgets are tight and time is running short. His latest sumptuously produced epic, “Frankenstein,” is a project he struggled for decades to bring to the screen before Netflix agreed to greenlight a $130 million horror film where the creature (Jacob Elordi) is more sympathetic than his creator (Oscar Isaac). It’s a film that reflects del Toro’s own turmoil and pain.
Cooper, who starred in del Toro’s 2021 film “Nightmare Alley,” sees his latest directorial effort, “Is This Thing On?,” as a similarly personal project. It’s the story of a middle-aged man (Will Arnett) who discovers a love for stand-up when his marriage collapses. It also gave Cooper a chance to show a deeper, more sensitive side of Arnett, a close friend famous for broadly comedic turns in “Arrested Development” and “The Lego Movie.”
Bradley Cooper: I think Warren Beatty said this: Casting is plot.
Guillermo del Toro: That’s a great way of putting it. I was talking about that the other day with Al Pacino. If you do Shakespeare and all of a sudden you cast a Hamlet in his 50s, that changes everything.
Cooper: You’ve been obsessed with “Frankenstein” since you were a kid. These characters have been gestating inside you. This idea of casting is plot — how does that relate to finding Oscar Isaac?
Del Toro: When you read the book, Victor is a young, brilliant student. But I was fascinated by this idea of a person in their 30s who was stuck in their teens. The point of the character for me is that after his mother died when he was a child, he grew intellectually, he grew socially, but he stopped growing emotionally. Also, I wanted Oscar to not belong completely to the family of his father; I wanted him to be frowned upon because his skin was darker, his hair was unruly, and he had this fiery temperament. I wrote it for him.
You came to “Is This Thing On?” after it was developed?
Cooper: But I rewrote it. And much like you, I wrote it for Will Arnett and Laura Dern and where they are in their lives.
Del Toro: Both movies are strangely autobiographical.
Cooper: Don’t you think if we’re doing our jobs properly, everything’s autobiographical?
Del Toro: People say, “Oh, you identify with the creature.” In the past, yes. Now I identify with the creator. I’m the antagonist of my own story, as well as the protagonist.
Cooper: I know you, so I identify you throughout the film.
Del Toro: That’s the biography.
You operated the camera on your film?
Cooper: I did wind up operating the camera for the lion’s share of filming, which created an environment with the actors that was special. I was able to keep the flow going.
Del Toro: Did you talk to them from behind the camera?
Cooper: I would shout lines or ask them to explore something.
Del Toro: You were like David O. Russell?
Cooper: I learned so much from him [on “Silver Linings Playbook,” “American Hustle” and “Joy”]. He expanded my horizons about what it can be like in a creative environment on a set. I took to that way of making movies.
What [you and I] share is that we love this so much. We love every aspect.
Del Toro: When people talk about filmmaking visionaries, I go, “Well, it’s hard work and it’s hardware.” You have to build it; you have to film it with a certain lens. You have to decide between a Steadicam or a handheld. The decision is precision.
Cooper: Both of our movies take chances structurally and trust the audience. Where the camera is has everything to do with how the viewer relates to the story. In “Is This Thing On?” you don’t see a full shot of our main character’s face until about 20 minutes into the movie. It’s all profiles or three-quarter shots until he gets up on that stage, finally turns and says, “I’m getting a divorce.” I wrote it into the script, and the studio was trepidatious about the idea of not seeing your main character. And I said, “It will work because hopefully the audience won’t know it cerebrally, but they’ll feel like all of a sudden there he is.”
I love the scene in “Frankenstein” where you have the monster hiding behind this wall, looking at the blind man’s house.
Del Toro: The moment where he crosses from his hiding place into the house, the camera crosses with him through the set. All of a sudden, he’s in a completely different environment. It’s the widest shot of the scene, so that when we enter the house, it’s magical.
That happened to me at the Academy Awards. When I got the Oscar for “Shape of Water,” people asked, “How does it feel?” I said, “Well, you’re in your seat and then you climb up to the stage and turn around and go, ‘What is this?’” All of a sudden, you’re in your dream moment in the shower as a kid rehearsing your speech with the shampoo bottle.
The monster needed to feel like that. He enters the house, and it needs to feel like a palace. Everything we did is 99% anchored in practical elements. We wanted to build giant sets. We wanted to build a massive ship on real motors.
Cooper: Which is incredible.
Del Toro: You want to stage everything so that that world exists in a way that feels natural. [But] you have to be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
Cooper: Things can just pass you by — these wonderful gifts — and if you’re not looking, you’re not going to see them.
Del Toro: One detail can change everything, and you have to identify those accidents. I ordered oversized irises for Jacob Elordi to make his eyes more animalistic. So those are scleral contact lenses; they’re large and troublesome. He put one on and the other hurt, and he says, “I can’t put in the two lenses. Let’s do it digitally.” And I said, “No, let’s keep two different sizes of eyes, and the bigger eye is going to reflect back the light, and I’m going to use it to show when he’s angry.”
Cooper: It wound up being an incredible story weapon.
Del Toro: If you’re playing chess with reality, you will lose. That’s true of every filmmaker that has ever lived, even when they create their entire world, like Jim Cameron. What was fascinating about the “Avatar” [movies] is the more control he has over the world, the more he can be loose with the actors. On the most recent movie, you see how much he’s improvising.
Cooper: Yes, 100%. It’s funny, the more structured I am, the freer the actors feel.
Del Toro: How do you choose the movies you direct?
Cooper: It sounds hokey, but they choose me. It takes so much work and energy; it has to be something that feels slightly otherworldly to harness what it takes to see it through. For each movie that I’ve directed, I asked, “What’s the nuclear weapon?” With “A Star Is Born,” there’s no better way to tell a love story than two people singing, because you cannot hide your emotions. And then Gaga was the nuclear weapon. For “Maestro,” it was being obsessed with conducting since I was a kid. But then the nuclear power was finding Leonard Bernstein.
Del Toro: And for “Is This Thing On?”
Cooper: It was Will Arnett. Here is this guy who is like Robert Mitchum. He’s 6’4”. His voice is what you would dream of having. To see him on a nightclub stage — knowing where he is right now in his life — I knew he could open up.
Del Toro: And you could push him where he has not gone, because you know him?
Cooper: Every day was a struggle. Every day he was uncomfortable. It was about trusting me.
Del Toro: People say, “Why did you choose this movie?” I say, “Listen, I’ve written 42 screenplays; I’ve made 13 movies.” It’s not like I said, “Oh, no, I’ll do that one now.” It’s which project can I get produced.
Cooper: When we made “Nightmare Alley,” we both had other obsessions.
Del Toro: But because we made it, I got to make “Frankenstein” and you made “Maestro.” We approached the character that you played in “Nightmare Alley” as being the worst and the best of us, [which helped me on “Frankenstein”]. I did that with Jacob Elordi and Oscar Isaac. I said, “Let us not be the actor and the director; let us be flawed human beings and confess to each other our shortcomings and come to these characters through that pain.”
If I had done “Frankenstein” 20 years ago, it would have been about my father and me as a child. Now it’s too late for that. It needed to be about me as a father and my fear of repeating mistakes through generations with my children.
English (US) ·