GDT:The List of Seven was based on the novel by Mark Frost. He also wrote the screenplay and produced a draft that I really like. It’s a fantastic steampunk adventure.

The story is about Arthur Conan Doyle before he writes his first Sherlock Holmes story. He gets tangled up with an occult society in Victorian London that is planning to assassinate Queen Victoria and substitute an automaton for Prince Eddy. The society is building sort of a doomsday machine in a castle in the north of the United Kingdom. And I wanted to create these Caspar David Friedrich-type ruins and Piranesian spaces.

Mark is a very good writer of characters, so Conan Doyle was a really great personality in the screenplay. I love Conan Doyle and know his biography well, so I wanted to include details like the fact that he was an ophthalmologist. And the idea was that he succeeds in the movie only when he includes Holmes as a character, which is based on a secret agent for Queen Victoria named Jack Sparks, who is like a James Bond in Victorian times with all the accoutrements and the gadgets.

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes had a lot of the energy, which is similar to what I wanted to do with the Holmes character in The List of Seven. What I kept saying to Universal was that we didn’t need to shoot Holmes boringly. We needed to shoot him to suit the adventure. We are so used to having a passive intellectual—a guy who lives a monastic life. But for me, Holmes is a guy who is pensive and immobile for long periods—like, literally, he could stay in the same pose on a sofa for days, not even eating—but then, when he says, “Come with me, old chap,” he comes alive and it is an adventure.

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* SIDE VIEW List of 7 “Doomsday Machine”

* “You are going to regret this…” He leaves

* “After all that I’ve done for you, you refuse me a simple favor” Spanky in the library.

* The owner of the house/ severed head in a package: “I won’t allow anyone to bring that “thing” near me. It’s in the cupboard.”

* “Holmes” examines the cord, the newspapers, and the paper that’s wrapped around the package with the head in it.

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

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* When he sees her from the roof he cries because “she’s too beautiful”

* A motorcycle built to be driven in the drainage pipes at the M/M.

* “Scouting in the trash dumpsters for pieces.

* Dad receives a letter “Mom’s dead” from there, downhill.

* Hard to know where the hand begins…

GDT:The Left Hand of Darkness was an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I did with Kit Carson. We started in ’94, and it took us about two years to write the screenplay. And then when my dad was kidnapped in ’97, I rewrote it. And all the anger I had about the kidnapping went into the Monte Cristo character. There’s a great deal of personal grief in it, and I think it’s the best screenplay I’ve ever written.

The Left Hand of Darkness is a story about vengeance, which I’m fascinated by because it is an empty act. There’s this old saying, “When you seek revenge, dig two graves—one for your enemy, and one for yourself.” I think revenge, when you enact it, ultimately leaves you empty. It makes you feel dirty afterward. And that was the choice we faced after the kidnapping. And we chose not to enact revenge.

But I thought an interesting way to personify vengeance would be to give the Count a mechanical hand that is not good for anything but killing. And he would say, “It’s hard to know where the hand begins and the gun ends.” They fuse. And the mechanical hand was solid gold and had a glass window in it so you could see the gears. This hand turned into the best part of Kroenen in Hellboy. There’s a natural evolution.

And when the Count gets the mechanical hand, he becomes the fastest gunslinger in the West, because I had set it in Mexico, so the film became kind of a steampunk, Gothic Western. But there’s a moment where the Count goes too far and becomes a monster. I wanted the audience to feel sickened at that moment by the fact that they’d been rooting for this guy for an hour and a half.

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Ty’s first drawing.

First drawing in new type of notebook

“The hand of God” for Montecristo

Nineteenth Century.

Drawing: Guillermo del Toro

Original Design: TyRuben Ellingson

The move to Austin was a bitch for everyone involved.

14 aug

No doubt the need to fill all available space is Freudian and very serious

Good luck in the meeting with GH in TT—O

16

17 “ 1

Possibly painful and lethal

Date to fill

Who knows why I’m obsessed with the void.

Notes for the glove

This drawing presents new empty spaces.

Thirty-three and with debts. Leave your fears in this [?]

Bullshit to fill up space

But it gives rhythm to the image

Apparatus that the count will use

More bullshit to fill up space

Guillermo del Toro 7/18/98 Austin

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

GDT: I’ve been trying to do At the Mountains of Madness for almost twenty years. Right after Cronos, I wrote a version of it set during the time of conquest of the New World with a bunch of conquistadors arriving at the Mayan ruins and finding another city beneath. It’s never been far away for me. In terms of imagination and the creation of worlds, it’s one of the most compelling projects. But I also think it’s a very commercial horror film.

In the notebooks, I’m really thinking about Mountains more than drawing it. The funny thing is, Lovecraft excelled at being ambiguous about the way his creatures look. The creatures that he’s very specific about, once you draw them, are kind of clunky. When you’re drawing the flying cucumbers that are the Old Ones in Mountains, you have to go, “How are we going to make this work?” But the less Lovecraft describes, the more beautiful the creature. And I think the ambiguity provides the opportunity to make them shape-shifters.

What is funny, though, is that this sketch of a character in Mountains with tentacles over his mouth predates Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean by about two years. When I saw Pirates, I was like, “OK, I’m screwed.”

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E* Fetuses in jars of marmalade.

* A day hasn’t gone by in which I haven’t thought about death.

* National Geographic’s EXPLORER.

G* Hey, what about X? (grave news about someone). Well, it depends.

T* DRAGGED UNDER BY A SUBTERRANEAN RIVER.

G* Someone does something “very special” and/or receives it at once and then (saves it with, throws it among, sticks it amid, or places it among) a pile of objects or things just like it.