Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was featured at the Toronto International Film Festival, leading to plenty of interviews from the director and leading men Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. In a recent discussion with the Ankler, the trio talked about the film’s production, which included more talk about Elordi’s creature performance.
Del Toro has previously talked about Elordi’s “staggeringly beautiful” rendition of the monster, which came from months of studying child development stages, Mary Shelley, and even the Japanese dance-theater form butoh.
Continuing that thread, he said these discussions created a “common language [where] the movie talks to you,” resulting in choices like having Elordi wear two different-sized contact lenses to reflect the character being made up of different people: “Listening to things going in a way you don’t expect them, it’s actually a movie telling you what it wants to be.”
In Elordi’s eyes, he’s been meant for Frankenstein “[since] I first saw the back cover of Pan’s Labyrinth in Blockbuster.” He recalled telling his hairdresser for Priscilla, who was also part of the Frankenstein team, that he’d be seeing her again on the later film. This exchange came before he wound up booking the part after Andrew Garfield dropped out due to scheduling.
Having come late into things, Elordi felt del Toro had to take more of the reins, since many of his own choices in the moment were “subconscious and came from the soul.”
Elordi had a lot of trust in del Toro, and he wasn’t the only one; Isaac described the production as “listening to what the movie’s saying” and having the freedom to do whatever feels right in the moment. He recalled his own moment of shooting a scene that he wasn’t entirely pleased with, only to find after his lunch break that they were redoing the scene with a different shot because he’d told del Toro, “I did it as me, and 1757586876 I want to do it as my father.”
The director felt that explanation fell right in with the film’s themes of fathers and sons and listening to what the film was telling them.
Frankenstein hits select theaters on October 17, then Netflix on November 7.
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