I think the only time I'm completely free is when I'm working on my no books. They are 100 per cent integral to my creative process. The first time an idea happens, it happens in these pages.
I carry the books with me in my bag and if they're not beside me, I'll quickly write in my other leather notebook, which is my left hand, and then pencil it in as soon as I can. I'll go back to the books in the final stages of writing or designing. I also do the first breakdown of colours here, both for the art direction and the lighting.
Only the essentials make it to the notebook - the moments of great enthusiasm. Hellboy 2 takes up 20 or 30 pages. Even Pan's Labyrinth was not much more than that.
Visually, I'm as proud of this new movie as anything I've already done. In the first Hellboy, I was a lot more slavish to [comic-book artist and Hellboy creator] Mike Mignola's visual universe. This time I frankly decided to let my hair loose. It was a very difficult and painful movie to shoot, but creatively it was one of the most rewarding experiences I've had.
I do the first sketch and sometimes it goes through with very few changes, as with Cathedralhead or the King. Sometimes Mike Mignola or one of the designers takes a stab, and the digital designers might even start altering it in post-production. The process is similar for the physical creatures. The Angel of Death went through several phases of sculpting and was constantly evolving.
Of the 32 creatures we created for the movie, about 90 per cent were created physically. Only the creatures that were too big, like the Elemental character, or too small, like the tooth fairies, were created using CGI [computer-generated imagery].
It's extremely unusual to make a movie like this nowadays, but I feel the film acquires an artistry and a textural value and a handmade feel - a human touch - that CGI by itself does not give. I think it's extremely important to preserve physical effects for creatures.
The wardrobe is done very carefully. We colour-code it and texture-code it as much as possible. I try to be as careful with it as I would be with the screenplay. I am essentially the grand torturer of the designers - I'm a pain in the ass - but they know I'm coming from a genuine place and that when I ask for something I know exactly why and what it implies.
Every time I'm done with a film I look back at the notes and I find that the essence of the characters is there. Obviously, there are moments when you have to compromise because of an engineering problem or a design flaw, but they come out pretty damn close.
When we use the word superhuman we always use it in the Nietzschean sense, meaning the guy that is overqualified as a human, but what I love about Hellboy is that he is superhuman in his flaws. He is like a monument to human vulnerability. He has the extraordinary job of hunting down monsters but he goes at it like a blue-collar plumber. I love that simplicity in the comics. In the movies we've taken it up a couple of notches, in that we've given him an almost childlike innocence, or a brat-like innocence in some instances. With Ron Perlman playing Hellboy, your heart goes out to him because he's such a wide-eyed, big-hearted creature.
I find monstrous things incredibly beautiful, in the way that the most beautiful carvings in Gothic cathedrals are the grotesque carvings. If I were a mason I would be carving gargoyles. I'm absolutely head over heels in love with all these things.
The main monsters in the film - the really odd and quirky ones - spring straight from the notebooks. If I could be illustrating creatures all day long every day for the rest of my life, I would be very happy.
In medieval times, they had these beautiful books called bestiaries. A lot of people are confounded by them because they think there was an ignorance of the real zoological function of the animal or they were too fanciful, but in reality bestiaries were very wise books because they tried to do a taxonomy not only of animals but also of their cosmological, symbolic and spiritual meanings.
If I could say anything about the movies I do, I would love for them to become my personal bestiaries of fanciful creatures.
I'm going to start a separate notebook for The Hobbit [Del Toro's next project, adapting the JRR Tolkien novel] or sketch on loose leaves of paper, because legally I'm still resolving some ownership issues over my sketches. These notebooks are my legacy to my daughters. I want them to remain intact so they can give them to their children in turn, or else just browse through them and see how deranged their father was.
The Del Toro CV
Born: 9 October 1964 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised by his grandmother. Lives in Westlake Village, Los Angeles, with his wife and two daughters.
Early life: Eight-year-old Del Toro started making movies with his father's camera. After attending the University of Guadalajara, he studied under legendary makeup artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist) and established his own special-effects company, Necropia, in the early Eighties.
Films: With his acclaimed 1993 debut, Cronos, Del Toro established himself as a creator of dark, highly imaginative fantasies with a grounding in real life. After an unhappy brush with Hollywood on Mimic (1997), he directed The Devil's Backbone, a ghost story set during the Spanish Civil War. A return to Hollywood gave rise to two comic-book adaptations, Blade 2 (2002) and Hellboy (2004).
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) received lavish praise from critics worldwide and won three Oscars, including Best Cinematography, a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Original Screenplay, and a Bafta for Best Film not in the English Language.
In Hellboy 2, the tough-talking, destructive, but ultimately good-hearted demon, who helps the US government combat dark forces, is up against the power-hungry Prince Nuada (Luke Goss).
Cathedralhead
I came up with this idea one day of a character with very simple features - a flat face and two big eyes - but with a cathedral at the top of his head. I sketched it really quickly and showed up at the office the next day and said: 'I want to create a creature called "Cathedralhead".'
Originally the idea was to have little humans running around the ramparts of the cathedral but the budget didn't allow for it.
Prince Nuada
The idea was for the prince, the princess and the king to look as if they were made of old ivory. I wanted very much for their faces to be cracked like old ivory. They would also sport a marking across the face, a very thin subtle line like a carving. I thought it would be nice for the three of them to have it.
I colour-coded everything in the movie before talking to the art director and cinematographer, and one idea I liked was to have the elf world in earth, gold, crimson and black, echoing the colours of Hellboy's library at the BPRD [Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence]. That would emphasise the fact that Hellboy has something in common with the magic world. You can see these basic colours in the sketches.
King Balor
I wanted the markings of royalty to be natural. I didn't want the king to actually have a crown, because a separate crown is needed to control the Golden Army and it would only become confusing. I thought it would be nice if these antlers or dreamlike branches came out of his head and were regal and looked like a crown but were in fact natural growths. It was a very striking image. I did that sketch very quickly one day, and that was essentially the design we executed on the film.
Angel of Death
I tried to convey some sense of symmetry by having the wings in an X shape. There are some medieval artists who painted four-winged cherubs and I always liked those formations and I was trying to echo that. I'm influenced by artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Arnold Böcklin and Hieronymus Bosch, as well as the Belgian Symbolists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists and some of the Pop movement. In this case, I knew the wings were going to be black and they were going to have eyes in them and that the figure itself would be blind. The final design in the movie, the final silhouette, is very similar to the initial sketch.
Mr Wink
Mr Wink is one of the prince's henchmen. He was originally from a sketch by Mike Mignola but everybody at the office took a whack at him - I allowed him to evolve hand by hand. I knew I wanted him to be a one-eyed troll with a huge scar on the left side of his back. All I kept asking was for him to be very symmetrical with Hellboy, for him to have a right hand of steel and the sideburns like Hellboy has. This sketch was done to develop his colour palette. I designed the tattoo on his chest because I wanted him to have some sort of tribal marking but in fact it's barely visible in the movie. I also wanted to show his size in relation to Abe Sapien. He needed to be able to hold Abe's whole head in his hand while he whacked him with his other fist.