Guillermo del Toro Hopes He’s Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream

Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed “half-assed,” and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail.

Such discipline is evident in Frankenstein, his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. It’s a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes—as well as some embellishing of Shelley’s story—could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.

Raised in a deeply Catholic family in Guadalajara, Mexico, del Toro was so enthralled when he saw the 1931 Frankenstein film at age 7 that he opted to make Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature his “personal messiah,” he told NPR. Since then, he has made a career out of transforming so-called “monsters” into heroes—from the kaiju of Pacific Rim to the fish-man of The Shape of Water, the latter of which earned him Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture.

Frankenstein, which is currently playing in select theaters and will hit Netflix on November 7, marks the latest and probably most extravagant of del Toro’s love letters to mistaken monsters. WIRED hopped on Zoom with the director to talk about AI, tyrannical politicians, and the fateful summer in 1816 during which Shelley was inspired to write the book he treasures so much.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: I’d like to begin at the ending. You close Frankenstein with a quote from Lord Byron. “The heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” You’re adapting Mary Shelley. Why give Byron the last word?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Well, to me, the movie is an amalgam of Mary Shelley’s biography, my biography, the book, and what I want to talk about with the Romantics. One of the strands that I felt was missing, but very present, was war. Basically, the metronome of their lives is in many ways the Napoleonic Wars, and this is part of Byron’s poem for Waterloo. There’s no better way to express what the movie’s about than that quote. This comes from a very personal experience for me. The fact that your heart will be broken, you will be pulverized, and the sun will rise again, and you’re going to have to keep living.

Byron is also the one who provoked Shelley to write the book. He was with her and Percy Bysshe Shelley and writer John Polidori on Lake Geneva when they had a competition to write the best horror story. She came out with what was probably the best of the bunch.