Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has birthed a monster with his new big-budget Frankenstein film and joked on Saturday that the effort had left him worn out ahead of the world premiere in Venice.
The Hollywood version of the Mary Shelley masterpiece from del Toro - winner of the 2018 Best Picture Oscar for The Shape of Water - is an elaborate, evocative production, which the director said he has been dreaming about making since he was a child.
"I've been following the creature since I was a kid," the director told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival ahead of the premiere.
"I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world," del Toro said.
"And now I'm in post-partum depression."
The Netflix-produced film, which will have a limited theatrical release in October, is one of 21 films in the main competition vying for the Venice Film Festival's top prize, the Golden Lion.
Starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creation, the film is a no-holds-barred Gothic spectacle as it follows scientist Frankenstein who is driven by an obsession to invent his own living creature - and the aftermath of that all-consuming hubris.
Exploring themes of humanity, vengeance, and unbridled will, the film spares no expense in its visuals, whether the imposing tower where Frankenstein performs his experiments or the gruesome anatomical bits from which his monster is stitched together.
"In you I have created something horrible," Frankenstein tells his creature.
"Someone," his creature replies.
Since the seminal 1931 Frankenstein film starring Boris Karloff, there have been numerous adaptations, underscoring the appeal of the story, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1994 from Kenneth Branagh and Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein.
For del Toro, Mary Shelley's novel tries to answer the question "What is it to be human?", he told journalists.
"I think that the movie tries to show imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect. And the right we have to understand each other under the most oppressive of circumstances," he said.
"And there's no more urgent task than to remain human in a time where everything is pushing towards a bipolar understanding of our humanity," he said, speaking of the modern world.
Source: AFP
