hen director Guillermo del Toro first met Ron Perlman in 1992, he saw the all-too-rare spark of an old-fashioned action star in the tradition of Lee Marvin and Steve McQueen. The director immediately cast him in his first feature project, the independent Mexican horror film Cronos. After gaining the attention of Hollywood with the moody, atmospheric fantasy The Devil's Backbone, del Toro was signed on to make the big-budget studio film Mimic. Though he likens the experience to "open-heart surgery without anesthesia," Mimic opened the door to more studio projects, such as the vampire action sequel Blade II, which allowed him to work with Perlman once again. The film became a kind of dress rehearsal for their latest collaboration, Hellboy, which opened in theaters on April 2.
In adapting the script, based on a popular comic book about a red-skinned demon raised by humans to fight evil, del Toro took inspiration from both from the comic's creator, Mike Mignola, and Perlman himself. The similarities are not lost on the lead actor, who embraces his likeness to his demonic alter ego with gusto. To become Hellboy, Perlman underwent four to eight hours of makeup and preparation daily without complaint. The process was not foreign to the actor, who has played a number of roles involving heavy makeup, most notably the lionesque Vincent in television's Beauty and the Beast, which ran from 1987-1990. Throughout his career, Perlman has balanced appearances in a wide range of offbeat films, including City of Lost Children, with more conventional Hollywood fare such as Star Trek: Nemesis. So far, stardom has eluded the versatile actor, but with the success of Hellboy that may change.
Del Toro and Perlman recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to talk about their passion for Mike Mignola's dark, quirky vision and the long road that led to the big-screen version of Hellboy.
So how does it feel to finally see the finished film on the big screen?
del Toro: I feel very good. This journey was more than half a decade, so I can't believe that we [made it]. ... I was always waiting for the other gigantic shoe to drop. And fortunately, in this case it didn't.
I feel that with Devil's Backbone, I reached personally a point that I was happy with a small, personal movie of mine. I felt that I was happy with that one, and to a degree this is the first movie I've done in the bigger budget scale that I feel I started, I initiated and I finished the way I wanted.
I'm feeling a happy threshold to start new things. I'm very happy with this one.
Are you nervous about the opening?
del Toro: I'm nervous until [opening weekend]. Whatever it does, it does. Basically, I remember when in high school I was nervous about asking a girl out, and I felt much better after the no or the yes. I can deal with that easily. What is really kind of a killer is the impasse, the pendulum swing, the moment where you don't know if it's going to come back. So you know, I think by Monday I'll be OK.
What kind of feedback are you getting so far?
del Toro: So far it's been great. Abraham Lincoln used to say, "For the people that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like." And I think that when you make a movie and you try to make it with your personality and respect the personality of the source material and all that, it will find its audience, whatever that audience is. That's impossible to calculate, but it's a movie done sincerely, balls to the wall, the way it should have been done, and it's shamelessly marching towards its own destiny. The only thing you can say with a movie at the end of the day, the only measure of success to me, is when you say, "I'm proud of it" or "I'm not proud of it." And this one, I am. So it's a measure of success for me.
Why did you want to do this movie?
del Toro: I was shooting Mimic and basically going through the equivalent of open-heart surgery without anesthesia. And I was in the middle of that shoot and [discovered] Hellboy. It was like, "This is heaven. This is purity." And it reminded me of the joy of creating a world and all this, the comic. I thought it would be impossible in a Hollywood scheme, in a Hollywood structure. Then, years later, I heard about it being made and I said, "I have to do it." This was six years ago, before any comic-book movies were being made, before even The Matrix was on the horizon. So it took a lot of effort and work to find the place.
Was it worth it in the end?
del Toro: It took six years, but I was invested personally because in '97, when I started writing it, I decided to make it about two things that were personal to me. One is, my father had just been kidnapped for several days. We freed him, we got him back, and for the first time in my life I felt I was not somebody's son, I was a man. I had my own children, I was alone in another country, I had to leave Mexico. I felt like sort of an outcast, but at the same time was very firm about being a man. And I wanted to also give my own version of what love is. Through my marriage with my wife—we've been together 21 years so far—one of the things I find is beautiful is that we love each other because we have defects, as opposed to demanding from each other perfection. I said, we can say all that and still, as Hitchcock used to say, put that cyanide inside of a bon-bon and people enjoy it. But you're not giving them a message to be conformed to things that are neat and happy. If you can give them security in their uniqueness and all that, I felt that it would be a very personal movie to make. It took a long time, but it was made.
Is that why you created the love story between Hellboy and Liz Sherman that wasn't in the comic book?
del Toro: There's a moment where [the character of Agent] Myers in the movie says to her, "We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects." The love story is sort of an anti-Beauty and the Beast in the sense that normally in the Beauty and the Beast they demand purity from the beauty and transformation from the beast. That sort of annuls everything. What I wanted to say is, "It's OK to have a dark side. You have to actually make peace with it, and still make the right decisions." I have a dark side in my imagination and my mind since I was a child. I could have easily just fabricated bombs or robbed banks, or ... put that intelligence or that craftsmanship to work in that. But I decided to create something in an art form. And I feel that, in Hellboy, what is incredible is the movie doesn't deny his nature. Selma Blair, at the end of the movie, makes peace with her fire nature. She takes charge of her fire nature, and to me the almost fairy-tale kiss at the end is Beast and the Beast.
You seem to be attracted to heroes with flaws.
del Toro: Well, I'm not attracted to Superman, because he is white-bread. He is almost like a CIA operative. It's like, he is always right, and blindly embraces the principles of land and country. Batman is like a darker character in the book, but not like he's been done in movies so far. To me, the great thing about Hellboy is that he is an incredibly flawed and human comic-book figure. I mean, the guy is 90 percent Achilles' heel.
First of all, there are unspoken rules in Hollywood where they say, "You cannot see the hero fail. You have to have your hero save the day, always. You cannot see him vanquished." Hellboy screws up. People under him die. People he loves, he fails to protect. I mean, he is doing a jealousy-rage number when his father dies. Those are things that make him human. The fact that he miscalculates a Matrix jump, and he falls. These things, for me, make him more touchable. It makes him more human. Usually superhero fantasies are power trips. I think it's very nice to say, "If I had super powers, I would steal a beer. I would throw a stone at the guy courting my girl." These are petty, but I think they're incredibly human things that make him reachable.
And he has a sense of humor, too.
del Toro: But what it is, is all the humor in the movie comes from him being a blue-collar guy. I mean really, his attitude is that of a plumber who is there to fix your leaky faucet. "Once again, we're here." He says, "Could we talk about this? Could we not fight? I just want to go home and drink a beer and watch TV." It doesn't happen and he goes, "Oh crap. I gotta go in and bang those again." It's a very blue-collar sense of the superhero duty.
How did you work with Mike Mignola in adapting the comic to the screen?
del Toro: We started blending our sensibilities all the way through Blade [II], and we are pretty much the same guy, in a way. We read the same comics, we read the same pulp, we read the same classic gothic horror. ... And one day we were arguing about something and he said, "You know, it's your movie." And I said, "Mike, your duty on this movie is not to say that. Unpleasant as that may be, you have to fight me, and I have to fight you, and we will not leave this room until one convinces the other about something." We argued a lot, and we pumped each other a lot, "Oh, let's do this. Let's do that." But it's the greatest collaboration. It has been really a joy because we never threw in the towel. We stuck.
While the film is its own entity, there are certain scenes in the film which are lifted directly from specific panels in the comic. How did you decide where to deviate and where to remain true to the source material?
del Toro: The main thing with that is, there were and there are emblematic moments that are pure Hellboy. There are certain watermarks that you need to hit, in the same way that Batman has to have a damn Bat Cave and a Batmobile. Or Spider-Man has to shoot a web. Those are pulp elements that you have to hit for it not to be an indiscernible comic-book origin. We tried to hit all those Hellboy [things]—beating the crap out of a falling monster, or standing in front of a statue with a gun, et cetera, et cetera. All those iconic Mignola moments.
But at the same time, the movie is a movie and the comic is a comic, and they live next door to each other, but they're different guys. And what we tried to do was, if we cannot translate the comic exactly, we can try to be as visually experimental as the comic book is. I really forced myself to find a color language and a texture language. In a movie, that was very exacting. Like, the comic book is limited to a certain palette and certain type of shapes and textures and all that. It's a movie that says as much through textures and colors as it says through story.
You did keep his love of pancakes, I noticed. There are a lot of great details like that in the movie.
del Toro: Well, the movie is full of nods and winks to the fans, but it's made for anybody to be able to watch it. So if you don't notice the pancake joke as insider, at least you'll notice he's going to swallow 50 pounds of pancakes.
Did you have Ron Perlman in mind for Hellboy from the start, or did you ever want a bigger name to play the role?
del Toro: Never. The secret of this movie is that Ron Perlman has been a star for me since 1992. ... It's taken 12 years for me to make my sort of love poem to Ron Perlman [laughs]. I am so disgusted with all this obsession with youth. You know, I addressed it in Cronos and I've addressed it in other things. I think Hollywood lives to see the Calvin Klein model of the moment, and I miss Lee Marvin, I miss Steve McQueen, I miss these guys that are rugged, no-bullshit Robert Duvall-type action guys that are character actors and that take charge of a movie. I think Ron is that. Someone on the Internet said I have a crush on him. They're probably right [laughs].
Ron, was there any point where you considered turning down this role?
Perlman: That I would turn this down? Are you out of your mind? This is what you work a lifetime for. You work a lifetime to have that moment at the top of the mountain. Whether it lasts or not, you have no control over. Try playing Hellboy for a day, man. You'll have the coolest time you've ever had in your life.
So it was fun, then.
Perlman: Oh, man. It was as tripped-out an experience as I've ever had, and probably ever will, because a lot of it has to do with the fact of how hard it was for Guillermo to pull off to get the movie made on his terms, with his actors. It took six years. I've been friends with Guillermo for 14 years now, so he's someone I adore and love as a brother, and have an amazing working relationship with for a compendium of reasons. He has an incredible heart, which is in exactly the right place as far as his revere for the art form of cinema. He has a formidable intellect, and he has exquisite good taste in filmmaking. What he saturates the screen with in terms of imagery and color and juxtaposition of humanities is very, very evolved and very eloquent. So you know you're going to be involved in something that's well worthwhile.
How it's going to be received is anybody's guess, but it is very worth people's time. He created this character that is, like, delicious. Delicious. It's a pleasure. Delicious to be, even for a moment. But for six months? Wow. There's not one scene in Hellboy [I wouldn't] go back and do it all again. I had that much fun being this guy.
Even under all that makeup and latex? That couldn't have been easy.
Perlman: But to be transformed into somebody is the kind of challenge that I'm not a stranger to. And I've had a great deal of enjoyment solving those problems over the course of time. And then I have been incredibly lucky that most of the transformation or work that I've been asked to do is not one-dimensional or exploitative, or crassly commercial. It's always in quest of a piece of humanity that is well worth spending time with, well worth trying to solve, and Hellboy is the penultimate experience in that. Making the transformation every day to become that guy was the opposite of tough. It was the springboard that set me aglow, that got my adrenaline flowing, that challenged my intellect, that sparked my imagination in ways that you hope to have as many moments on this planet of reveling in as is humanly possible if you're a guy who's committed to the arts.
What was the hardest scene for you to shoot?
Perlman: The scene with Selma, where I say, "I understand what you don't like about me, what makes you uncomfortable about me." I actually express that I wish I didn't look like this. That was a terribly important scene to get right, because that defines what we don't know about Hellboy, which is that he's capable of profound self-loathing and that he pays a price for his existence. And it's a heavy price, it's a steep price, but that he longs for things in an also equally profound way. And what he longs for most is for her to just love him. That's, to me, the reason to do the movie.
What was the most enjoyable scene?
Perlman: Every one of them. What are my favorite moments? My absolutely favorite moment in this thing is when I'm writing Liz a love letter and I can't get it right. Then she actually comes in in the middle of that and I have to, like, hide 300 pieces of paper littering the floor. And my second favorite is the sequence on the roof with the kid.
So you like the little human moments?
Perlman: Yeah. The reason why I'm as truly enthusiastic about this character as I am is because of the humanity of the character, the heart of the character. Not his abilities, not his superhuman aspects at all. It's certainly because of his humanity.
How much like Hellboy are you in real life?
Perlman: Let's put it this way. Let's examine, if you will, what Hellboy does in this film. He drinks beer. He smokes cigars. He f---s around with the guys he works with to the point where he drives them up the wall. He's a wiseass, he's a wisecracking dude. He trash talks the people that he's fighting against for life or death. He's constantly in this kind of mode like, "Is that all you've got?" There's nothing similar to him and me [laughs].
Do you ever wish you could stop traffic like he does?
Perlman: I have [laughs].
Is this the kind of movie you would see, even if you weren't in it?
Perlman: Oh, yeah. I think I would go see it just from the trailers alone. The trailers are great.
You have some great one-liners in there. Were there any you came up with yourself?
Perlman: Yeah. Which ones were mine? Well, when he throws me the gunbelt at the end and I say, "Gee I didn't get you anything." And when Clay is referring to his implants and saying, "It doesn't look like doll hair. It's growing in good, don't you think?" And I say, "I'm thinking about doing it myself."
You seem to have the same sardonic sense of humor that Hellboy does.
Perlman: Really [laughs].
What do you think this role will do for your career?
Perlman: Anybody's guess. ... I do not allow myself to entertain those thoughts. I just basically go where the wind blows me.
You don't have a career plan?
Perlman: Why would I have a plan? Everything that's happened to me is far greater than I could have ever imagined.
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