Del Toro had gone on a quest, but he came home with no treasure. The triumph of “Pan’s Labyrinth” was now five years old. He needed a comeback project. In Wellington, he hadn’t been able to film the proof-of-concept video for “Frankenstein.” That could be next. But he was thinking of taking an even bigger risk, and pursuing the adaptation of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”—his “Sisyphean project.
Although Lovecraft’s work was dismissed in his lifetime, contemporary writers including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have celebrated him as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft’s prose may have the highest adverbial density in English: “I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely.” But, like an outsider artist, he is so committed to his lunatic visions that they achieve a strange grandeur.
I met with del Toro in Los Angeles on the first day of preproduction. He had hired five artists to engage in ten weeks of “design promiscuity” at Lightstorm, James Cameron’s production company, which is in Santa Monica. Parts of “Avatar” had been designed in the same suite of offices. Corkboards were covered with constellations of silver pushpins; in an interior room, “Avatar” maquettes were still on display.
He wanted the creatures in “Madness” to be fascinating, not disgusting. He said, “Normally, creatures are designed in the same way that gargoyles were carved in churches—for maximum shock value.” He cited Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-motion animation, who designed the effects for the 1981 “Clash of the Titans”: “He used to say, ‘Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lion—how a lion can be absolutely malignant or benign, majestic, depending on what it’s doing.
He told Greene that digital-effects houses needed to understand that each Shoggoth had at least “eight permutations.” He said, “Let’s say that creature A turns into creature A-B, then turns into creature B, then turns into creature B-C. And by the time it lands on a guy it’s creature E.” He discussed one grisly Shoggoth transformation: “It’s like when you grab a sock and you pull it inside out. From his mouth, he extrudes himself.
This is a great piece. Congratulations to all my fellow crew mates Pinocchio.
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