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The Book Review
Guillermo del Toro on Writing and Directing the Oscar-Nominated ‘Frankenstein’
00:35:46
Ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, the director appeared on the Book Review podcast to speak about his latest film.
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We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.
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Do you think this one's still good? Free milk. Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.
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Dang it. Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico.
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You could save about 900 on car
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insurance without ever touching a coupon. Oh, how about this one?
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Half off floppy disks.
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Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.
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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Did you always know that no matter how long it took that you were going to do your version? A version of Frankenstein?
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Not really. I have done 13 movies and I have written or co written 42. So I'm very well versed with the fact that I'm never going to get to make the movies I could have made. And this was complicated because I knew I wanted to make it, period. I knew I wanted to make it the 19th century and I knew I wanted to make it big and lavish and operatic. None of these words and none of these notions sound like a Hollywood blockbuster.
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B
I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times. And on today's episode, it's Guillermo del Toro. Guillermo is a three time Oscar winning director and this year he's nominated for his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That is the classic novel which tells the tale of scientist Victor Frankenstein, the monster that he creates and the many tragedies that ensue. I've been a fan of del Toro's work for years, from Kronos, his very first movie, through titles like Blade 2, Pan's Labyrinth, Shape of Water. He is a master of mixing scares and tears and at making monsters that are both terrifying and absolutely gorgeous to look at. His new movie, Frankenstein, is no exception. It is not an exaggeration to say that this film is the culmination of his life's work. It's a story that he has been obsessed with since he was a child. He was 7 years old when he saw the classic 1931 film version. He was only 11 when he read the book for the first time. And when we talked, I asked him to take me back to that moment. Tell me, how did you get a copy of the book? Just tell me the whole story.
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A
You know, I used to go to a supermarket near my home where you would get all the expat American magazines and paperbacks from Spain and I would shop for horror books there and for horror magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and. And at that age, at 11, I pedaled my bicycle to that store and I bought the paperback from a Spanish publisher. That was the 1818 text, which is for me, the only text, the only version of the three versions that exist of the novel that were revised during Mary shelley's life. The 1818 is the most pure for me, is a little undisciplined, it's a little ungainly, is a little unrepentant, but is absolutely the one closest to the pulse of the biography of Mary Shelley, the ID of Mary Shelley. And I read it and what I always felt is the creature is me.
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B
What was it about the creature at that early age that spoke to you in such a strong way?
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A
I really believe that the depth of fear that you experience before you get into your teenage years is the most profound fear you will ever feel in your life. And every time you are afraid or angry or full of rage as an adult, is that very young child controlling you, feeling abandoned or feeling apprehensive about the future or the world? The deepest questions, at least me being raised Catholic, you know, I was raised by, partially by my great aunt, who I called my grandmother. And she would tell me, look, you're going to go to purgatory no matter what for hundreds of years because of original sin. And I thought, this is like timeshare, but for the soul. This is a complete scam. You know, there's such a pageantry, such a savagery to Catholicism. And at 11, the questions I had about the world were very profound. And Frankenstein, the book downsized a lot of these questions. The questions of why the world can be savage, why the world can be cruel, how can we be cruel to each other in a way that is even now hard to explain? And that's why it's a singularity.
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B
Watching your movie and revisiting the book, which I hadn't read since I was a teenager. Now, I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but the loneliness of it was really underscored for me and I was able, possibly in a way, I wasn't as sophisticated as you as an 11 year old that I didn't see when I was younger. It's just he is so lonely. He is the only one of himself out there.
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A
And I believe that was Mary Shelley.
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B
How, how so?
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A
I don't think Mary Shelley felt comfortable in the gender that she was put in by society. I think she had the spirit of her mother, which was also a free spirit of great hunger for the world.
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B
The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.
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A
Yes. And you know, she had lived large and wild and beautifully. And then basically, in the eyes of her father, William Goodwin, Mary kills her and in fact teaches her to read on the gravestone of her mother. You know, the sort of cross crushing feeling for her that she is motherless and somewhat fatherless, that she's alone in the world. And I think that's the key for me. I felt so alone at age 11 and so full of love to give and so full of rage to dispose of. It was a very, a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young. And this, you know, some people find in the Bible the way to articulate their faith and their existence. I found it in this book to
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B
quote, maybe inappropriately, Robert De Niro and heat when he says, I am alone. I am not lonely. When you were a kid, were you alone or were you lonely? Or was it both?
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I think I was very lonely.
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And why was that? You had this aunt or this great aunt. You had other family members. But where did that come from?
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I think the way you introspect the
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world
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and where you put it and how do you shelve it and how it affects you if you are over empathic, if you are, if you are, if you take the suffering of others to heart and you grow up with a much more somber, much more melancholic disposition. You know, and I, I was definitely resonant and I was very attuned to the, to the way adults told you, the way the, the world was not being truthful? You know, I saw the lies, I saw the, the falsehoods.
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B
Can you recall a moment where maybe it was religion, maybe it was something else, where someone, an adult who you trusted told you a thing and then you were like, that is sorry, my friend, that is not true. Like I can tell. I can see it. Why are you lying to me?
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A
Yeah, no, well, it. As very pointedly you can see on my movies, it started with my father. You know, my father, you know, my father won the lottery in 1969 and he changed. He changed quite a bit. And it's not that he was at great fault. I'm talking about nuances, you know, he was by all accounts and by all experience a good man. But he was not very consistent with what he said and what he did. And I did ask him and he said one thing doesn't have to do anything with the other, which was marvelous. I said, dad, how can you Be so Catholic. You are part of the Opus dei, and you're, you know. And then you behave like this.
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Yeah.
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And he said, well, one thing doesn't have to do charity for him. Charity. Charity existed as a notion in the church. You know, you gave money in the church, and that was charity. But charity to your fellow human beings was another matter altogether.
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Did that make you see the world as you got older, as more black and white? Or did you understand that people are contradictory?
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As much as anything, I actually love the fact that the world is neither black nor white in a constant way. I think the flaw flow, the flow of the black and the white through the gray is so liberating to understand that that's the nature of the universe is the yin and the yang revolving constantly and never ending. You know, nothing is permanent. That is really good. What I didn't like was the inconsistent way in which it's phrased the nature of the world puzzled me less than the declarations the adults made about what the world was, you know.
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Yeah.
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I think when you. When you realize the entire nature of the world is the paradox. We exist in a paradoxical state. And anything we want to become permanent or safe or good or bad, quote, unquote, is a tantrum, a tantrum of the soul. And that's the answer that I found out at an early age on the Book of Job, when Job says to God, why me? Why this? And the answer God gave him is, why not? You know, it's really, really, you know, phenomenal to find that at an early age. And I did. I was raised in Jesuit school, so we have a spiritual counselor. And I was very close to several priests growing up. So I asked these questions of them. I really asked the questions of my ethic and spiritual advisor in Jesuit school. I said I wanted to discuss the Book of Job so urgently. He just said, well, God made the world in a way that we don't have to understand. And that didn't satisfy me. I found more answers later on in the Tao, you know, as a younger man.
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B
And the fact that seems deficient on that priest's part. I mean, you know, I went to a Jesuit college. The Jesuits are supposed to be smarter than this.
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A
You know, the great thing about the Tao, it phrases it very much more beautifully. He says, he who tries to use the tools of the master basically will cut himself. You know, they are not tools that you can handle. And I understand the tools that make the world and that make the world so full of products. The day you marry and celebrate is the day somebody got run over by a car is the day somebody lost a son is the day somebody gave birth to a daughter. I mean, that's the nature of the world. And I understand that easier through that phrasing.
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B
I feel like if you're not using the tools of the master, if you're not using the text that you were given as a child in order to make sense of the world, it feels like art. And specifically when you were younger, books and literature is a way that you came to understand the world, came to your own understanding of the world. And I'm just curious, how did that start? How did you become a reader? How did you realize that this was the way that you were going to start to make sense of how everything was?
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In 1969, when my father won the lottery, I was five years old. As part of his new life as a gentleman gentleman, he bought a library. And it was full of basic literature, children's classics, quote, unquote, an encyclopedia of health, an encyclopedia of art, two encyclopedias of general knowledge. So at age five, I started to five or six, I started to wander into the library more and more, and I started reading really fast. I was completely bilingual at age 7. I read the entire library in a couple of years, and a lot of the books were very dark. He had a collection of Latin American writers and some Mexican writers, and I read all of Oscar Wilde and I read Victor Hugo's Notre Dame and Les Miserables and Monte Cristo and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I realized this was a way to communicate with the world, just as comic books were. Art was. So I discovered health, biology, the history of art, all of it at the same time. It was a tumultuous time. That library was my gateway into words and images.
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B
That's incredible. Do you still have any of those books?
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Yes, I have them right behind me.
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B
The original books that you read when you were seven?
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Yeah, the Encyclopedia of Art is behind me.
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B
That's amazing, because I think most kids, whether it's comic books or the books that they were raised with, find that their parents end up tossing them in some fashion.
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A
That happened to me with my comic books with my mother, and she burned them. She didn't just toss them, she burned them.
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B
She burned them in, like, a fireplace?
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No, no, no. In an empty lot next to the house. She said, I'll take all this stuff and burn. She said to. To. Oh, my God, the gardener, you know. She said, take all this and burn it so she could organize my socks on My drawers. But you know, those were formative years because movies were already an obsession and I was reading a comic book. So I, I was very, very familiar with Neil Adams, Jack Kirby, you know, Steve Ditko, all the comic book artists. And at the same time I was becoming, with Goya, Manet, Monet, Degas, you know, everything had the same value. And at the same time I became a, a, a very knowledgeable and young hypochondriac. I, I, I, I knew about the cirrhosis, trichinosis, glaucoma, high blood pressure, diabetes, you name it. And, and to this day I'm, you can see it on my movies. I have an obsession with biology that comes from those years.
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B
All of these building blocks led to the writer, director, creative artist that you are right now. It sounds like a lot of hardship was involved. However, around all of that is there. You can't imagine a world in which none of this happened. But is it? Do you ever think, I wish I was less lonely as a child and I would be okay with being less creative? Like, have you ever thought about how one led to the other and the trade offs?
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Well, they're indivisible.
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Yeah.
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You know, Truman Capote famously said you get a gift and a whip at the same time.
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Yeah.
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A
To have is to fear, to desire is to fear. There is no, no way to be a father without feeling fear for, for the well being of your, of your children. You know, there's no way to be in love with that. Having the pang of fear that you one day may lose it. You know, it is the nature of the cosmos to receive both.
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B
After the break, Guillermo talks about turning the story he loved all his life into an Oscar nominated screenplay.
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A
Appreciate.
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B
Let's talk a little bit about that screenplay. Talk to me about when you first started. You literally the first day you started writing this, what was the first scene? Was it about structure? Was it a character? Was it dialogue? How did you start the first thing
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A
I did start with the beginning because I knew I wanted to show a very violent attack of the creature to the ship. And I wanted the audience to say, well, I have never seen this before, and to find the creature monstrous and reprehensible and savage. And then I knew, after going through the whole movie, you would understand. You would come back to that moment and realize, oh, that's why that violence occurred, so you would understand the other side at the end of the movie. That was my hope. And then I knew I wanted to create this sort of almost imaginary childhood for Victor in which he was already quite an atrocious mama's boy, you know, and because he felt slighted, he would feel the old. The world owed him. We are now in an era in which we can see many of the most powerful men are men, children that feel the world owes them something that we are all paying for. And I felt that felt very alive. I wanted it to feel alive in the way that the novel felt alive when Mary Shelley published it. It felt, as of now, modern, loomed very large. And as I went into the adaptation, I knew the Romantics were and are modern. These were people that took the savor and went to war and galloped through Waterloo. And when they gave recitals, they were the tool of the devil, inflaming passions in young hearts and being in favor of death and love being fused into one. All of these things started to percolate. And I wanted to encompass the romantic spirit and the loneliness that comes with it and the doom, the sense of doom and hope that comes with it and the sense of graveyard poetry that comes with it. So all these things occupied my mind. And that's why when we started this campaign for this movie, I said, the only nomination that I really desire is Best Adapted Screenplay, because I have written so much for decades, and this is the screenplay I'm the proudest of.
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B
God, I have so many questions now about the Romantics, but we're gonna move on. You said this is the screenplay that you are most proud of. You have written screenplays for all of your films, and as you said, you've. You've written many more that have gone unproduced. Just tell me why you're so proud of this one.
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A
One of the things I found, people that think they know the book, that's an illusion that happens often with those characters that are so large. People think they know Pinocchio. People think they know Dracula. People think they know Frankenstein. People think they know Monte Cristo. But the mechanics that made the books what they are escaped them. I think that one of the things I wanted to do was to. I knew I was going to generate 90% new dialogue. But I wanted to feel of a piece with the book. So to learn, I read, for example, volumes of letters from the 1800s. There's a patois and a cadence and a style to the language that takes quite a while to try to condense. And then you can say things. To you I am obscene, but to myself I simply am. Which to me is a very concussive statement. The language of the movie has to be a little more stylized and elevated or operatic or there are conscious choices that require a lot of work when you're writing dialogue.
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B
Given that you're trying to achieve this sort of Shelley esque patois. You said, how do you know that the rhythm is right? Because it feels like it's as much about rhythm as it is about words.
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A
I've been a screenplay writer for about 30 years and the rhythms I have as a native speaker, which come from Latin languages, are very melodic and long. English tends to be very percussive. Modern English certainly has a rat, a dat of Hemingway. You know, a whole paragraph in Spanish can be said in English in four words. No, it's very concussive, it's very percussive, it's very rhythmic. And 19th century dialogue is a mixture of both. You know, it has a certain rhythm. You know, nobody says, can I have a piece of toast? They would say, I hesitate to ask, but if it wouldn't be too much trouble, may I partake of a piece of your toast? And there's a tentative quaintness and at the same time clarity.
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B
Yeah. Do you write dialogue only in English?
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A
No, no. I have only written three movies in Spanish. You know, the Chrono Devils, back when I'm Pan Sabrent. But I love. It's like I'm Olsen Bolt in Spanish. In English. In English, I have to ponder and ponder and move things around. I mean, when you write on a second language, you're very aware of the haiku brevity of how much one syllable weighs in the second language. That's why I can read in French fluently, but I cannot write in French. It's a mystery and alien music to me, but it's exquisite. But you cannot. It's very hard to master languages to the point of trying to write in them.
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B
I would like to get. We're coming up on our by the Book segment where I'm just going to ask you a bunch of sort of quick questions about stuff you're reading. But I want to ask you about the ending here. If we're talking about adaptation if we're talking about, as you put in another interview, transmutation, you know, the ending of Shelley's book is quite stark. The captain of the ship enters his cabin. He discovers the creature standing over Frankenstein's lifeless body. In your version, they have an exchange. Frankenstein and his creature, Frankenstein and the thing he created talk, and there's forgiveness, there's understanding, there's a reconciliation.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Why did you feel like that was the truest way for your version of the story to end?
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A
In my. In my opinion, the. The dialogue that occurs in the cabin in this version is a dialogue that occurs in the eyes between the creature and Victor, you know, earlier in the book. Earlier in the book where he tells him, look, this is what happened to me. And to me, the radical thing to do in the Romantic times was to end up in a almost proto existentialist way in which the creature is born by the current and the distance into nothing. You know, that is a very. A beautiful nihilism, you know, like a very powerful, very counter to what was in vogue in the world, you know, therefore, very anarchic. And to me, right now, the radical position is grace, you know, and the fact that we tend to believe that forgiveness is very elaborate, but I think forgiveness is actually grace. We want to forgive and we want to be forgiven. We really long for it. And. And I think that's the radical position for me now, one of the things I decided, very much so, is if I have fused through the decades with the spirit of the book and how autobiographical it was for Mary Shelley, I believe, to write this book. It was all her rephrasing, her life. I decided I would rephrase my experience as a father and my experience as a son. And the ending has a very strong tie with my own life, you know, and. And that is to accept the grace and the rhythms of the world to accept. You know, the movie starts with the sun rising and the captain turning his back to it, and it ends with the creature facing the sun and accepting it, abandon himself to. To that current. It's a different current than the current that Shelley portrayed in the ending. But it felt like, look, if I am to sing this song, I'll sing it with my voice, you know, at the.
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B
I think it was at Cannes when they premiered Sentimental Value. Joaquin Trier said something like, kindness is the new punk rock or tenderness is the new punk rock. You also saw it in last summer's Superman. The idea that in times like these, actually, the radical thing is to be nice, is to be kind, is to forgive.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Is to forge some sort of understanding between people.
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I think, I think I, I proceeded a few years ago saying motion is a new punk and I sustain it. Because here's the thing. Grace and hope in ignorance have no value. But grace and hope with the knowledge of the world and how it is is radical. You are not doing it out of ignorance. You're doing it as a conscientious objector to the world. You know, and I think then they have a different weight and gravity.
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B
When we come back, Guillermo answers some of our by the book questions.
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C
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B
Guillermo as we approach the end of our conversation here, I'm going to swerve back to books. Your love, my love.
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A
Well, I have.
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B
For more than a decade, every week the New York Times Book Review has asked authors a recurring set of questions about their reading. As part of a series that we call by the Book, I have a feeling that you above all people are going to have some very interesting answers. What is the best book that you've ever either received or given as a gift?
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A
I would say the Tao in the translation of Stephen Mitchell is one of the books I love to I discovered and I love to give. And another great book I think is called Wabi Savvy for Artists. You know, I love to give that that I have received. I think that almost nobody dares to buy me books. But I would say there's a really good book that is called Nabokov's Butterflies, which is a collection of miscellaneous and I think Nabokov had a fascination with entomology and particularly fascinated by butterflies. But it collects loose pieces that I find very compelling, a lot more compelling than his organized studies of literature.
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B
For example, are there any classic novels that you only just recently discovered or read for the first time as a
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A
young reader, I had difficulty finishing Moby Dick.
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B
Hey man, you're not the first.
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A
Whenever you hit the wailing passages as a young reader, I said, well, I would be completely shipwrecked and now recently, a few years ago, I finished it and the Wailing passages became my favorite. And I realize how much you change as a reader.
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B
This is a classic journey with Moby Dick. It feels like everyone tries to start it. At some point they bail. They say there's too much about Spermaceti. And then when they actually get to it and get through it, it is the detail oriented nature of the description of how you take a whale and do all the stuff that people fall in love with.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Is there one book that you would be okay with never being adapted into film or never being adapted again into film?
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A
I think a guy that is very hard to adapt but very rewarding is Ray Bradbury. Bradbury. His style fools you as something you can pastiche. You know, the way he uses adjectives in an evocative way seems to be something that you can do, quote, unquote. And when you're a young writer, you say, well, I'm gonna write in the style of. Yeah, sure.
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B
It's so funny that you say that about Bradbury. Just follow up there. Because I've read Something Wicked this Way Comes many times. And I actually tried to read it again to my child and it was just not the right point. Like, the language was actually sort of more florid and sentimental than I recall, even though I love that book. And I remember seeing finally on the big screen, the Jack Clayton film and thinking about how that film was trying to capture the tone, the language, the style. And it didn't succeed in many parts. It succeeded, you know, with Jonathan Pryce's character and some. But the nostalgia, the sort of like sepia tone nature of that book is almost impossible to capture without feeling like a ripoff of the Natural or something. You know, Ray Bradbury is very difficult. I have to ask this. I have to ask this question. Is it true that the first movie that you ever saw or that you recall seeing was the Laurence Olivier version of Wuthering Heights?
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A
100%.
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B
So how does it feel that your creature is now Heathcliff?
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A
Believe it or not, it's full circle for me because I saw it with my mother in a cinema downtown that is now a parking lot. And I remember falling. There's something very. Victor, in childhood, I fell asleep on my mother's lap and I woke up to a storm, you know, in the moors or something. A very dramatic. And. And. And I think it made me who I am. So the fact that the creature is. Is now in Wuthering Heights is, in the best words, synthetically powerful.
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B
Well, I have to tell you, Jacob Elordi looks gorgeous in both, both films. So.
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A
Yeah, I know. The, the, the beauty about Jacob is I think how much he reveals by wearing makeup in Frankenstein. He can open himself to a vulnerability that I don't think existed before in his filming work. And I'm very curious about Wuthering Heights. I haven't seen it yet. Yeah.
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B
Guillermo del Toro, thank you so very much for joining the Book Review. This has been just an absolute delight.
- [36:41]
A
No, thank you. It was a pleasure. It went by really quick.
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B
That is the best compliment anyone can get it.
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A
How's it going? Thank you, man.
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B
All right, man. Good luck. Have a great rest of your Oscar right here. This show is produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Diamond. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and Paula Schumann and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Our theme was composed by Elisheba Itu. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.
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A
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A
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