VENICE - A few years ago, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos was meeting with Guillermo del Toro when he asked the celebrated director which films were on his bucket list.
Del Toro answered with two names: "Pinocchio and Frankenstein." "Do it," Sarandos replied, effectively agreeing to fund both projects for the streaming giant. The first film, Del Toro's acclaimed dark-fantasy version of Pinocchio, arrived in 2022. But when it came to starting work on Frankenstein, del Toro had one warning: "It's big."
He wasn't joking. The Mexican filmmaker's ambitious take on the famous mad scientist and his monstrous creation is one of the centrepieces of this year's Venice Film Festival. It's a project he has been working towards for decades. "It's sort of a dream, or more than that, a religion for me since I was a kid," del Toro tells journalists at the festival. He highlights Boris Karloff's performance in the 1931 adaptation as particularly influential, but it's taken a long time for del Toro's own version to reach the screen.
"I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, creatively, in terms of achieving the scope that it needed, to make it different, to make it on a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world," he explains. Now that the process has come to an end and the movie is about to be released, the director jokes he's "now in postpartum depression". Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character.
The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to. Isaac recalls: "Guillermo said, 'I'm creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat'. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well.
"I can't believe I'm here right now," he adds, "that we got to this place from two years ago. It just seemed like such a pinnacle." Andrew Garfield had originally been cast as the titular creature, but had to leave the project due to scheduling conflicts which arose from the Hollywood actors' strike. (BBC/Netflix)
