Director Guillermo del Toro is keeping as busy as ever, having launched his newest project, the Netflix series Trollhunters, over the holidays. While Netflix, as always, keeps their exact numbers a secret, they do tout that Trollhunters is on track to become the streaming-services' "most watched kids original ever." Which isn't surprising, considering how well-received the show has been, including in my own review of the first season for IGN.
We chatted with Del Toro over the phone recently and learned more about how the director finally made the jump to animated television. Del Toro also discussed the hard work that went into animating Trollhunters and the impact that Trollhunters star Anton Yelchin's tragic death had on the crew.
Also, be sure to check out what del Toro had to say about his role in Hideo Kojima's video game Death Stranding.
IGN: When you worked on the original Trollhunters book, did you always have plans to adapt it into a film or TV project?
Del Toro: You know, it was a very strange and rocky road. One afternoon in 2006, I think it was, I pitched Trollhunters and The Strain to Fox as TV series. I pitched Trollhunters as a live-action TV series in the tradition of Amblin Entertainment and Steven Spielberg. That was the original pitch. And they passed on both The Strain and Trollhunters back then. I decided, okay, I'm going to go write The Strain with Chuck Hogan as books and see how it goes. The three books did extremely well, and then we went right back at Fox and got it made as a series [for FX].
With Trollhunters, I talked about the book with Daniel Kraus, and I told him we should make it young adult and a lot more sinister, with elements of adventure. As we were writing the book, I went to Dreamworks Animation about six years ago. That was the first animation project I started to try to direct solo as a feature. During that time, as I was co-writing the screenplay to turn it into animation, I decided I wanted to make it something for the whole family. I found that I have a yearning for that - a really un-ironic, not post-modern, heart-on-its-sleeve-type of adventure story, you know? And then the chance came back full circle to turn it into a TV series. When Jeffrey [Katzenberg] said, "What would you think of this?", I said, "Well, that's the way it was conceived, originally."
Eventually, it ended up being its best incarnation. Because the incarnation we have now, we have complete and absolute creative freedom. We've been able to run the writer's room, the animation, all the design and creative decisions and be completely protected, creatively. That was actually a great advantage, because if we had wound up making a 130 or 140 million dollar animated movie, you go through a lot more scrutiny. You go through audience testing and energy scores. You get a lot more scrutiny. And while this was done on a TV budget, we were very ambitious. The fact that we stayed under budget allows us to work protected.
IGN: And I think one of the most impressive things about the show is that it really looks like a movie despite the fact that it's a 26-episode series.
Del Toro: Yes, well, the first thing we did was set a look for the series. I established very carefully a color palette and a style of cinematography that is completely not like any other animated kid's show at all. It's very dark. Very dark. And by this I mean visually. It goes through variants of light. Sometimes we're in daylight. Very often we use one light source, which means if there's one window, we only turn on the light in the window. The rest is a balance from that light. There are very saturated colors in the night scenes - bright reds, bright purples, bright yellows. Even more in the middle of the season, we even have a beautiful moment in the opening of one of the episodes where it's completely overcast, which is something you never see in animated TV shows. It looks like a painting almost, because the sky is gray and there's rain and the light is soft and steely. We lit it, for lack of a better description, like a movie.
We made the decision where I said I want the characters to have a quality of vinyl. I want to have some surface scattering really present so we have their skin sort of suffused with light, as opposed to lighting them like surfaces. Because that always looks cheesy to me. We inherited a great number of rigs from Dreamworks Animation to control the facial animation on the characters, and then we went from animation company to animation company and we said, "These are the rules." There are three or four scenes in the series - in every episode - where we're going to do feature-level, careful character animation. And what I guaranteed them was, creatively, we'd be protected. That makes a huge difference, because what we ended up with was a lot of the companies didn't just do three or four scenes with animation-level finesse - they did the whole show. Because they were not getting studio notes saying, "We gotta redo 30% of the animation." They learned with time that this promise was being held, and they got really into it.
One of the things we proposed was to make “failed acts” or mistakes, because in animation, unlike live-action, you pay for every frame. Every frame has been made by an animator on a rig on machine time, on human time. So I said let’s have characters that have failed acts. Somebody tries to close a microwave oven and fails the first time and has to close it a second time. Or Jim tries to eat a pea and he fails to get it to his mouth. Or, in the pilot episode, Jim sits down on a piano stool and he has to adjust the height of the stool two or three times before he gets it right. You’re paying for these animations because there are no shortcuts, and those gestures tell the audience that these are real characters - characters that are animated with a lot of life. These are many of the things we did, and Rodrigo Blaas, my co-director on the pilot and one of the showrunners, is an animator. He was able to follow this precept, and whenever he forgot, I tortured the hell out of him.
IGN: One of the things I really liked about this first season is the way you treated even the villains as very complex characters, especially characters like Strickler and Angor Rot. Was it important for you to give the villains as much attention as the heroes in this story?
Del Toro: What I’ve tried to do, and I’ve done it in movies as big as The Devil’s Backbone and Pacific Rim - I always try to have bad guys that have a redemptive arc. A guy that starts as an enemy and becomes a friend. That’s the kind of story I’m interested in telling. From the beginning, when we were planning the arc of the first season ,I knew that they were going to be characters that you would end up loving. Draal, who starts as Jim’s sworn enemy in the arena, learns of Jim’s nobility and turns into his friend. We get to see, by the same token, a darker side to AAARRRGGHH!!!. In the middle of the season, you start learning that AAARRRGGHH!!! Has a past, that he was a former lieutenant in the enemy’s army. He’s not a character with a whitewashed past.
Those things are important for me in terms of the arc of the writing. Fortunately, here my relationship with the producer, Chad [Hammes], and the head of the writing room, Marc Guggenheim, allowed me to keep sort of encouraging them to take these risks and proposing some of these things. I think, at the end of the day, the “villain” not being black and white and the “hero” making mistakes are important to me in whatever I do as a storyteller.
IGN: It seemed, based on the way Season 1 ended, that you guys have a pretty clear idea of what you want to do in Season 2. Do you know when we might hear an announcement about that?
Del Toro: I’m not able to confirm anything, but when we talked about the series we made a really long arc, for sure, and we knew where we wanted to go. We came up here and there with the occasional bottle episode. Whether it was an episode with the pixies or the floating - where they become super heavy or super light - those were bottle episodes, but they were part of the arc of Angor Rot, nevertheless. Rarely do we do a complete bottle episode, you know? We did one for Gnome Chompsky, because we all fell in love with that character.
IGN: I imagine it’s kind of difficult thinking about a Season 2 after what happened to Anton [Yelchin]. Have there been discussions about how to move forward with the Jim character now?
Del Toro: Yes, and when the time comes we’ll be more forthcoming. With Anton, it really was something that took everyone by surprise, and it was one of the most shocking things, unexpected things. As a man of 52, I could imagine anything but him, who was such a life force, not being able to see everything concluded. He was such a lovely human being and a lovely artist. The whole family was watching Charlie Bartlett about two nights ago, and I was just reminded about how good he was. Not only as an actor, but as a human being.
IGN: Based on the was Season 1 ended, it seems like there’s an opportunity to maybe keep Jim out of the picture for awhile and focus the next season on Toby and Claire initially. Do you think that might be the case?
Del Toro: You know, we’ll probably have it in a direction similar to Season 1. It’s too early to confirm anything.
Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.
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