Regrets, he has a few, Guillermo del Toro told the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday night. The good thing, though, those regrets are creative fodder for the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s next movies. “I’m 60 now. So I’ve gone from asking who I am as a father and son to regret. I’m in the regret decade. Expect a lot of regret,” the horrormeister said during a Q&A after a North American premiere of Frankenstein at the Royal Alexandra Theater in Toronto.
Speaking specifically about adapting Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — with Dr. Frankenstein played by Oscar Isaac in the adaptation and Jacob Elordi the creature he gives birth to — del Toro said he aimed to craft a story about father and son issues. Then he eventually realized his narrative included his own experiences as both a son and a father.
“I had to realize that, in the course of being a son, I became a father. And then it became about me as a father too,” del Toro told the TIFF premiere audience about the movie he directed from his own screenplay.
Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac on the set of Frankenstein
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Wider themes the director also discussed included “what does it mean to be human in a time of inhumanity, war and in a moment of doubt as a race. That was true back then, and it’s true right now,” he added about the contrast between Shelley in her Romantic-era novel questioning scientific ethics and alienation after the Enlightenment, and our own tumultuous time of rapid economic and climate change.
“The Romantics were reacting with emotion after the Age of Enlightenment. They were basically punks, they were iconoclastic and broke the rules of society,” he argued. “We are there again. Emotion is the new punk. Emotion, we’re afraid of showing it. We’re afraid of seeing it. We’re in such a state of separation within ourselves. That’s the only thing that will save us, to have empathy and emotion,” del Toro added.
Having completed his latest gothic epic, del Toro teased his next projects. “This sort of closes a huge episode in my life,” he said of completing Frankenstein, a passion project that had been virtually a lifetime in the making.
Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in “Frankenstein” directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Ken Woroner/Netflix
His creative slate includes Fury, an upcoming feature reuniting him with Isaac that appears to center on a murderous dinner where guests get popped off between courses. “It’s going back to the thriller aspects of Nightmare Alley. It’s very cruel, very violent,” del Toro warned. The veteran of creature features is also at work on an “epic” stop-motion movie.
After its tour of the festival circuit, Frankenstein is headed for a limited theatrical release on Oct. 17. The feature, which also stars Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Christian Convery, Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz, will then head to streaming, getting a global bow by Netflix on Nov. 7.
The Toronto Film Festival continues through to Sept. 14.
