The actors have teamed up for Guillermo del Toro's new Netflix horror. Report by Nelsonj. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
00:00You couldn't just distill it to a horror movie, right?
00:02You know, in fact, you know, you could actually say it's not a horror movie.
00:06It's one of those situations like Shakespeare, you just have to say the words.
00:09You know, you just have to, and then something happens.
00:12There is no life without it.
00:13And in fact, it needs to have it, just like death.
00:17It was a good palate cleanser, this.
00:18I've been watching so many kind of realist dramas over LFF,
00:22and to watch this, it's just one of those...
00:24It seems stupid to call it a popcorn movie,
00:26but it just gives you all of those kind of things you need.
00:29I think that's a great deal.
00:30I suppose, but I think with the Guillermo del Toro movie,
00:34there's so many more themes that are explored in it,
00:36and it leaves you with a lot more than just like...
00:38Of course.
00:38...the superheroes and whatnot.
00:41I have been navigating fatherhood this last year,
00:44and everything becomes like a parable of fatherhood when that happens to you.
00:48But then this definitely feels like it leans into that in particular,
00:53elements of not passing on kind of inherited traumas,
00:56not making the same mistakes and whatnot.
00:59And I thought, Oscar, I'll start with you, mate.
01:01You're a dad, aren't you?
01:02That must have been something that spoke to you in this story.
01:05Well, that was the whole way that I even got into the story.
01:09It's Guillermo and I met and started talking about...
01:12It wasn't even about Frankenstein.
01:13We were just talking about our own biographies, our lives,
01:16and particularly our fathers and our relationships to our fathers,
01:19and then becoming fathers ourselves.
01:21And I also have two young children and yeah,
01:24those exact fears of making the same mistakes.
01:26And sometimes by running away from those,
01:30you know, the things that happen in order to try not to have them happen again,
01:33you just fall right back into it.
01:35And why does that happen?
01:37And how do we get so blind to those things sometimes?
01:41And also how children can often feel like they become just an extension of yourself,
01:46an object, you know, to be either judged, you know, well, like,
01:50oh, you did such a great job with your child.
01:52What does that say about you?
01:53Or, you know, ashamed by the way they behave and how that reflects upon you
01:57and how to kind of break that cycle.
02:01Yeah, you're struggling with this idea of you kind of want them to be you in a way,
02:06but then you also want them to be completely different.
02:08They want you to be better than you or just like unburdened by you.
02:11It sucks because it's like they come in perfect, you know, they do.
02:14And then you try to manage it.
02:17And then it's just, you know, like immediately all the regrets start to happen.
02:21Like, oh, you know, because we're just human as well.
02:23And we're trying the best we can, but we end up f***ing them up.
02:26Yeah. Here's to f***ing them up.
02:29Jacob, your character in this, it feels like for the first time watching a kind of
02:35Frankenstein adaptation, it feels like it's unfair to refer to him as Frankenstein's monster
02:41because it's infused with so much humanity in it.
02:44I kind of wanted to just like give him I wanted to give him a name.
02:48I wanted to like I wanted people to sit down and call him Jason or something just to make him feel a little bit better.
02:52And I wondered for you what was key to unlocking that to still have all that the pain and the kind of the anger and the horror and the power.
03:00But then keeping that humanity through at all times.
03:06I guess the whole thing is just inspired by being alive and being human because his plight is the same plight that we all have.
03:14We get like shot into the world, like you said, and we have this innocence and then consciousness arrives, which is the bullet to the deer's head.
03:21You know, and then the bullet to him and consciousness hits you and it ruins you and it brings pain and suffering and he's following this kind of eternal question the whole time.
03:31He's saying to his maker, to his God, he's saying, why, why am I here?
03:36And I think that's why it's interesting.
03:37He's not actually named the whole film until he's liberated.
03:42I guess my point, my long point is it's all in Guillermo's script and he's designed it that way.
03:48It's so elegantly technical that you, as an actor, it is it's one of those situations like Shakespeare.
03:55You just have to say the words, you know, you just have to.
03:57And then something happens.
03:58It's just, I guess that's the beauty of a great script and the beauty of Guillermo.
04:02So that was a really long winded way to get to that.
04:05No, no, that was good.
04:06That was beautiful.
04:07It's the first time I've watched a Frankenstein movie and I've thought of it as sort of growing up.
04:11As you get old, you have all this imagination, all these ideas of what life can be when you're very young.
04:15Usually it's usually a positive, whereas he's born into a kind of a negative, but then you become more cynical over the years.
04:21But this is like truncated.
04:23It's like what if this happens over, you know, 12 months rather than 30 years and how kind of how much pain that would cause.
04:30Let's talk about Guillermo.
04:31The man's a genius.
04:33He makes so much like rich, textured, dark, sometimes kind of grotesque cinema.
04:41The person always seems like this kind of jovial, almost cheeky sort of bloke.
04:47I wonder what it's like to be in his orbit on a set full of body parts and kind of grotesque seriousness and stuff.
04:56What's that like?
04:57It's those two things mixed together.
04:59You know, I think and at the heart of it is a real mischievousness, you know, and I think that his his thing is the scary dark thing.
05:07You shine a light on it to see that it's not actually as scary as you maybe think it is.
05:11You know, I think that's something that he he's drawn to.
05:14But he's also incredibly personal with the way he approaches his work with what he's made up of.
05:21You know, he talks about his upbringing, you know, particularly with Catholicism being, you know, incredibly Catholic and Mexican.
05:28And the way that that informed his love or his, you know, fear of the grotesque, you know, the forensic crucifixes, you know, that really informs his view of horror.
05:41But like horror and life and, you know, religious vocation, all those things are kind of mixed together with this very funny, you know, vibrant, vital culture that he's from.
05:54He inserted an interesting quote in the movie by Byron, who was obviously a contemporary of Shelley's, the heart will break, but broken live on, which I thought was kind of very thought provoking and apt to the to the to the movie.
06:08You think of pain and trauma, and I think it's only useful if you're a songwriter or you're an actor.
06:13And for everybody else, it's just a bit of a burden.
06:16I wondered if you guys felt pain was sort of like a superpower in your profession.
06:21It's just it's in everyone's life. Yeah, that that is what life defines your life for everyone.
06:27Yeah, it's like suffering is incredibly important like that is, you know, there is, you know, there is no life without it.
06:34And in fact, it needs to have it just like death.
06:38I mean, that's kind of part of the whole point, this idea of like vanquishing death, but you might as well vanquish life because the one can exist without the other.
06:46And in fact, like the suffering and how you particularly, you know, that your curriculum that you're given, you know, that's like an opportunity to really understand who you are by the way that you are confronted with these particular circumstances.
07:01You know, it's like very special, actually. It's an obvious question. There's a lot of people will be asking it, but I am interested to find out this doing stuff like horror Hamlet that has been done by so many wonderful people in wonderful different ways over the years.
07:13Do you have you guys just got to purge yourself from this story prior to dealing with Guillermo's scripts and coming on set or do you sort of is there a temptation there to to read everything, to watch everything, to see every performance, see how many different ways it's been done.
07:27So you're not repeating certain things. Like, how did you guys go about it? No, I don't think you need to purge yourself.
07:33I think everything is everything. And I think everything informs everything. And it's all just sort of one big kind of artistic process.
07:41So I wasn't concerned about anything that's come before because we're making us we're making Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, which is in our lifetime going to be that's its own thing.
07:53You know, it's just the screenplay that's there that you need to adhere to because you know what his film is going to be.
07:58So everything else is kind of it's it's already happened. You know what I mean?
08:02Yeah. And I think I mean, I've I've been both I've done both things, you know, been around a long time.
08:07I'm an old showgirl.
08:08You've done horror Hamlet.
08:09That's right.
08:10Both.
08:11My Hamlet was a horror, but that's a different thing.
08:14No. And, you know, sometimes I'm voracious and I actually want to see, you know, how did this person do that line on?
08:19Can I steal that? You know, there's a sense of deny nothing.
08:22But also it's a delicate line between, OK, is this going to make me self-conscious because that's you don't want to be that.
08:27You know, you want to be free in the moment.
08:29But I think the more I've worked, the more it is.
08:32It does feel like deny nothing, you know, and also you're under no obligation.
08:37And when someone says action, you're not even obligated to act.
08:40You know, there's no obligation.
08:42And what was great about Guillermo is he very much was saying the same thing to us.
08:47Like, this was bespoke for you. You can't fail.
08:51And I wondered, going forward, you said you've been around, you've done a bit of everything.
08:56Do you feel horror in this kind of way has kind of ticked off for a little while now?
09:01Or are there any other iconic characters of this genre that you still think that would be nice to have a sniff at one day?
09:08I mean, for me, if I believe in the filmmaker and I love the script and I feel like it means something, then movies are kind of genre-less to me.
09:20Yes, I mean, particularly this movie is like, you couldn't just distill it to a horror movie, right?
09:25You know?
09:26In fact, you know, you could actually say it's not a horror movie.
09:29There's elements of body horror, but, you know, it doesn't even follow necessarily the same structure of a horror movie.
09:34I think it's just, that's an inherited from what we think of when we think of Frankenstein, you know?
09:38I agree.
09:39Yeah.
09:40Yeah, exactly.
09:41Well, gents, I really enjoyed it.
09:43It came at a great time.
09:45I loved your scenes with David Bradley, by the way.
09:47Me too.
09:48Well, that was at a moment in the film when you really, the audience needed like an arm over their shoulder, in a way, in the same way that the creature did.
09:55He's an incredible actor, though.
09:57He's a brilliant actor.
09:58Genius.
09:59And the fact that we know him as kind of...
10:01Filch.
10:02Yeah, Filch and Walder Hay, Frey from Game of Thrones.
10:07He's known as kind of more of a conniver.
10:09And to see him just this like warm kind of grandfather type, it was a lovely bit.
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