I may not be the biggest fan of Guillermo del Toro‘s most recent film, Crimson Peak, but there’s still a lot that I love and respect about it. First and foremost is the absolutely gorgeous production design and visual style — it’s even one of the few films to actually make a 3-D theatrical screening worthwhile. There isn’t a dull frame to be found here, and that’s more than most films can claim. The cast is committed, the effects are stellar, and the violence is brutally effective.
Universal releases Crimson Peak to Blu-ray/DVD next week, and along with several featurettes and a handful of deleted scenes the disc also includes a commentary track with del Toro.
Keep reading to see what I heard on the Crimson Peak commentary.
Crimson Peak (2015)
Commentator: Guillermo del Toro (director/co-writer)
1. He believes this is not only the most beautiful movie he’s yet directed but also one of the three best. “Of course I’m not objective, and you can think what you want.”
2. It only takes 52 seconds into the commentary before del Toro points out that this is not a horror film and is instead a Gothic romance.
3. He views the birth of Gothic romance in 1764 as “a romantic and emotional reaction to the rigidity and inflexibility of the Age of Reason and academia.” He sees it as a rejection of other narrative forms like fables, fairy tales, myth, and lore.
4. The film opens with muted colors, but he moves into “on camera technicolor” with colors saturated contrary to the expected in a period film.
5. Del Toro believes that film is capable of telling a story beyond what’s written in the screenplay and that you should be able to follow along with the volume down. “The rest is dramaturgy and I value it a lot.”
6. Young Edith’s first ghostly visitation is a nod to del Toro’s mother who was visited by the ghost of her grandmother. “It climbed the bed, and she heard the bed springs creak the night of her funeral.”
7. “There is a theme in the movie of moths versus butterflies,” he says. The motif is visible in woodwork, clothing, and elsewhere. “Lucille (Jessica Chastain) thinks of herself as this moth of the night, and she looks at Edith (Mia Wasikowska) as this weak butterfly.” He resents the idea that beauty equals weakness.
8. He chalks up some negative reviews to male critics who can’t seem to “accept a strong and independent heroine. I think that some of it rubs them wrong.”
9. Del Toro kept careful control of the film’s color scheme as a way of telling the story. One specific involves the limited use of the color red as he reserves it for “the ghosts, the past, the blood, the clay, and Lucille.” He sees it as “the most voracious of colors, and it’s a very tricky color.”
10. The ghost who first visits adult Edith has facial features modeled after Lucille. “The lower portion of the face of the ghost is Lucille’s lips, mouth, jaw, and chin.”
11. The wallpaper glimpsed in the corner of Edith’s childhood bedroom is the same pattern visible in the foyer of Disney’s The Haunted Mansion. “I chose it as an inside joke.”
12. The back of Lucille’s red dress has a design that echoes the spinal cords of the ghosts that appear later.
13. The waltz scene as scripted originally featured everyone dancing, but the producer told del Toro that it would cost over $1 million to shoot that many dancers across two days because it would require paying every extra as a performer. He asked if Edith and Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) could just dance alone, and del Toro said that was ridiculous but then spent a weekend re-structuring the scene.
Universal
14. Del Toro creates ten-page biographies of his characters and shares them not only with the actors but with the wardrobe designers and production designers too.
15. The cameo broach that Lucille wears belonged to del Toro’s grandmother, and he previously used it in The Devil’s Backbone.
16. The scene where Thomas breaks Edith’s heart is the first hint that Lucille “moves very little like Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but she is there, in the shadows, waiting.”
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