While beginning the pre-production process for Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," production designer Tamara Deverell began her research by attending museums to create the look of 1850s Edinburgh.
"One of the first opportunities I had to spend time with Guillermo was when we were scouting. One of the first things we did was go to museums," said Deverell in a conversation moderated byVarietyin partnership with Netflix. "We went to the Ontarian, where the real Evelyn tables are, because we had to do our own version of them. We saw the equipment and the tools of the trade of the scientists and doctors of that period."
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In creating the Victorian landscape of Edinburgh, costume designer Kate Hawley collaborated with Deverell to help bring to life a color scheme that reflected Victor Frankenstein's (Oscar Isaac) state of mind as he gets expelled from the Royal College of Surgeons. The world of Edinburgh is cold and bitter, with small glimpses of color seen throughout the costumes of characters like Lady Elizabeth Harlander (Mia Goth).
"Edinburgh is a color of wet cobblestone and the incredible stone buildings," said Deverell. "That was our color palette, and as we picked the locations of Gosford House, we had the color palette of the marble and the cream tones that were all these beautiful period tones."
"Color serves as a sort of different role. All the time when I worked with Guillermo, the background is part of the environment in the world," Hawley said. "All those colors ended up in the colors of the background extras. We have a different language of color. There's also a beautiful tone of melancholy and mood. That affected how we did color."
Color played a large part into creating the look of the Creature (Jacob Elordi), a monstrous creation that Victor creates in order to defy the odds and conquer death. By utilizing the look of different body parts and decaying corpses from the Crimean War, prosthetics designer Mike Hill collaborated with del Toro to amplify the look of the Creature to be accurate to the time period.
"Everything is vintage and of the period," said Hill. "The one thing we tried to achieve was making this creature feel like he stepped out of the 1800s, and he's not a modern day creature design."
Aside from the streets of Edinburgh, the film also utilizes a Royal Danish Navy ship, the Horisont, that discovers a wounded Victor Frankenstein in the opening sequence of the film. Instead of resorting to green screens, del Toro and his team handcrafted a practical ship encased in ice on its descent to the North Pole. Deverell collaborated with historians and shipbuilders on creating a ship that looked authentic, but could also move as if it was on sea.
"It was an adventure building the ship. We looked at what Guillermo wanted to do in the film, [such as] the action and the requirements to really move the ship," said Deverell. We built it on a giant gimbal that actually did the movement. When the creature pushes it, it's a whole huge engineered gimbal inside the ship. We had this great guy, Matthew Betts, who advised us [as] an Arctic historian but also a shipbuilder. He was bringing me information like we could do iron plates on the ship because that's what they had for the ice. We were devising ways on how to make the ice."
207 years later, "Frankenstein" cemented itself as a literary classic, and with the film adaptation, has opened the doorway for new generations to discover Mary Shelley's words. While reading the book as a child, del Toro hopes that the message behind the story resonates with audience members watching the film for the first time.
"The fact that it was written by a teenager, and it is as urgent as a book written by a teenager is what makes it immortal," revealed del Toro. " It asks all the questions in the time you need to ask the questions. My hope is people don't say, 'Oh, the movie is the book,' but that they discover Mary Shelley. It's one of those books that makes your life richer."
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