BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 93
* When he sees her from the roof he cries because “she’s too beautiful”
* A motorcycle built to be driven in the drainage pipes at the M/M.
* “Scouting in the trash dumpsters for pieces.
* Dad receives a letter “Mom’s dead” from there, downhill.
* Hard to know where the hand begins . . .
GDT: The Left Hand of Darkness was an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I did with Kit Carson. We started in ’94, and it took us about two years to write the screenplay. And then when my dad was kidnapped in ’97, I rewrote it. And all the anger I had about the kidnapping went into the Monte Cristo character. There’s a great deal of personal grief in it, and I think it’s the best screenplay I’ve ever written.
The Left Hand of Darkness is a story about vengeance, which I’m fascinated by because it is an empty act. There’s this old saying, “When you seek revenge, dig two graves—one for your enemy, and one for yourself.” I think revenge, when you enact it, ultimately leaves you empty. It makes you feel dirty afterward. And that was the choice we faced after the kidnapping. And we chose not to enact revenge.
But I thought an interesting way to personify vengeance would be to give the Count a mechanical hand that is not good for anything but killing. And he would say, “It’s hard to know where the hand begins and the gun ends.” They fuse. And the mechanical hand was solid gold and had a glass window in it so you could see the gears. This hand turned into the best part of Kroenen in Hellboy. There’s a natural evolution.
And when the Count gets the mechanical hand, he becomes the fastest gunslinger in the West, because I had set it in Mexico, so the film became kind of a steampunk, Gothic Western. But there’s a moment where the Count goes too far and becomes a monster. I wanted the audience to feel sickened at that moment by the fact that they’d been rooting for this guy for an hour and a half.
NOTEBOOK, PAGE 3B
Ty’s first drawing.
First drawing in new type of notebook
“The hand of God” for Montecristo
Nineteenth Century.
Drawing: Guillermo del Toro
Original Design: TyRuben Ellingson
The move to Austin was a bitch for everyone involved.
14 aug
No doubt the need to fill all available space is Freudian and very serious
Good luck in the meeting with GH in TT—O
16
17 “ 1
Possibly painful and lethal
Date to fill
Who knows why I’m obsessed with the void.
Notes for the glove
This drawing presents new empty spaces.
Thirty-three and with debts. Leave your fears in this [?]
Bullshit to fill up space
But it gives rhythm to the image
Apparatus that the count will use
More bullshit to fill up space
Guillermo del Toro 7/18/98 Austin