Throwback Thursday: Guillermo del Toro

New Blood

Back in 2009, in Tripwire Annual 2009, we spoke to writer/ director Gullermo del Toro on writing the first book of The Strain, three books which are now a TV series. So here it is, this week’s Throwback Thursday

TRIPWIRE: I read that the genesis of this was as a TV series idea. Is that correct?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: I was watching The Wire. I love that show because it deals with absolute concepts like good and evil but everybody ends up dealing with those concepts in a really grey, vague, very grim everyday reality. And the heroes of The Wire do really shady things and the villains of The Wire have really good moral principles. So it’s a position that I was very attracted to and I thought I would love to try my hand at a very limited three season run of a series and I pitched it to a network that I had my deal with at the time. And they rejected it because they wanted a vampire series but they wanted a comedy. And I decided to try my hand at writing because I’ve been writing so many screenplays, so many short stories, a few of them published.I even wrote a book about Alfred Hitchcock about a year ago and I felt it was about time. But I knew very consciously that I would need a partner that would bring the American point of view, that would give it a push on the medical side and the procedural thriller side. But Chuck and I ended up partnering in much deeper ways than that but we wrote it as we say in Spanish with four hands. It was four hands writing.

TW: So how did you split the work? Did you co-plot the book and then did you throw it back and forth between you?

GDT: No the main plot originally came from me four years ago. But what we did is we started writing chapters separately and I would send him my chapters. Then he would send me his chapters and I would correct and edit his chapters and he would correct and edit my chapters. It’s very natural because I’ve done that with a screenplay project so many times. I’ve done it at least 10 or 11 times with a screenplay.

TW: So you didn’t find it too much of a difference writing prose compared with writing for the screen?

GDT: No not on the discipline side but on the technical, narrative side, absolutely different disciplines. They’re absolutely two different tools and in screenplay writing you do not describe in the same way because you cannot objectivise freely. You objectivise only what is objectively provable with camera and sound and you always write in present tense. So there’s an immediacy to the screenplay writing and a rigidity to the form that is not at all present in writing fiction. You are much more free in that way.

TW: So did you have to have a bit more distance as a creator? Is there that extra distance in fiction?

GDT: No I wrote the same way. I write with discipline and I write every day at least 2 hours. Like in screenplays, six days of the week you write shit and one day of the week you write good stuff. Same thing. When I wrote a lot, I wrote a lot that I didn’t send Chuck or Chuck cut out. But the same was true of him. I think we were very brutal editors to each other. There was not a different quotient of edited stuff in either of us.

TW: So how long was the writing process?

GDT: Three years approximately. But we were dealing with three novels at the same time.

TW: I know it’s a trilogy.

GDT: I wrote the outline, the original outline for the three novels four years ago and Chuck knew as they evolved we had to reconvene here and there and see how it fits in the trilogy. Because new characters have emerged, new problems have emerged and you have to reconfigure the three at the same time in a way.

TW: So how much survived from the original pitch for the TV show with the novel? Did most of it survive intact?

GDT: Yes but in a different way. There were a lot of devices that I was hoping to do in the TV show that got tossed out of the window when it became a novel and not a TV series because I didn’t want to do a written TV series, I wanted to write a novel with Chuck. There’s a lot of the devices I was trying to use on the TV show that shouldn’t have been used and are not used in the novel. I wanted to write very visually, I wanted to have a very filmic rhythm but I didn’t want to essentially flesh out a screenplay. I wanted to write a novel from the getgo.

TW: One of the things that seems to be a big influence on The Strain is Invasion of The Body Snatchers. It’s almost like it’s a viral thing, like a force of nature. Was that a very conscious decision?

GDT: It was more the idea of following a group of patients zero. We really wanted to go at it like a true pandemic. You can draw parallels with zombie movies or you can draw parallels with David Cronenberg’s Rabid. But at the end of the day, we wanted to make it a medical thriller almost. It’s almost like a medieval plague movie, like a medieval plague phasing a world that falsely feels sophisticated because pandemics provoke medieval fear.

TW: So it’s about a lack of control for the protagonists like Ephraim?

GDT: Absolutely.

TW: And Setrakian is the Van Helsing character here?

GDT: Yes in the same way that the airplane is the Dracula ship, the Demeter arriving at Whitby.

TW: Are you quite satisfied with the way the first novel has turned out?

GDT: Yeah, we learned a lot that has informed the second novel. It’s curious because what I think has changed is the way we’re approaching the second and third novel. We know much,
much more now so I’m having a blast. I’m having the time of my life right now.

TW: So how far are you into the second novel?

GDT: We are delivering it in a few months and then we are going to stop essentially because I’ve got to shoot The Hobbit and I’m not going to be writing and shooting. We’re going to stop and then when I finish shooting The Hobbit, whatever is left of me will pick up the work with Chuck but the second novel will be on time in bookstores in 2010.

TW: So there’s been a huge campaign to promote the novel, here and in the States and I know you’re going back down to New Zealand in about a week and there’s the signing at Weta. You seem very composed as ever. You don’t seem like this has frazzled you even though you’ve gone through three different time zones. How do you keep on top of things?

GDT: I don’t. Yesterday at the Apple Store I was a mindless cursing machine. Yesterday at 1am, Peter called me from New Zealand and it took me about five seconds to know who I was and where I was. And he said ‘Are you awake?’ and I said ‘Oh yeah.’ But for a few seconds I wasn’t.